Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
I will be building one of these myself shortly. I used to have a nice 25 VDC bench top power supply but a leaky water pipe sent it to electronics heaven. The units looks like to needs a load to stay on, that would normaly be the mother board of a PC but in my casse I think I’ll use a 12V neon case light. Should be hard to forget that I left it on with it glowing like a spent fuel storage pool.
[via MAKE]
Nothing is sweeter than a camera that has been subverted to pass infrared light. I have a Nikon 950 that is just waiting for me to do this…
[via MAKE]
This is quite sad. Another blow to amateur scientists everywhere:
The United States CPSC has initiated criminal legal action against us and other chemical suppliers. In short, the CPSC would like to ban the public from all access to chemicals. This would mean an end to hobbies such as model rocketry, pyrotechnics and of course chemistry. One by one, our freedoms are slowly being taken away from us – this action must be stopped now.
I suppose that in 15 years people in the US will look around themselves in their high security cities and wonder why all the equipment and technology is being sold to them by Chinese R&D labs. I suppose they won’t care because the call center jobs pay pretty well even if you do have to learn Mandarin to work there.
(There’s irony in there but the fedral government doesn’t want anyone to point it out.)
Boing Boing:US bans sale of chemicals to hobbyists without $1K license
Mumm… Old science tutorials are the greatest. Back when the world was a simpler place, little Timmy Citizen was encouraged to explore the world of science via discoveries that he would make in his back yard laboratory himself, and not just by reading boring old facts from a text book. This is an extract from a 1949 issue of ‘Modren Mechanix’ that details the production of nitrous oxide.
But don’t go trying this at home these days kids, just having ammonium nitrate (the prime ingredient in this experiment) without the proper papers will get you jail time. You could be a druggie, or even a terrorist! So be happy to just read about how reactions and decomposition takes place from a book and know that your better off blindly taking their word for it that this is how things work. Think of it like reading a cook book but being forbidden from owning any food. I’m sure all the best cooks in the world got to be what they are by just reading and never touching the ingredients…
[via Boing Boing]
I saw this over on Hack-a-day this morning while I was looking around the ‘net. The project is clever, I have a bunch of disposable cameras for playing around with myself. I find the lenses to be of a veru low quality but for doing simple macro work they are good enough.
Wow, talk about serious old school. An entire computer built out of relay logic is quite an impressive feat. OK, fifty years ago it was pretty normal but the transistor wisened everyone up pretty quick. He’s got this cool video clip of the LEDs blinking and stuff here.