Cheap portable book scanner Instructable
For about $20 in parts and a spare point-and-shoot digital camera you can build a cheap portable book scanner with this Instructable from DHagen.
Imaging
Postmodern propaganda posters
Brooklyn’s Brian Moore makes these cool information age / 20th century propaganda mash-up posters. Right now, he’s selling prints of Loose Tweets Sink Fleets and Wikipedia is Free, shown above, and he’s got several more designs in this Flickr set. [via Boing Boing]
Mechanically dimmed fluorescent lamp
In a purely practical sense, this idea is kind of goofy since electric lights can, in general, be dimmed, you know, electrically. However, and if my understanding is correct, that’s a little trickier with fluorescent lighting. It can be done, but it’s considerably more complicated than with incandescent bulbs, and there are problems maintaining a consistent color temperature. Even though it’s not exactly ground-breaking, then, I still really like this mechanically-dimmed lamp by designer Camille Blin, at least in part because it reminds me of the cool tunable neutral density filters (e.g. below) I used to play with on the optics bench in grad school. [via NOTCOT]
Owl nest web cam
I lived in a rental years ago that had a water tower on the property. Each year barn owls nested in the eaves of the water tower, and each year my husband and I spent many evenings sitting nearby watching them. We saw babies learn to fly, mother and father swoop in and out with […]
Handy reverse image search engine
The same helpful commenter who gave me a hand on this morning’s mystery dentist office flyer post also hipped me to the wonder that is TinEye, a Heaven-sent search engine that lets you upload or link to an image, and then finds other instances of the same image, or cropped or resized versions of it, […]
How-To: Lego Nikon IR remote
KoZuEst made this nice compact IR remote for his sister’s Nikon camera using a PIC chip! Schematics and source code included.
This is not a spiral
Slightly off-topic, here, but I see lots of these optical illusion posts on the web, and although some of them are pretty impressive, this one borders on voodoo. I had to run my mouse pointer over the blue traces a few times to persuade myself. I’ve overlaid some big yellow circles on the original image, which you can see, below, after the jump, to save you the trouble. [via Neatorama]
