Category: Cool Stuff

What did George Washington look like?

A brief article about some interesting work — reconstructing George Washington’s looks at several times throughout his life. Includes a fascinating video. (via Blue’s News)

“The most difficult part of the challenge in a way was morphing backwards when there are no images of the 19-year-old,” said recreation team member, Ivan Schwartz. “Our 19-year-old mystery man — the man who would become leader of the country.”

The team recreated Washington at age 57 when he was president; at age 45 when he commanded troops in the Revolutionary War and as a teenage surveyor.

[tags]George Washington, President[/tags]

Over the air HD reception

MAKEzine had a similar article in the latest issue, but here’s a write-up at HDBeat on how to get over the air High Definition signals on your TV.  I suspect doing this for your PC would be similarly manageable. (via MAKEzine blog)

Some of the best picture quality possible can be obtained with an antenna, at least until High Definition DVDs are released. It’s FREE, it’s recordable on some computers like Windows Media Center Edition and it works sometimes when cable and Satellite doesn’t.

[tags]HDTV, OTA HD, Hi Def[/tags]

Sound following robot

Wow, this is really cool. A LEGO Mindstorms robot with the capacity to follow sound. (via MAKEzine)

Paul-Nicolas created this nice robot that is capable of following the sound of a radio or a music instrument or a human voice. It follows the ideas developed on this site concerning the interaural time detection (ITD) (binaural sensor and high speed sampling).

[tags]LEGO Mindsprings, Robot[/tags]

Guide: Converting physical system to virtual system

I recently reloaded my system from scratch. I wish I had thought to do this. I did it the old-fashioned, hard way of installing on a fresh hard drive and restoring things from my old hard drive. This way seems much smarter. (from MAKEzine).

recently got a new replacement laptop for work. I had a lot of stuff on the old laptop after 2+ years of use and so I didn’t want to have to rush myself in remembering everything in one or two passes before formatting it to send back to the office. There are always things I forget when I’m mostly focused on moving data files over: files in “hidden” places like IM logs and non-file based data such as product keys, configuration info, settings for programs and other stuff. So I decided the best thing to do was make it into a VM and take my time about reinstalling and configuring the new laptop to match.

[tags]Virtual machine, backup[/tags]

Another HTPC article

I put up a different, but similar article recently.  Here’s a post at Engadget that’s something of a guide on building your own home theatre PC (HTPC) for under $1,000.

We’ve seen a lot of home theater PCs lately and being in need of a new workstation, we decide to build one of our own. We started planning by looking around to see what others had done.

[tags]HTPC, Engadget[/tags]

Potential PDF replacement?

In another of the many “I’m not sure how I stumbled across this” sites I stumble across, I’ve been reading about Unipage tonight.

What is Unipage?

Unipage is a way to store a complete web page as just one file.

All of the page’s images, formatting, and even functionality are kept together instead of as separate files.

To create a Unipage from any web page or page on your computer, you need the Unipage Unifier program.

[tags]PDF replacement, Unipage[/tags]

Skier safety

Technology keeps making athletes better able to compete. (via DQ)

The resulting material exhibits a material property called “strain rate sensitivity”. Under normal conditions the molecules within the material are weakly bound and can move past each with ease, making the material flexible. But the shock of sudden deformation causes the chemical bonds to strengthen and the moving molecules to lock, turning the material into a more solid, protective shield.

[tags]Olympics, Skiing, Cool Tech[/tags]