This is prety cool, inter locking hardwood flooring in the shape of puzzle peices.
[via Boingboing and Wonderland]
Premium quality hardwood floor – product, design ideas and installation
Nike + Apple = Personal Theme Music
As soon as I saw this the first thing that popped into my mind was "Cool I can have personal theme music!" Apparently Nike will be selling special shoes that have a sender sensor in the insole that will transmit information about your workout to a receiver that fits into an iPod Nano. This will let you load up you Nano with music from iTunes that will match you workout. Now, I suppose you could just wear the sensor shoes around during your normal work day, this way the music you load becomes your personal theme music. How cool is that? Just like Peter Griffin in that episode of Family Guy
The Golden Plungers
The info is a little dated (2003) but if your looking for a reason to go on vacation to such exotic place like Singapore or Branson, Missouri look no further. These places have what have been called the best bathrooms in the world. Well, it takes all kinds doesn’t it?
[via neat-o-rama]
R.I.P. Amateur Science
In my recent issue of Wired, I was saddened to read an article on how the amateur exploration of science and chemistry is being criminalized. It’s all in the interests of anti-terrorism or anti fireworks laws. Mostly the ‘dumbing down’ of science has been because of the lawsuit happy nature of our society. (Gee, could the greedy lawyers and the lawyer law makers be the root cause of this? I wonder…) When the United States no longer has people winning Nobel prizes, or creating new technology, or science classes in schools become electives, all will be lost. All of the people who cry "but letting kids play with chemistry sets is dangerous and irresponsible! Think of the children!" Bah! If you give a bright kid the right tools to learn with they won’t kill themselves. Some of the less bright ones might get some injuries from adding water to an acid or something like that, but it’s a lesson learned. If enough do that then you will weed out the idiots. Harsh I know but that’s life. You never get anywhere by hiding at home and living life through what you see on TV. Having hands on experience is what makes you learn how and why things work. Look at how popular magazines like MAKE or Ready Made are. That’s because over the recent years the whole ‘hands on lets see what’s inside the black box’ creativity that made this country what is it has been bashed about it’s head and neck by litigation. Heck, even buying parts of a healthily chemistry set can get you fined or even jailed. What is this world coming to?
Anyway, here are a few links that can help open the doors to scientific exploration:
Household Chemistry from the International Order of Nitrogen
DIY – Alcohol Backpacking Stove
Scientific American’s "The Amateur Scientist"
Henley’s Formulas for Home & Workshop
Don’t break any laws with this knowledge and try not to hurt yourself. Remember that part of science is having ethics and a broader look of the world around you. Think of the impact your experiments will have on others. Be smart and responsible. And if you hurt yourself it’s your own fault.
Open Source Flash – fc64
Now that Macromedia Adobe has released a new version of Flash (9 beta 3), you can do some pretty amazing things. What has to be the best could be this Commodore 64 emulator. I say could be because the live demo site is down and I it looks like some of the downloads are missing. It should be fun to play with, I hope you will be able to save programs that you write on it one day. I’m also hoping that this version of Flash will be a better team player with Firefox than the last version was.
[via Darron Schall and Waxy]
Getting The Most Out Of A Pinhole Camera
It all started on a long plane flight in the beginning of 2006. I was doodling in my Moleskine notebook and musing about pinhole cameras when and idea struck me. What if I made a camera that was panoramic and high capacity at the same time. I had been shooting with my 6×9 medium format pinhole (120 film) for a few weeks and was happy with the images but wished I could get more than eight shots a roll and have a wider field of view.
What I thought was if I moved the pinhole closer to the film plane and rotated to aspect 90 degrees I could get dozens of images on a single roll of film and still get a pretty good sized negative. Turns out I can get about 30 images on a roll and even a quickly made pinhole will produce a satisfactory sharpness.
Check out my build notes of this fun and rewarding project.