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:
nelson8815 on Instructables made this hydraulic robot arm our of a pizza box and some tape. More: Holiday Gift Guide 2010: Robots @Makezine.com blog Homebrew SCARA robot arm Building a robot arm from foam Industrial robot arm catapults flaming bowling balls
I built one of these years ago from plans I saw in Slocum and Botterman’s New Book of Puzzles, and still delight in playing with it, so I was pleased as–geez, I can’t say “pleased as punch” and still respect myself in the morning, so I’ll just leave it at “really pleased”–to see this new tutorial from Instructables user Phil B about how it’s done. From the outside, the puzzle is deceptively simple: You can guess from Phil’s description that you’ve got to spin it, to win it, but there’s a devious twist. The book I saw it in had a picture of a clear plastic version that showed off how the mechanism worked, but that makes it rather too easy to figure out; the best way to appreciate Yoshigahara’s design is to build one for yourself, then give it to somebody else to puzzle over.
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.
From a life of recurring knee injuries, I’ve got a closet full of crutches. They’re useless as soon as I’m ambulatory, so I’ve been poking around for reuse projects. Flip those crutches upside down and you’ve got a snazzy pair of crutch stilts! And, as one commenter points out, if you injure yourself trying them […]
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.
That’s a very lucky lad grinning at you in the beginning of this video from his dad, Instructables user Steve Moseley, who designed, built and installed this elaborate marble run around the ceiling of his room.
