Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
The latest offering from the guys in Japan:
Sphelar® captures light from all directions, which means it can catch reflected light and diffused light. In addition, there is no need for the superfluous operation of tracking the sun. The spherical light-receiving surfaces achieve unprecedented high generation efficiency.
[via metaefficient]
Spherical Photovoltaic Solar Cell | Kyosemi Corporation
I was quite impressed when I learned that the sport of model rocketry was alive and well in the former Soviet Union. Every year in Baikonur, Kazakhstan the World Model Rocketry Championship is held. I stumbled upon a load of photos over at English Russian and decided to do a bit of research on the subject. I happened on the World Spacemodeling Championship website (Google translation here) that has information on the event. Looks like the next one is going to be on April 21. If you happen to be in the neighborhood you should plan on attending. Or you can read about what it’s like in this article on when Vernon Estes (namesake of Estes Rockets) visited there in 2006. Sounds like great event, not only do you get to see some world class model rockets fire off but you also get to tour some of the buildings at the famous Cosmodrome.
This grabbed my eye today.
Camera-object designed for time-syncronized double exposures of opposing settings (180°) on one film. 2x agfa box (widely modified), wire, glass, plasic, velvet, double cable release, roll-film (modified/ without halation protection)
Looks like a nice camera mod.
[via Flickr]
zeitsynchrone photographie
(machine translated page from original German)
Looks like mega director James Cameron is stirring up the muck with his latest project. Seems he found the Jesus family tomb. And bones. And evidence that Jesus had a wife and kids. Yeah, that’s going to give some people a brain ache. It must be a bit like finding out that Star Wars is all blue screen and miniatures…
So will Cameron’s next film be, if they can get DNA out of the bones, a new twist on the film ‘The Boys From Brazil‘? You decide, go have a look at the article of you can wait an see the documentary on the Discovery channel.
Acting like a TV guide to the entire world, Netherlands based wwITV.com is a portal to hundreds of video streams from around the world. Everything from the latest news recap from the BBC to the home shopping network in Japan you can pretty much find something you like here. Now, you’re going to need to have Media Player or Real Player installed on your system. I didn’t have Real Player on my system but the Firefox plugin installer took care of that without even a browser re-launch. Nice. If you don’t want to bung up your system with even more suspect from Microsoft you can use Media Player Classic (Media Player Classic is an extremely light-weight media player for Windows. It looks just like the good-old Media Player v6.4, but has lots of nice extra features) or VLC.
Today on Retro Thing I saw that there is a new on chip audio synthesizer on the market.
The Soundgin is a serially controlled Sound Synthesizer in a PIC.
It produces complex sound effects, synthesizer style music and English speech with an unlimited vocabulary.
For use in manufactured electronics and home projects. .
The Soundgin is an 18-Pin Microchip PIC18F1320 that has been programmed to generate complex sounds by incorporating six oscillators which can interact with each other in various ways. The oscillators are configured by sending short serial commands to the Soundgin via the RX pin. These configurations result in the Soundgin’s oscillators continuously generating sound. The Soundgin also contains presets that can be used to configure the oscillators to generate predefined sound such as a Gong, Steam Engine, Etc… The six are spit up into two identical units referred to as Sound Engines.
The sample on the page are quite good. I can see this as an easy to implement addition to a lot of DIY music projects or a speech synthesizer for robots.
[via retrothing]
Soundgin