Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Umm.. Yeah. Stock up on these for the Yew Year. Or better yet, as the animated GIF is better at telling how it works than the patent papers, build your own. Ya know, nothing says ‘I’m a geek’ louder than a parachute on a champagne cork. Come to think of it, a cork parachute and a 2 liter bottle of something fizzy (I’ll go with baking soda and acid of choice for home chemistry, vinegar) should make for some weekend fun.
[via BoingBoing]
I’ve been reading through the premiere issue of ‘Robot Magazine’ and have nothing but good things to say about it. Anyone that has an interest in the growing area of hobby robotics needs to read this publication. No matter if you have a LEGO Mindstorm kit and want to get some ideas, a new VEX robotics system, or are building a ‘Robo One‘ classed robot there is going to be something in this for you. The lead story of how the Mythbusters built their own PackBot out of the new VEX Robot System is a great read. First class stuff!
If your into the whole do it yourself scene and like photography then this page is going to be a big hit with you.
A collection of links to programs, calculators, simulators, tables, formula’s, and applets related to photography and optics
When my friend Greg sent me this link I’m sure he wasn’t thinking of the fashion applications of this new technology. The scarf uses a color sensor and a matrix of red, green, and blue LEDs to adopt the local color as it were. This reminds me of the active camouflage used by some ships and planes in WWII. The vehicle was illuminated by lights that were dimmed to match the ambient light levels. This would make the object harder to see at a distance. I suppose that the same would be true of a person wearing this if it was emulating the color of the wall behind the wearer. I doubt that it would be used in only this way, the fashion impaired would make a better market for this sort of thing.
How clever, use the hexagonal cross-section of a pencils as dice. Mix it in with the kind of rules you would find in a card game like Pokemon and you have the latest Japanese craze that is heading to our shores. Expect a TV show based on this soon…
I would swear that when I was a kid there was a game a little bit like this so the entire thing may not be all that new.
[ via Boing Boing ]
This is an electronic version of the (now) classic game ‘Win, Lose, or Draw". The question shows up on the little LCD screen located on the pad and then you try to draw it on the graphics tablet. You and your teammates get to see the thing your trying to draw up on the TV. Without the benefit of having played with one of these, but playing the analog game a few times I can see some interactive things are going to be lost when you play the game this way. Like how you can fake out the other team by throwing them off the track with pen motions for starts. Plus, your going to want to have an LCD projector to play this unless your all huddled around the boob tube.