Wow, some impressive footage from a camera bolted to the side of one of the boosters on the latest space shuttle mission. You know, I bet you could sell rides on this.
Category: Technology
Otona No Kagaku Crystal Radio Kit
Otona No Kagaku, or ‘Science for Adults’ is a ‘mook’ series published by Gakken in Japan. Each issue has includes a kit that goes along with whatever the issues topic is. I could hardly wait for this one! It’s a crystal radio. Very classy design too, that diamond weave coil design is a real eye catcher. It includes a diode that you can use as a detector or if your feeling like playing with the cat’s whisker a bit you can use the tow mineral samples. The reception isn’t as good as with the diode but you get the true crystal experience with this method. In the base of the radio is a small battery operated amplifier so you can use the radio without a super long antenna. I don’t think it’s cheating, your still using a chunk of rock to rectify the signal. It took me about two hours to put everything together and that’s with a few false starts in winding the coil. As my Japanese is very bad, I did have to look up the characters for some basic colors so I could connect the wires in the right order. This page on about.com proved to be quite useful with this. Now, the selectivity isn’t the best but that can be fixed with a little tinkering under the hood. It does receive the local stations quite nicely and best of all it just looks dead on cool. I took loads of photos of the build to have a gander at them and enjoy.
Otona No Kagaku Crystal Radio Kit build – Flickr photoset
Bastard Operator From Hell
I’m going to show my age on this one, I can tell. I remember first reading about the BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) back in the early mid 90’s while browsing through the posts on the good old Usenet. At first I didn’t quite know what to think, was this just some sys admin that was venting his spleen in creative way? Turn out, I was right:
The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH), a fictional character created by Simon Travaglia, is a rogue system administrator who takes out his anger on lusers (his colleagues, bosses and anyone who gets in his way).
The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet by Travaglia, with some being reprinted in Datamation. They were published weekly from 1995 to 1999 in Network Week and from 2000 they have been published most weeks in The Register. They were also published in PC Plus magazine for a short time, and several books of the stories have also been released.
As someone in a similar position I have been reading them ever since. The Register has the current archive but you can find older ones at Simons personal page.
And while your at it, make sure you check out the DIY excuse board. I’m sure it will be very handy the next time someone calls and asks why the file they had been working on all morning (and didn’t save) is gone after the power glitch and can’t be recovered from the previous nights tape backup.
Archive of BOFH
Current BOFH on the Register
Bastard Operator From Hell – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Olympus Wood Camera Casing
I love this idea. I hope that this process is easy to do so we see more things have something unique to them. I wonder if it would work with bamboo.
Olympus just announced their three dimensional compression molding process for wooden materials at the Photokina show. Accordingly, the processed wooden material has the feel and grain pattern of natural wood and proves to be harder than engineering plastics such as ABS and polycarbonate resins.
[via core77]
Portable Commodore 64 – The Picodore 64
This has been making the rounds lately:
Here are a few pics of my own DTV Hummer project. I had an old PSOne LCD screen lying around and I thought I’d make a C64 laptop. Actually, it’s more like a C64 PDA! It measures 6.5 x 6 x 1.5 inches (15.5 x 16.5 x 4 cm) when closed. It can run from an AC wall adapter or 6 NiMH AA batteries. The keyboard is hacked from a portable folding keyboard for a Jornada PDA which outputs RS-232. I’m using a PIC 16F88 to decode the signals and re-encode them to PS/2 (that was an ordeal to figure out). The PIC checks to see if an external PS/2 keyboard is connected on power up. If one is hooked up, it will route data from that instead. There is an internal ampilfied speaker as well as connections for audio and video output on the back. There’s a serial connection for a disk drive and an SD card slot in the side for a 1541-III but I haven’t been able to get that to work yet. I also have a connection for a userport/joystick. The joystick in the picture is a hacked Atari keychain joystick. The mini joystick wasn’t in the original plan but after I accidentally discovered it on ebay, it seemed perfect.
[via hack-a-day]
Petscii Forums "PETSCII.COM" – Unveiling the Picodore 64 – a Commodore PDA!
Open Clip Art Library
Need some clip art and just don’t want to plow through the Office download site, or maybe you haven’t partaken in the Redmond Kool-Aid and use Open Office but still want pretty clip art to liven up that boring sales report or add some flair to the TPS reports. Over at Open Clip Art Library you can find thousands of clips that are just waiting to be used in new and exciting ways! It’s all Public Domain and Creative Commons here my friend so take what you want and if your handy with the art supplies maybe you can contribute to the site.
Open Clip Art Library :: openclipart.org :: Drawing Together.