Blog

Tim Hunkin has a neat page with the history of safes and how to crack some of them- An illustrated lecture about the history of Safes and Safe breaking. The lecture is based round a large wooden safe with a video camera inside, projecting the inside of the door mechanism on a screen. This is currently my favourite lecture to perform. There’s something very satisfying about the simple ingenuity of safes and locks. Its also an area of engineering design that has not been transformed by science or maths, and to me illustrates intuitive aspect of the subject, which often now gets forgotten. Link.

Here’s an origami-liek chair project. The site has the history and step-by-step of making chairs from the from the “spam signs” you see all over towns, especially during election time. The street spam lounger uses more than 95% of the material from 21 of the picket-sized signs, and more than 50% of the material from 1 of the “election” signs. There are only two different part blanks–one for the picket signs that form the “skin” of the chair, and one for the election sign which makes the structure. Link.

This a really cool blog- X-37…First Try: June 16, 2005 – Today was targeted to be the first flight of X-37, but unforeseen problems caused the flight to be scrubbed. The X-37/White Knight pair did taxi to the end of Rwy 30 for a short time, and then back to the hangar. Hey, folks, that’s just how it is in the flight test world. No date has been announced for the next attempt. [via] Link.

Here’s a photo of a ton of PSPs perched on a window. Are they about to jump, fearing their firmware is about to get rolled back to 1.0 to play homebrew games? Or are they waiting to swoop down and snag memory sticks. I’m not too sure either, but it might be some new form of DRM, you’ll need to buy a new PSP every time you want to play.

I don’t think this is real, but I’ll check it out- In a suburb of Toronto, Canada, a small company called Rothman Technologies, Inc., has in fact discovered not one but two viable methods for breaking down ordinary water into hydrogen and oxygen. Neither method involves the need to spend a billion dollars. They are simple answers. The existing engines in our automobiles could work with these systems with very little alteration and no need for an external support infrastructure like the one now provided by gas stations, and which would be required by fuel-cell technology. Link.

Jeez, IBM is publishing up a storm of articles…LinuxDevices rounds them up. IBM has published the following technical articles, tutorials, and downloads on its DeveloperWorks website. They cover a range of interesting (though not necessarily embedded) technical topics, primarily related to Linux and open source system development. Link.

Wow, next week might be really interesting…On May 22, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said that iTunes would debut within 60 days of May 22; however, sources tell AppleInsider that iTunes 4.9 is reportedly nearing the final stages of development–about three weeks ahead of schedule. The company now plans to unveil the software at the end of June or by the first week of July. Link.