Arapaimag built a 50,000 gallon tank at his house. He writes – “I built my mega and mini mega tanks in the 1994 to 1997 period. I built the tank as an addition to the home and then joined it by putting doors through the basement and upstairs through the bedroom. You can see the excavator removing the soil on the first week of construction. You can see the doors cut through my walls in the 3rd picture.” Link.
I’ve been to a ton of museums that have said flash photography damages the works, but it seems like it’s not exactly true. “300 amateur flashes a day is equivalent to adding five minutes to the display day. In order to actually increase damage by 10% on a ten hour day, one would need to experience 3600 flashes per day. Two large professional flashes would raise the ante a little, they would need 225 flashes a day to add 10%. For museums at 150 lux (15 footcandles) these numbers become 10,000 amateurs, or 700 pros, every day. To actually double fading would need 100,000 amateurs a day. Most museums would kill for those attendance figures!” Sounds like a good MythBusters thing too, Full story here – Link.
Green is good! – “Network Operations Centers and Help Desks all over monitor their systems and networks with a somewhat open source product called Big Brother. Here’s how to add a traffic light to indicate network status. Big Brother provides a web interface that shows the status of the network, and systems. The web interface allows you to drill down and see the status of any device monitored. It does all this in a very simple and elegant way, by providing color indications, red, yellow, and green to tell you how things are going. Well all of this really can put the idea of traffic lights into your head if you like to “repurpose” consumer electronics like I do. So lets get to task and use our desktop computer, running Java to monitor a BigBrother web page and change a faux traffic light to match the color-status of our network.” Thanks Victor! Link.
SWITCH is a DIY show that creates fun and fashionable items with electronics. We’ve posted about SWITCH before but now the site has launched with two new videos to check out. Watch Allison take a tour of CES showcasing the best in girl technology. Then get your workshop ready as Allison and Diana show you how to make a talking photo frame. We can’t wait to see what these ladies make next! Link.
A clever maker out there made his own robot pal – “My dream of a home-built robot was smolding since the early 80ies. The floor of the young boy’s room was covered with “fischertechnik” parts, and a robot which clears the mess seemed feasible… Well, it took some years until the project actually started. And this not only due to my personal capabilities as a mechanical engineer, but also in the environment of today’s technologies: Webcams, WLAN, and last but not least powerful yet power-saving PC-Mainboards.” Here’s how he made his robot! [via via] Link.
C64s.com has a pretty neat way to play your old favorite Commodore 64 games / retro-games right in your browser. Each day you can get a daily dose of C64 nostalgia with their “game a day” mailing list. All games are abandonware or copyleft. Link.
With our kits you can capture high-speed events, splashes, popping balloons and breaking glass. It’s an adjustable flash controller triggered by light or sound. Our kit includes a high-speed flash, disposable camera, flash controller and fully assembled flash trigger that synchronizes the high-speed event and the flash. Also included is a 6-ft cable connects your high-speed flash to the flash controller, and all the tools needed to precisely time your high-speed picture. Flash controller is adjustable, so the flash can be triggered by soft sounds, loud sounds, a laser pointer, or a flashlight. The kit also includes digital output that can trigger other external flashes, such as the SnapShot II strobe light. But, how do we test each unit before we ship them? Here’s great video with Tom Anderson from Quaketronics showing you what we do! Link (MP4). Click here to get the video with iTunes! This video should work on PC/Mac/Linux/iPod video and PSP (let us know if it does not).
