Over the weekend I participated in a group led by Jeff Warren of MIT’s Design Ecology group to build DIY spectrographs using recycled materials. It was a fun weekend citizen science project that’s perfect for families. The spectrographs we made weren’t as nice as what you can build for $20, but then again they were built using trash.
Have you ever wanted to take a closer look at an aspect of life – such as how diet effects exercise, how exercise effects cognition, how sleep effects your work… Any field of study is free game. And, if you are reading this, you are qualified to submit an entry! Submit questions and entries to eri@genomera.com. For more details, see here. You have until December 15th.
Designer Chris Mullin constructed these electronic sunglasses, which detect bright objects in your view and selectively darken them by turning on part of an LCD screen.
Interesting paper from Neel Joshi, Sing Bing Kang, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Richard Szeliski at Microsoft Research, describing how they mounted 3 gyroscopes and a 3-axis accelerometer on a DSLR to record the camera’s motion while a picture is being taken, and used that data to automatically deblur the resulting image at the software level. From their abstract:
We’ve seen some pretty interesting touchscreen hacks over the past couple of years, but this one definitely stands out for it’s unique surface. A group of Finnish hackers from Nokia substituted the standard opaque white screen used in most rear projection touchscreens with one made of blocks of ice.
A reader who enjoyed Monday’s post about Ken Perlin’s astoundingly tiny screen font , but was disappointed to learn that the font was not available for use, wrote to point out Domenico Mazza’s “Zepto,” which is available for free over at MyFonts.com. Shown above is a comparison of Perlin’s Tiny Font to Zepto, with the same text, in the same screen area, at comparable size and density. You can see that Zepto isn’t quite as readable as Perlin’s font, but still does pretty well.
Ever notice how unevenly some foods can cook in a microwave oven? San Francisco area maker Zeke Kossover came up with this clever method for visualizing the microwaves inside a microwave oven by embedding a matrix of tiny neon lamps inside a sheet of acrylic.
