Okay, just humor me and watch the video, please. It’s not like I get paid to describe things with… those… um, you know, the things that make stuff readable. With individual letters, etc. And periods, commas — the things in between those.
If you’ve ever wandered around an older building you’ll notice something that looks like an ashtray bolted to the wall. These ashtrays, which usually say something like “Watch Station,” once held keys to wind up a watchclock, a mechanical wonder that forced the night watchman to make his rounds through the building under mechanical supervision.
As you moved through the building carrying the clock you would have to fit each key into the watchclock. The clock then noted the time and location of each winding, ensuring that the watchman didn’t just bugger off and drink whiskey.
Wow. Jerry Jalava lost the tip of his left ring finger in a motorcycle accident and made his own prosthetic fingertip which doubles as a USB memory stick.
Wow. While building a digital pinball machine out of a giant LCD and a second, slightly less-giant LCD might cost more than buying an actual machine, the ability to play multiple machines using the Future Pinball simulator effectively turns it into an almost endless supply of fun for any serious pinball fanatic.
I don’t have the time, patience, carpentry skills, open space, or wherewithal to build my own trebuchet but after seeing Mark Winkler’s “Mongo the Trebuchet” launch a flaming ball of fire across an open field under the cover of darkness, I suddenly have the urge to go to Home Depot with a quick stop at the local Fireball Emporium (or wherever they sell fireballs).
Wow. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Hatfield Hotdog Launcher that’s brought out in between innings at the Phillies’ games. A lot of work went into getting all the science-y stuff right and even then, sometimes the hot dogs fly out of their wrappers mid-flight (watch at about the five-minute mark). Very cool.
Hats off to Joshua Callaghan of Los Angeles for coming up with a way to not only hide those utility boxes you see all over your neighborhood, but to also turn each one into something of a conversation piece. Callaghan calls it “public art” after answering a call from the city of Los Angeles to somehow disguise the boxes.
More photos after the jump…
I’m not one to get overly excited about the technology behind transportation logistics (or am I?) but this thing from HP looks pretty cool. It’s basically a handheld wireless-enabled barcode scanner that can also print quick-drying ink directly onto boxes.
So if you work at, say, UPS, you scan a box coming in, that info is transmitted wirelessly to your warehouse servers, and then you print another barcode or “FRAGILE” or some other message onto the package itself, all in the blink of an eye.
Check out this video to see it in action.
[via Treehugger]
Jalopnik has a pretty extensive photo gallery of the second-generation Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) from Discovery’s Storm Chasers series. For the uninitiated, the tank-like TIV is able to drive into the middle of tornados, allowing owner Sean Casey to film from the inside out in high definition. If you haven’t seen the show, check it out.
The TIV2 weighs a staggering nine tons and gets 12 MPG from its 92-gallon gas tank. Its key feature is the 360-degree steel turret that sticks out the top of the vehicle. That’s where Casey and his camera spend most of their time.
It’s entirely possible that most ordinary people won’t ever have the problem of trying to figure out what to do with two empty fire extinguishers (that’s a lot of fires) but just keep this idea in your back pocket should the scenario ever present itself.
A Russian man has turned a couple of spent fire extinguishers into some pretty cool-looking speakers. It’d be an understatement to say that the process looks a bit daunting for those of us without extensive metal cutting and welding experience.
Oh, and it also might help if you speak Russian, as the step-by-step process is written entirely in that language. So welding, metal cutting, and Russian. If all three check out, you, too, could have a set of awesome fire extinguisher speakers.
[TopMods.net via technabob]
This old girl has been stripped of all over component parts, hollowed out and filled with a CPU and lots of cool audio circuitry. The result? The Fender Bender, more machine than guitar, more monster than musical instrument.
The creator, Dan, even made a pickguard out of an old motherboard, soldering out each resistor with a burning cigarette that he held in his mouth threateningly. It appears he’s using sound gear from here but I’m not quite sure which model.
Here’s a Steampunk phone prototype by designer Arthur Schmitt. You make calls using binary punchcards. Punchcards! There are also some dials and a metal grill-type earpiece. The backside of the device seems to contain some sort of rolling counter that likely either keeps track of call duration or gives you the time.
While I personally am a fan of micro-dirigibles as opposed to the (IMHO) wasteful helicopter-type UAVs, this is certainly an awesome version of the latter. Its multi-rotor setup enables some serious agility, as you can see in the videos. If you’re filming, you might need some serious image stabilization, although it’s easily good enough for recon or aerial photography. There are several cool mounts for popular camera form factors, and I’m sure with a little customization you could have it drop water balloons on the kids across the street.
They start at around $15,000, so they’re not really hobby machines, and add-ons like GPS-aware hovering and a video-enabled controller make it more robust (good). I’m reminded, however, of the Manhacks from Half-Life 2 (bad). Keep your crowbars handy. More pics below.
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Yeah, I know, it sounds a bit dry; how could a chart of microprocessor stats be awesome? Well, just look at it! It’s glorious! And huge! It’s so very complete and monolithic that I just have to stand in awe of it. There’s just so much… information! It’s organized by date, by core, by what have you, and having it visualized is a revelation. I like the color scheme, too.
There’s lots of them and they are interesting to look at; click below to see ‘em, or go to where they come from.
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This might be a little to ambitious for most of us desk jockeys, but Instructables has instructions for creating your own cement-filled lightbulb wall hook that you can create for fun and profit. Note: You do not actually leave the glass part of the bulb intact. At the end of the experiment you break the glass off and then stick the huge lag bolts into your wall. The results, needless to say, are quite impressive.
Last winter after breaking out the serious cold weather gear, I found myself fighting the coat rack next to the front door. It was, to put it bluntly, failing miserably. Tipping over, breaking off, it was a mess. I swore before the next winter I would drive some serious hooks into the wall that would handle all my heavy overcoat needs. I just haven’t seen any kickass hooks yet that I liked enough to justify making serious holes in my walls.
This is really cool. This guy wrote an app that essentially saves the signal strength at a given location and then collates the data points into a little map, giving an approximate location of the access point and the places where one finds the best average signal. This seems really practical to me; if it’s not too hard to do, IT departments around the globe might take it up and use it to plan office layouts or diagnose signal problems. I imagine there are already some tools to do this and I’ll look like a fool for drooling over this, but whatever, it’s awesome.
The program is written in Python with OpenGL and you can get the source at the site. Can you imagine this being built right into a wireless-aware phone with GPS, generating a constantly updated heatmap of wherever you are, and adding it to an online repository? [via a sharply critical Reddit]
Wow, this is really, really goddamn cool. I love how the “skeleton” created by all the photographs is visible, a ghostly meta-world based entirely on aggregate data and an insane amount of processing power. You can switch between day and night, rotate smoothly, zoom, it’s color-corrected, it looks fantastic. I’ll let the guys in the video explain just what is going on, but man do I want this on my rig.
Deep respect to Microsoft Research and UW for putting this together. Check out the higher-res version at their site. [via Reddit and I started something]
Christian Cantrell, an Adobe employee and editor of WatchReport just sent me a link to his latest project. It’s called Apprise Reader and it’s basically a feed reader with two very compelling features.
On the surface, Apprise Reader hits all the right buttons: Adobe Air, Twitter, AIM, RSS. It is, at its core, a feed reader with a dead simple interface. It accepts standard OPML files to import feeds and runs natively on Windows and OS X – Linux support is coming soon.
Oh, look at me! I’m DeepNote! I’m the best Guitar Hero player in the world! Jealous? I score perfectly in every game. Watch me beat Cult of Personality on expert mode!
I kid, I kid. DeepNote is cool. It’s a robotic whatsit that uses diodes as eyeballs and can tell what color’s coming when in Guitar Hero. Watching this video just goes to show you how long it takes your own human eyes to process something visually and then translate it into dextrous hand movements. Robots are much faster.
via NWFB
