Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
I’m all for kids having the option to better themselves through technology but these things have access to the Internet right? And a million of them have been ordered by Nigera? Umm, can you say ‘biggest scam mill on the planet? I hope not. I’m sure this won’t happen but you have to admit, it makes good Internet…
Four countries commit to buying 4 million Linux-powered OLPC laptops
What do you do when you discover that your neighbors are leaching off your wireless connection? Well, you could use WEP or you could have a bit of fun. I’d choose fun if this happened to me.
[via Slashdot]
This should make the game play a bit more fun in a first person shooter. The gun shoots doors. no, not like the gun will only blow away doors, it makes doors that are connected. Shot one makes the exit, shot two makes the entrance. See? Check the video out if you don’t understand it.
(Thank you Kevin for this link, there’s an extra clip and a med pack for you on the break room table.)
Mumm… there’s a hardware store on the way home that sells all the parts I need to build these uber nifty mousetrap tripwire mines. Very harmless (even if you do put roll caps in them) and easy to make these booby traps could mean and end to office desk pilfering. If you have a bag of these mines, a couple of micro-claymores, and a few Nerf guns you would be all set for a very un-productive day in the office
You know, with a setup like this the sport of disc golf could be as interesting as Nascar. If I lost you with that one, lets start with the basics. Disc golf is where a small group of people try to land a thrown spinning disk into baskets made out of chains at some parks. I suppose they enjoy it, all I know is that whenever there is a group of ‘golfers’ in a park all the other people there had better head for the hills as their very lives are at stake. The players seldom announce their themselves before shooting at a ‘hole’. Even if you have been there long before the golfers arrived. Having a Frisbee land in your picnic is a bit of an upset. Anyway, that said I think we all know what Nascar is. I mean with the movie Cars and such its hard not to know what it is. Now I have a feeling that the entire televised racing thing hit big when some genius realized they having a live camera inside of a car was exactly what everyone wanted. That is entirely true. Now you not only watch the sport to see the cars crash and burn like you normally could if you were in the stands but now, if you were extra lucky, you could see it just the way the driver saw it. Ooo, I smell ratings! Now, if follow this path you could say that if you put a camera on anything and let the viewers experience a new point of view you have gold. See what I’m getting at here? The white fin on the Frisbee is a rudder that keeps a small video camera looking in the right direction when the disk is thrown. Genius! I expect this on The Ocho any day now.
Have a webcam and a smoke detector? If you do you can make a clever alpha particle visualizer. An alpha particle is an ionizing form of radiation that is made up of two protons and two neutrons. It’s powerful but doesn’t penetrate very far, paper or your skin is enough to stop them. Inside smoke detectors is a tiny chunk of americium that produces alpha particles when it decays. If you place some of this near the CCD of a web cam you can see flashes of white light as the particle strikes the capacitors and over charges them. Over time this could destroy the device, as radiation can do to space craft or robots that work near harsh radioactive sources, but in this case it makes for a good practical visualization of radiation. This would make for a fine science fair project.
[via hack-a-day]