Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
An ongoing project, this homemade 6×17 panoramic camera is not something that will win a beauty contest but the photos it takes are amazing! The body is mostly built out of 2mm aircraft grade aluminum and the lens is a wide Caltar W-II 90mm, something that would normally be on a 4×5 camera. He does a great image comparison between the results from this camera and a Nikon D200 to show the leap in quality. I love pages like this, the inspiration they give make browsing the web well worth it.
Sounds like a great idea, this would solve the low (or non existent) wireless data rates that are found in the core of large buildings. Should be inexpensive to implement as well. So when can I get my LightFi lamp and alarm clock combo?
The objective of the initiative is to use visible light for communication between wireless devices and LED-based lighting fixtures. The LED-based scheme could also be used to communicate between automobiles, which are increasingly being equipped with LED lamps. The overall goal is to build new communication capabilities into all LED lights and reduce congestion in current RF bands.
Every once in a while I’ll stumble across a ‘classic’ camera when I visit the local second hand store. I recently picked up a Kodak Duaflex IV that was in pretty bad shape. The faux leather case was hard and cracked, there is rust on anything that could rust and weird corrosion on whatever wasn’t rusty but the lenses looked OK and the shutter moved. I was thinking that this would be a great camera to pull apart for the glass and shutter mechanism. I’ve been doing an on again off again search for simple camera shutters for my own creations, the Kodak looked to be a likely source. I’d rather have a nice Copal or Zeiss shutter from a folding camera but this would do.
How I managed not to open it while I was at the store is beyond me. If I had I would have noticed the exposed roll of vintage 620 format Kodacolor-X that was neatly waiting for someone to process it. Continue reading “Mystery Camera and the Film From Within…”
Had a little drama at the last HeatSync Labs meeting when one of the members was filling up a balloon with helium…
We live in amazing times.
…If Microsoft founder Bill Gates unleashes more mosquitoes at this year’s Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, Nathan Myhrvold will be ready for him. Myhrvold demonstrated a “Death Star” laser gun designed to track and kill mosquitoes in flight. The device was crafted from parts purchased on eBay by scientists at Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures Laboratory. As Myhrvold explained, a child dies every 43 seconds from malaria. Current methods for eradicating the disease aren’t working very well. There’s no viable vaccine yet, and although mosquito nets work, people don’t always use them. When given free nets by public health organizations, many people in the developing world use the nets for fishing instead. So until the time comes when malaria can be controlled, Intellectual Ventures thought it might be a good idea to try to control mosquitoes. Myhrvold’s team demonstrated the system onstage using a green laser light rather than a real laser for safety reasons. They let loose mosquitoes in a glass box rigged with a camera on one side of the stage, then pointed the laser device at the box. The laser lights quickly located the mosquitoes in flight. After the live demo, Myhrvold showed a video depicting mosquitoes being zapped for real in flight. They’re currently examining how cost effective it would be to deploy the device in places like Africa.
Brighten up your desktop with stunning shot of science imagery. Over 80 to choose from at various dimensions to fit even the most ’embiggened’ of monitors. There are even instructions on how to apply this as a desktop to your computer if you were wondering how that sort of thing was done. Space craft, planets, satellite pictures of Earth, there are enough pretty pictures to make most everyone happy.
Space Wallpaper, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Moon, Stars and Galaxies – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.