Category: Cool Stuff

Lifting squirrels

From the xkcd blag (I’m a Blahgger, he’s a blagger – we just don’t want to fit in with those filthy bloggers, I guess) comes this fascinating look at using lasers to lift squirrels in to space.photon_squirrel.png Amazingly enough, without taking advantage of reflection, the method described uses the Doc Brown approved 1.21 gigawatts of energy to lift a squirrel. Using a sufficiently focused beam of light along with properly placed lasters, that power requirement can be cut a few orders of magnitude, down around 1 megawatt. dyson_sphere_diagram.jpgThis is a far less interesting number, but much more economically feasible. Understand I’m all for using gross amounts of power to lift squirrels in to outerspace, but I realize the country might not share my willingness to drain from the entire power grid for such a useful pursuit.

Nicely, the blag post transcends merely levitating squirrels, advancing to such necessary topics as generating lasers from the sun, tying them together via Dyson sphere manipulation to create a death ray, and sending a message to our celestial neighbors.

Why settle for interstellar communication when you can have interstellar war? And we could modulate the beam to carry a message — in this case, “FUCK YOU GUYS!”

And ultimately, isn’t that the real purpose of advancing laser studies? Inter-stellar war and Parisian-level offense directed at other galactic entities? Well, that and frikkin’ shark/laser hybrids.

[tags]xkcd, blag, lasers, 1.21 gigawatts, squirrels, frikkin’ shark, Dyson sphere, death[/tags]

On killers named Wayne

I frequently find fodder for my other, briefer blog from my regular News of the Weird emails, but rarely use the weird news on the Blahg. A recurring theme in those emails is the improbably high number of killers whose middle name is Wayne. Being a middle-name-is-Wayne kind of guy, I just like to know to whom I am being compared on the oddities scale. With that information, you can probably understand why I’d want to post a News of the Weird image of 3 guys who killed a store owner in a shooting:

which_is_wayne.jpg

{democracy:6}

Can you guess which one has the middle name of Wayne just from the picture? Read the full article to check your answer.

[tags]News of the Weird, Middle name is Wayne, Guess the Wayne[/tags]

Lasers are old, you know?

I’m not really sure when the brilliant hybrid of frikkin’ sharks and laser-beams came about, but it’s pretty clear from this 1963 article on cutting wood with a beam of light that the frikkin’ sharks didn’t yet have frikkin’ laser-beams on their frikkin’ heads – at least, not in popular culture. There was probably an underground cult-like movement with such creatures. I envision them hosting frikkin’ shark fights in frikkin’ pools in frikkin’ secret underground cabins. All before Michael Vick was even born, most likely.

mm-med_laser_cut_wood.jpgA new technique in woodworking may be on the way. The University of Michigan has developed a tool that cuts through maple and other hardwoods with bursts of light that act like the science-fiction writers’ disintegrating-ray gun. The experimental drill operates with a laser (light amplification by stimulated electron radiation) head that contains a coiled xenon flash tube and a ruby rod. It builds up intensely hot light pulses, focuses them through a lens to vaporize a hole in a block of wood instantly without leaving char. It’s not ready yet for the home workshop.

I have a theory, in fact, that the young man pictured there is the inventor of the frikkin’ shark/laser hybrid, although I haven’t worked out all the details yet.

[tags]Sharks, laser-beams, cutting wood, wood, laser, frikkin’, Modern Mechanix[/tags]

Staten Island Ninja!!!

You know, there are only 3 facts you need to know about Ninja:

  1. Ninjas are mammals.
  2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.
  3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

So when one shows up on Staten Island robbing houses, you know eventually someone is going to end up dead. It hasn’t happened yet, but someday…

[liveleak 8c3_1191087140]

Phear the Ninja, people.

[tags]Ninja, Real Ultimate Power, Staten Island, LiveLeak, Video[/tags]

World’s biggest ferris wheels

ferris-wheel-800_clip2.jpg

Honestly, sometimes I even surprise myself with the subjects that I find interesting.  Quite randomly, I recently found this very short, but very cool article on work around the world (well, at least a couple of locations) to build the world’s largest ferris wheel.  A ride that had fallen out of favor some years ago, the ferris wheel seems to be suffering, you might say, a resurgence in interest since the London Eye opened a few years ago.

The larger these monstrous rides become, the greater their capacity and potential profit—and the more seriously builders take them. To start, they don’t call them Ferris wheels. “We categorize them as ‘observational wheels’ because of the capsules,” says Alexander Pieper, spokesman for the Great Wheel Corporation, which developed the Singapore, Dubai and Beijing wheels.

My bad.  The world’s largest observational wheel.  It’s hardly an article, being no more than sidebar length for any magazine publication, but I found the accompanying illustration (captured in part above) to be chock full of useless cool knowledge. For instance, the original ferris wheel, the Eagle 16 noted in the illustration, made a revolution in a mere 12 seconds.  Now, it’s around half an hour start to finish on the giants.  To borrow a phrase from Keanu Reeves – Whoa.

[tags]Ferris Wheel, Observational wheels, Singapore Flyer, London Eye, Beijing Great Wheel, Extreme Engineering[/tags]

KDE for Windows

I hadn’t even heard of this before, but for all you Linux-lovers out there, work is being done to get KDE running on Microsoft Windows. If I get a bit of time to work on this, I’m going to try it on one of my systems and see how it goes. I suspect it will make it easier for me to get the family ported to Linux based systems at home.

So how did I learn about this? Why would I care? Well, MrCopilot has a good, moderate length write-up on his experience with installing and using KDE for Windows. This is a port that has been in-process for quite a while, because, let’s face it, porting a full development library set like KDE and supporting libs is a big undertaking. But after showing a few screens of the install, he gets right to the meat of the experience. What works?

Quite a lot actually. See below for Screenshots of included apps that work. Almost all the apps shipped “work”. Two are all but useless due to bugs. The rest seem to function perfectly as long as you don’t need to refer to Help. Fortunately most apps have an online help while this bug gets ironed out.

And he shows a lot of what does work, what standard KDE tools and apps are included, and so on. But first, he has to answer the opposing question – what doesn’t work?

Sound, at least on my setup there was no sound, any application that tried to make a peep instead produced this error message. Most Apps let you disable sound.

. . .

Konqueror – KDE’s Swiss Army Knife, Web Browser, File Manager, FTP Client, Embedded File Viewer, Etc … Unfortunately on my Windows box it is reduced to a Web Browser (without Flash support) and a Menu Explorer (without being able to launch anything.)

And a few other things that would probably be minor to most folks.  I always like the concept of changing my Windows interface, but the fact that it doesn’t follow me to other machines really hinders my enjoyment of that idea.  This is why I don’t use Stardock’s GUI re-skinner or desktop customizer tools, as much as I like the company, the concept, and the cost.   Of course, that means there’s a good chance I would try this and not stick with it.  But again, the concept is appealing, and the more universal desktop experience this could enable at home when I move between Windows and Linux is very appealing to me.

And I’m hopeful that developments like this will push content creators (read “developers”) to put out more portable, cross-platform software.  Once the support libraries are more globally available, it should make it easier for more globally portable software, right?  I mean, I know it’s not a case of “Well, the libraries are there, so *POOF* our software now works on 12 different operating systems.”  But as middleware and support libraries become more portable, I would think that applications would naturally follow to become multi-platform entities.  So I will be watching KDE for Windows as it is worked on to see if this does anything to improve computing for the masses.  I’m hopeful, but I realize what an uphill battle that change will be.

What dancing is all about

This is all the reason I need to suggest more people buy poles to put up in their garage.  Probably NSFW.

Her comments from the YouTube page:

sorry i’m tired of answering the same questions over n over.
took me 3 months to get to this level of dancing 6-8 hours a day for 3 months. i do not do this amout of hours now though.
i do not have any dance background, no ballet, gymnastics ect
song: fergalisous – fergie
i am using a 50mm chrome x-pole from xpole.co.uk
and for those who wanna leave nasty comments… dont bother cause i now aprove them, you gain nothing

Seems more pervs on the intarw3bbs like me have seen the video and tried to leave naughty comments. Shame on you pervs. Be more like me and look but don’t let them know you are looking.

[tags]Pole, Pole dancing, Fergie, Fergaliscous, Mmmmm, Pervs, YouTube, video[/tags]

DIY Signboard

Web server outages suck. Let’s celebrate the Blahg’s return with a DIY LED project – signboard 2. And no, I don’t know what happened to signboard 1 – maybe if you look, you can find it and report back?

signboard.jpgOn this page, I will introduce the electronic signboard with PIC16F84A.

112 LEDs are used for message display and 50 LEDs are used for around.

Latch registers by CPLD are used for the display of the LEDs.

Interesting little project there. I could see spending some time building my own programmable LED board. (via MAKEzine)

[tags]Signboard, DIY, LED, MAKEzine[/tags]

Wii-remote head-mounted virtual-room tracking

This is simply awesomesauce in a little controller.  While catching up on my Penny-Arcade reading for the day (and by the way, might I recommend the PennyPacker extension to you if you are a Mozilla user), I caught this video of a project to make a head-mounted device to give a user the visual sensation of a truly three-dimensional image on a monitor.

The first minute or so of the video might seem a bit boring, but it’s a setup for a really neat demonstration of the effect of real spatial movement effecting the display.  I tried snagging some images from the video to show the effect, but it’s the motion and not the image that makes the effect so cool.  In motion, parts of the image do appear to stand several feet out from the screen, and moving forward will put you behind those parts of the view so you don’t see them any more.

[tags]Penny Arcade, Head mounted display, 3D enabling technology, Wii, Nintendo, Sensor bar[/tags]