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The function of a brake booster is to prevent the brake bosses from moving apart under heavy braking. A good brake booster considerably improves the feel and the strength of the brakes – the force of your finger is converted to braking instead of flex of your fork or frame. It is especially important if you have flexible frame/fork/brake bosses. Therefore, the main characteristic of a booster is its stiffness. Not strength, but stiffness. Or actually stiffness-to-weight, because you wouldn’t like to carry half kilo of steel on your bike. Link.

It’s like robots, made out of clay. Tiny robots that can turn into any shape – from a replica human to a banana to a mobile phone – are being developed by scientists in the United States. The new science of claytronics, which will use nanotechnology to create tiny robots called catoms, should enable three-dimensional copies of people to be “faxed” around the world for virtual meetings. Link.

Earlier we posted up how to make a paper pinhole camera, the DIY Dirkon Paper Camera and here are some images of a ceramic pinhole camera along with some of the photos it took. Pottery + Photography = Phottery. There isn’t a how-to, but it wouldn’t be that difficult to adapt existing pinhole camera instructions to do something like this. [via] Link.

How many possible ways are there to lace an average shoe? This simple question, when answered with mathematics, results in some surprisingly big numbers – on an average shoe with six pairs of eyelets, there are 1,961,990,553,600 ways to feed a shoelace though those 12 eyelets. Here are 24 ways to tie your shoes. Link.

How to make a really big poster from a lot of photos, now for Photoshop PC users. Mike Matas posted instructions on how to make a “Life Poster” but sadly some of us are still using PCs and can’t use his iPhoto wizardry. Well for those like me here are the instructions for creating a life poster using Photoshop… Link.

Handy way of running PHP on a USB drive…the most obvious being demonstrating your wares to a potential client on their computer , but the possibilities should be obvious to any PHP heads who in general I find are quite an inventive bunch. In the past I have produced AMP CD-R’s , e.g. Apache/MySQL/PHP installation running from a CD-R , a USB flash drive install is even easier since we don’t have to worry about non-writable media, the point of this article by the way is to provide a portable system with no hard-coding of drive paths etc. Link.

Mac version of the disposable digital camera mod. PV2Mod is a simple program I wrote to modify files stored on a PV2 camera. It is currently only a Mac command-line program (since OS X, macs have become the choice of many geeks, and I’ve found USB programming for Mac to be very easy). While PV2 can modify any file in the camera’s root directory. Link.