Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
What a perfect companion to my light bulb DIY! This has some amazingly valuable information on how to cut, bend, and blow glass for scientific devices. It also has information on how you can use this new found knowledge to make your own photo cells, vacuum diodes,and even a cathode ray tube. For the amateur scientist this is a gold mine of information.
[via MAKE]
Booting your PC via a USB key drive into a cut down version of XP could have many uses. I might give this a go, it would be handy to have when I get people that have a bad virus/malware infection.
[via Mike Linnen Blog]
I’m a little short on the batteries he used as the counter weight but other than that I’m all set! this makes a great addition to the paper trebuchet that I found online a while ago. Come to think on it, its almost as cool as the popsicle trebuchet.
Time to get bending and lay siege to the photocopier.
[via Digg]
This looks to be a handy tool. You enter the body diameter, the rocket weight, drag coefficient, and the motor type and you get an estimation of how high it will go and even how long it will take to land if you add the parachute size. You can use it for other things too, like seeing if you could launch a full roll of paper towels into the air. You can, it takes about 3 D-12 motors. 🙂
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.
People need computers with blinking lights. I slave away at a Macintosh all day and all I have to look at is a calm glowing white light. It glows the same way when the thing is doing nothing as is does when the CPUs are maxed out and locked up. I can’t even tell if there is any hard drive activity! Now, I can’t put this project on the Mac. For starters it’s not mine, work owns it. Second, there is that lack of a parallel port that causes some problems. However, this would work just fine on my PC. The front LED that shows hard drive activity is blown out (what is this problem I have with lack of hard drive feedback?!?) so this would be a cool indicator of when my drives are off in a world of their own. Unlike the author of the how to I don’t have a fancy table saw to make a mount for it, I’ll have to make do with hot glue. ;P
[via MAKE]
Put a scrolling LED display in your computer for less than $20