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Although it is simple, it can reveal the craters of the Moon and the satellites of Jupiter. It is also very useful for demonstrating lens aberrations. You really need to build this telescope as a necessary step towards understanding the solutions employed in the second and improved telescope model. In the section “From Lenses to Optical Instruments”, you saw how a telescope works; here I simply remind you that the objective lens produces an image of the object observed, and this image is magnified by the eyepiece. Link.

The BomBot is a modified 4×4 remote controlled truck that has been equipped with a pan and tilt camera and a charge dispenser. The robot can reach speeds of 30 to 35 miles an hour. This compact and versatile system, which costs roughly $6,700, is being deployed in rigorous environmental conditions where more expensive robots with a greater logistical burden are currently used. In just 90 days, the first prototypes of the system were delivered to users in the field.Link.

With the processing power equivalent to more than 200 standard PCs, the HYDRA computer is the world’s most powerful chess computer according to IPCCC officials. Housed in a secure server room in Abu Dhabi, HYDRA is a 64-way cluster computer- 64 computers connected and operating as if they are a single machine. Each computer has an Intel Xeon 3.06 Ghz. Man 0.5, Machine 5.5 youch. [via] Link.

The Knitting Machine is Dave Cole’s performance art piece that uses construction equipment and 20-foot long knitting needles to construct large-scale objects. Starting yesterday June 30th and throughout the weekend, the artist will use a pair of John Deere excavators to hold the needles and a Genie to wrap the yarn, creating an oversize American flag at MASS MoCA. Link.

At Where 2.0 I was introduced to Mappr, it takes geotagged photos on Flickr and puts them on a map. I took some in San Francisco, tagged them and now you can view them on the map. We’re going to use this for a couple cool things on MAKE soon, stay tuned! Link.

PSP HTTPD is a new web server for the PSP. Its in the early stages at the moment but lets you access the memory stick and two internal flash devices on the PSP via your web browser. Please note that there are many security holes in this release so do not make your PSP IP address public! This release will also only work on Infrastructure mode (no DHCP). Link.

Will we soon take all of our pictures with a camera phone? Probably not. The image quality is still pretty low, which means that we tend to use camera phones for casual, candid, lifestyle scenes. We save the stuff we want to keep forever for our “real” camera. Even so, there are things you can do to improve the quality of your camera-phone photos. Link.