The project is aimed in part at demonstrating that NASA’s new balloon vehicle can carry sophisticated instruments in near-space fairly cheaply. Balloon-borne telescopes can be launched at roughly 1 per cent of the cost of deploying a satellite by conventional rocket launches. The balloon has a volume of about 1.2-million cubic metres and is as high as a 33-storey building. [via] Link.
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.
