Hawaiian Rocks Make Lousy Souvenirs

Photo via KNHL

 

A 6.6 magnitude earthquake rocked the tropical paradise of Hawaii this morning. The quakes epicenter was located 10 miles away from the big island but was deep. Damage has been reported to some roads (rock wall failure, boulders on roads, and mud slides), power is out in many areas (maybe in part to heavy rains) and a flower pot was destroyed when it fell to the street from a two story building. However, news reports are still coming in.

The Brady children have not been available for questioning.

Hawiian earthquake news

Cassini Wows Us With Saturn’s Backside

Saturn's shadow

Recently, the space probe Cassini sent back a mess (over 160) images taken with it’s wide field camera that were assembled into this breath taking image of our solar systems premiere ringed planet Saturn. The color enhanced image (shown here) shows not only the rings we are used to seeing but others that are too faint to be seen normally.

[via boingboing] 

In Saturn’s Shadow

Full size image

Latest Master of the Automaton

 

These are brilliant works, very much in the same line as the works of Tim Hunkin (a personal hero of mine).

… he started researching kinetics and developed his own system for animating wood-carved figures with the turn of a crank. One of the results was a small body of work featuring important modern artists acting out some of their more eccentric or unfavorable characteristics. In “Picasso and Barbie,” the famously promiscuous Spaniard paints a portrait from a model, in this case a scantily clad blond doll in a suggestive pose. A crank on the piece powers a network of exposed gears that move the artist’s arm up and down, as if painting, and turn his head back and forth from the model to the canvas.

[via suicidebots] 

Man in motion

Cardboard Robot Halloween Costume of Doom

Robot costume

In 2004 I ended up having some time on my hands about three days before a big Halloween party. I did what anyone would do, I built robot costume out of cardboard boxes and dryer hose.

Sorry the photos aren’t better, for some weird reason I had set my camera on super low file size. I wish I had taken more shots of the build but I was trying to meet a deadline.

Robot costume - arms The whole thing was bonded together with tape (clear packing and gaffers), hot glue, and lots of brass paper brads. I used dryer hose for the arms and as it had to fit up to my shoulders I clipped the wires in them for about eight inches on the inside at the tops and covered them with some gaffers tape so I wouldn’t get poked. I tied them together with two short sections of rope,one across my chest and the other on my back. This kept the sleeves from coming off and falling to my wrists. I added some cardboard cuffs to hide the claw interface.

Robot costume - grippers getting some paint The claws were made from heavy tag board and regular corrugated cardboard. I wore them like mittens and my fingers ran through some cardboard loops on the inside so I could operate them. The hinges were paper brads.
I wanted rivets on my robot so I used about two boxes of brads all over the thing. They worked real well as surface detail and as actual mechanical reinforcements. I ran tape on the backside to avoid the sharp ends.
The name badge was simply an old LED chaser badge that I had built in the late 80’s. I mounted it to the costume with hot glue. I added some details like the chest logo and the static bag eyes after I slathered on a few coats of this water based gray paint I found at Home Depot.

Robot costume - the costume at rest

The costume was a success, after the party I went trick or treating with my kids and I can’t tell you how many comments I got from kids and parents alike. 

For more photos of my costume, got have a look at the photos on Flickr.

 

Running low on ideas for Halloween costumes this year? Costume Super Center is the place to go for your costume ideas and supplies. If you’re looking of kids costumes and can’t find what you need at the store, order them online. If you’re looking for a costume for a college or office party, we’ve got a great supply of adult costumes as well!

ifusion Stereo PMP Display

iFusion

In the ever popular search for cool gear for your gear I saw this. It says that by sticking this special screen over your personal media player and bam! You get eye popping 3d media. Well… Hold on there. i know a little bit about autostereo displays. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and make a guess how this works. First you are going to need some content in 3D. Left and right images or clips of video taken with a 3d camera. That’s a no brainer. Second, the content will have to go through a special media player that will either interlace the left and right feeds on the fly or will play back stuff that you have converted on your PC. It more than likely has more horsepower than a PMP. What you will get when you look at the PMP with out the special screen will be a sliced up picture that has striped of content side by side.  Maybe a few pixels wide. The screen is a lenticular lens array that will shift the slices of image to it’s respective eye. A good example of all this is an article on DIY lenticular prints that I wrote up a few days ago. I’ve seen professional systems that have these, nice 36" LCD screens, and the images look pretty good. Or it will use a red/green color image anaglyph. Those look ok in my opinion. I’ve never seen a color anaglyph that looks 100 percent real. I’m hoping for a true stereo image but you can never tell.

I’m looking forward to seeing one of these sceens in place one day. I have a crap load of stereo images and I’d love to show them to people from my PDA.

[via ubergizmo]

ifusion