Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
This is pretty cool, too but it’s yet another kit that I won’t be buying any time soon, a little pricey at $25,000US. The fuel cell is powered by a Hydrogen gas cylinder that is actualy inside the robot so you can run it totaly without wires.
Robot equipped with the fuel cell
Some more translated links to the Speecys company.
What is Speecy?
Press release
Here is a nice shot of the fuel cell itself.
This plan reminds me of a book by Piers Anthony called “Rings of Ice”. Things didn’t work out all that well, the Earth ended up getting flooded with all the comet ice that was used to build the rings.
The idea in sounds too close to the ice ring idea to me. Putting lots of little hunks of stuff in orbit to me sounds like a big mistake. Wouldn’t the rings be right where all of our telecom satellites are at right now? Plus as it might light up the night time sky as much as a full moon, wouldn’t that have an effect on the animals (and us!) that live here?
As long as we’re taking about potential bad things to do to our home world, what about building shadow squares? At least those would be farther away from the Earth and thus out of the way of most things we put in to orbit. We might figure out a way to turn them off or somthing if they end up working a little too well…
Now, if someone wants to build a sun screen to put over Phoenix I’d be all over that. It’s &%#% hot here!
Space Ring Could Shade Earth and Stop Global Warming
Lets suppose that your tired of your current operating system and want to try something new. It happens, nothing wrong with that. The problem is that you’re a laptop owner and as we all know laptops are a delicate little box of hardware. Part computer, part monitor, and part strange alien technology that breaks when you look at it wrong. You have a friend that said ‘Get Linux, it’s kewl!’ Well, you know darn well that your sleek exotic beast was barely able to take an install of Microsoft Windows let alone some free OS made by people with more time that you ever remember having. Face it, Microsoft has enough programmers to build an Egyptian pyramid (hey, Gates is going to die someday…) So the notion that free software is going to install might be as crazy as open source XP. But as with many things on the ‘net, other people have forged into this unknown territory and have left notes as to their experiences.
This is an index of information and documentation of interest to those who now use or are considering using the Linux operating system on a notebook or laptop computer.
All in all a very handy site if your thinking of making the switch and want to push your laptop into a new dimension. Heck, I’m downloading Debian right now and have a 20GB drive ready to go into my Toshiba Satellite. Live free, use Linux! 🙂
Last December I posted a note about the Panoscan digital panoramic camera and Mr. Sharpless was kind enough to make a comment about how he had built a few cameras that did pretty much the same thing but at a far lower price. Well I asked if he had a web site and I just got a reply saying that he was inspired to put a site up about his creations.
Thank you!!!
My “ScanCams” are panoramic cameras made from old flatbed document scanners and photographic lenses. They take images one vertical line at a time while rotating under control of the scanner’s electronics and drive motor. An attached laptop computer decodes the scan data and records formatted image files, using software I developed.
This kind of camera can have very high resolution and can make very wide images – up to 360 degrees or even more. The vertical field of view, and hence the angular resolution, depends on the lens focal length and the length of the linear image sensor.
I’m used to using a swing lens camera, I use a Russian Horizon 202pretty often, so the ‘limitations’ of such a camera are familiar to me. I don’t have a problem with the whole moving lens thing, it can make for some cool effects.
On the right is my second ScanCam, and the only one currently operational. Its CCD is 42mm long — the length of the diagonal of a 35mm film frame – and it uses Pentax screw mount SLR camera lenses. The sensor has 10,600 pixels, giving an effective resolution of 49 megapixels over the 35mm frame. I usually scan at one-half, one-third or one-quarter of the maximum resolution – roughly 12, 5 or 3 megapixels per frame.
GHAA… 49 megapixels per 35mm frame? Oh yeah… I am eyeing the screws in my HP 7400c scanner even as I type this…
So have a look at his site and go out and build one yourself! Make some art, why don’t ya… 🙂
TKS Digital Scanning Panoramic Camera
Very cool, and the cat ears make it all the better if you ask me. The ears act as air brakes to slow the train down in case of an emergency (earthquake, fire, etc…) Top speed is expected to be around 405 kph and run at 360 kph in normal operations. So, why can’t we have a few of these here in America? Once between Las Vegas and LA could pay for itself in a year, loads of people want to lose money in sin city. You know, on second thought I don’t think America is ready for something like this. For a start, if it was run by a private company it would be asking for an immediate bail out because the operation costs would be far too high. The company would try to cut costs and lower maintenance standards to keep the money pouring into the pockets of the shareholders from the government funding. Oh yeah, now that would make for some fantastic headlines…
Neko bullet train
The whole custom USB memory device trend is taking longer to catch on than I had thought it would. This is the latest batch, Star Wars inspired memory units. So far this is falling in the same catagory as all the other ones, looks nifty but the storage capacity is far too small to be of any practical use. I suspect that some one is selling smaller (older) USB memory drives for very cheap and because the margin would be pretty good those get used in the cool custom cases.
May the USB Memory be with you my Young apprentice