Build your own lightbulb

DIY light bulb

Building your own lightbulb this way is not economically feasible (the author estimates $50 to do one bulb), but it’s just so dang cool.  I may seriously have to try this out myself and then do it with my kids.  I think they have enough of my geek genes to appreciate the cool geekiness of this project.  And I’ve learned about how lightbulbs work just reading about how to build one.

It’s a whole lot easier to just displace the air with an inert gas that’s at the same pressure as the surrounding air, which is how most modern bulbs work. Common household lightbulbs use a mixture of argon and nitrogen. Fancy krypton flashlights and xenon headlamps use those eponymous heavier noble gases to allow the filament to burn longer and hotter.

So you don’t even need a good vacuum pump – just a reliable way to get inert gas into the bulb.  The article even covers that (he used helium).

[tags]Light, DIY[/tags]

Bird Flu Jumps to Cat in Germany

Well, this can’t be good news. I haven’t kept careful track of the bird flu lately, but I suppose jumping species is never considered a positive thing.

BERLIN (AP)—The deadly strain of bird flu was confirmed Tuesday in a cat in northern Germany, the first time the virus has been identified in a mammal in the 25 nations of the European Union.

[tags]Bird flu[/tags]

Black hole flight simulator

This is so unrelated to anything of interest to most people, I’m not sure I should even post it.  But hey, this is my bandwidth, and I get to put what I want.  So, up goes the story of the black hole flight simulator (New York times web site – registration required).

The “Black Hole Flight Simulator” was created by Andrew Hamilton, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado, for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The 23-minute show contains segments that required 90 hours of supercomputer calculation for each on-screen second. You can see the trailer here (and look out for the guy in the canoe).

Wow!  A 23 minute show that required 90 hours of computation for each second displayed?  Let’s see, that’s 23 minutes times 60 second per minute times 90 hours per second showed.  Work that out, and you get something like, ummmm, a whole buncha-lotta-wowza time required to build that (actually, I think it comes to about 16.5 years of computing time required to build the video).

I’m going to have to watch that video when I get some time to sit and watch it all.  Sounds fascinating.  Now, when will they make a game out of this?

[tags]Black hole, Flight simulator, event horizon[/tags]

If I were king II

People who listen to their radios so loud that you can’t hear your own radio when you are next to them at a traffic light would have their radio removed from the car.  If they want to get a new one, that’s up to them.  But another offense will result in another radio removed.

[tags]If I were king[/tags]

Repair your laptop display on your own

I’ve never needed to do this to a laptop, but I’ve done it to a cell phone.  The process is pretty much the same, you’re just working with more expensive parts.   🙂

The worst thing that can happen to a portable computer owner – aside from having his wife or girlfriend leave him or his hard disk go up in smoke – is irreparable damage to its built-in, but relatively sensitive liquid crystal (LCD) display. (No, I’m not putting women on the same pedestal as hard disks, what are you thinking?) This might happen because of an entirely innocuous-seeming mishap, such as leaving a pencil lying on the notebook’s keyboard and failing to remove it before closing the clamshell. A firm slap on the top deck to force the unit closed and presto you’ve got a serious problem with your LCD! Another common misadventure involves cracking the screen when you or a colleague trip over a portable’s power or network cables, hurling the computer to the floor with a sickening crunch. Ouch!

[tags]LCD, laptop, DIY repair[/tags]

Dead or Alive – the movie

Oh please, please, please say it ain’t so!  I don’t think movies based on games are inherently bad – I just assume the directors, writers, actors, producers, distributors, and/or others are incapable of making them good.  I suspect a large part of it is that the people responsible for spewing forth this bile think gamers are too stupid to know when they are getting something bad.  Sadly, they seem to be fairly accurate in their beliefs to date.

Dead or Alive movie still

[tags]Dead or Alive, game movie[/tags]

New game patch site

I’ll be splitting my time between this site and launching another site of interest to me – Gamepatches.info.  Posts here may slow for a while as I get in to the swing of keeping the patch information site up to date.  I’m already finding that site to be more work intensive than I envisioned, so I’ll be working to balance the number of patches and patch details I provide versus the number of available patches each day.  Feel free to leave feedback on either site as to how you think either site is doing and what I can do to improve what I provide.  Please visit Gamepatches and provide let me know how I’m doing.

[tags]Game Patches, New site[/tags]