Not Your Average Geeks
Tech
One step closer.
Aug 30th
Last night I successfully fired a strobe with a microswitch hooked up to my Arduino. I’m aware that at this point, the setup is a needlessly complicated and expensive version of just pushing the “test” button on the back of the flash, but hey, progress is progress! Now all I need to do is replace the microswitch with a break-beam or sound trigger, build a variable delay into the program, and viola, I should be up and running! Hit the jump for a photo of the jury rigged mess of wires. More >
Making tracks with MyTracks
Aug 27th
Me with part of the B-36's main gear
One of the neatest little apps I’ve been using on my Android phone (HTC Hero and now the EVO 4G) is MyTracks, which was developed by Google employees following Google’s 20% time philosiphy. At it’s most basic level, MyTracks is a GPS data logging app. It interfaces tightly with Google Maps, and lets you upload and view your tracks to My Maps on Google Maps.
The map screen
I’ve used MyTracks a couple times, mostly to track my position on hikes or various exploring adventures. It worked great to track Rich and my progress when we canoed the St. Croix river, and I used it a couple weeks ago to record my hike up to the spot where an Air Force B-36 bomber crashed near El Paso, TX in 1953. This hike was a great test of the app since it involved pretty extreme elevation change (about 1300 feet), a number of waypoints that I wanted to record, and since I was climbing a mountain in the desert, I had a clean line of sight to the GPS satellites the entire trip. More >
When these guys DIY, they don’t mess around.
Aug 26th
I am big into the DIY spirit. I love tinkering, building things myself, and figuring out how things work. For instance, I was pretty proud a couple months ago when I replaced one of the brake calipers and drive shafts on my Subaru Outback a couple of months ago. Then I read about the crazy Danes over at Copenhagen Suborbitals.
This is DIYx10^26. Copenhagen Suborbitals describe themselves as a “non-profit suborbital space endevaour, with a mission to put a man in space sometime in 2012-2013. That sounds pretty out-of-this-world, but it gets better. The mission will be launched from a self-built, floating, launch platform, towed into place by the guys at Copenhagen Suborbitals OWN SUBMARINE. This is some serious James Bond supervillian stuff!
In less than four days they will be launching the HEAT1X/Tycho Brahe mission, to test out an almost full-scale (640mm diameter) rocket with an attached crew module, complete with a dummy pilot. The launch will take place southeast of Sweden, and as we speak the catamaran launch platform is hooked up to the submarine Nautilus for towing. More >
Stream your music library anywhere with Subsonic
Jul 22nd
I’ve stopped carrying my old 80gb iPod classic ever since I got my new phone (HTC Hero on Sprint). Between Pandora, Slacker Radio, podcasts on Google Listen, and the 8gb MicroSD I installed, I was never really hurting for music, so carrying that extra gadget and it’s associated USB cable just seemed like a waste.
Things were great like this, but every so often I’d have a craving for a particular song. I was also annoyed by the roughly 50gb of hard drive space my music took up on my laptop’s hard drive. I could always just copy it all to my desktop’s larger drives, but I wanted to have my music library available while I was on the road, so I just tolerated it. That was until I learned about Subsonic…
Skynet is apparently just a decade and a half behind schedule.
Jul 12th
Today BAE Systems rolled out Taranis, the world’s most advanced stealth UAV. Designed at the request of the UK Ministry of Defence, it is just another piece in the puzzle that will eventually wipe out humanity in the cleansing glow of nuclear fire. Seriously. Look at this thing!
BAE Systems Taranis
More after the jump!
Wait, a solar airplane can fly at night? (also flying cars!)
Jul 11th
The Solar Impulse just completed a 26hr, nonstop, solar-powered, non-refueled flight on July 8th over Switzerland. This was the first ever overnight flight by a solar aircraft.
