I have a hard time exercising unless there’s some type of cool technology involved. jnielsen posted his heart rate and GPS info from the Ironman Arizona triathlon race. “I used my Garim 301 for the entire race and loaded it up to motionbased.com. The GPS has the distance almost dead on. Check it out – but no cracking on my time:) It’s a pretty cool tool – I actually swam a pretty straight line!”. Links to the individual maps and data here.
Microsoft’s Channel9 site now allows Tablet PC users to use ink in their forums now. Here’s my post (View image) with some ink from my Tablet. I really like the idea of some type of easy to implement system so more comment systems could allow ink from Tablet PCs, Wacom devices and PDAs. Oh course I’d really like to figure out a way to ink up my photos on Flickr. Update: Here is the first ever comment spam in ink!!
Wow, check out this correspondence figuring out ways to help soldiers in the field diffuse those cell phone detonators. “I was connected via a soldier on Iraq who sent me a picture of the radios they are using to set off the IEDs. Some of them are using FRS radios (Family Radios). The picture I saw was a Motorola TalkAbout 5000 (or something like that). What I did was make a FRS radio connected to a 7 watt external amplifier, and with a BASIC stamp controlling the main function buttons of the radio. It will hop through all 838 possible codes (22 channels, 38 privacy codes) and transmit for 1 second on each channel. Hopefully setting off the bombs before they drive through”.
I posted up my photo based “IT CAME FROM MAKE” comic using Comic life, but I’m interested in making the comic look more comicy. Here’s a great step by step guide to turning photos in to comic book looking art work with Photoshop. I’m trying to see if I can get GiMP to do the same thing.
Scary Terry’s Halloween pages has some cool projects using wiper motors that look like a lot of fun. Rocking a chair, kicking legs and dancing skeletons. Although it’s a bit too early for Halloween I’m going to start picking some motors up over the next few months to get ready to totally freak out the kids this October. Have any Halloween projects you’re thinking of doing? Let us know!
Here’s a simple project that might be interesting to try out. This simple circuit can detect the invisible fields of voltage which surround all electrified objects. It acts as an electronic “electroscope.” Regular foil-leaf electroscopes deal with electrostatic potentials in the range of many hundreds or thousands of volts. This device can detect one volt. Its sensitivity is ridiculously high.
MacMinute has a story about Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails making the band’s new single, “The Hand That Feeds” available to download for Mac users with GarageBand to mix and mash up (an actual multi-track audio session). “For quite some time I’ve been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks — to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what’s there,” Reznor says. Here’s a screenshot of it on my Mac (View image) and here’s where to get it (70MB file). Here are a couple of the first remixes!
