some junk we like
Archive for the ‘cool’ Category.
Ow, my hands… I’ve been getting a lot of time in multitasking treadmill and playstation…. to a fault, tonight. I played r-type delta for over an hour while on the treadmill. That was a great walk, but, omg, my hands are killing me. How can a game be so hard and insane, and so much fun to play?
My dad is a master deal finder. Over the thanksgiving holiday, I traded him a broadband router for this super nice pro camera tripod that he located for $6.95 at his local Salvation Army store. The only thing it was missing was any way to mount a camera.. a problem I’m sure I can rectify with an inexpensive solution from a camera store, or an even less expensive solution from my garage. 
While my camera’s in the shop, I figured I can use it for a really great iSight tripod.
So, here I present a solution for a pro-tripod mounted iSight bracket. Even simpler than the last version, this only has 3 pieces. The mounting plate is cut from some scrap hardboard, and has two angle bevels sloping inward like this: /___\ Add to this, a tall piece of hard board of the same width as the mounting plate, and a small piece of hardwood or plywood … whatever, I mean.. this is so basic. The goal here isn’t to match the angles of the tripod’s mounting angles so much as it is to just get the length of the mounting plate such that the cam lever will secure it in place.
Glue it up, and add a couple of counter-sunk short screws for stability (offset from each other so as not to crash into each other in your backer block of wood), and voila, iSight tripod mount v.3… the pro-edition.
Technorati Tags: diy, make, tripod, tools
Well, as you may know I like to shoot a timelapse video now and then… I’ve been using an earlier version of this iSight tripod mount for about a year, so today I thought I’d share the new and improved version:
It consists of a couple of pieces of hardwood braced at a 90 degree angle… I have one piece of wood with two holes in it (the mounting plate), and then a piece of wood that is 90 degrees to the mounting plate for the iSight bracket to grab on to, and then two triangles (with the corners cut off)…
On the mounting plate, I drilled a hole slightly smaller than the mounting screw on the tripod. The idea was to make the hole small enough for the screw to bite into, and then force it into cutting the mating grooves into the wood. The second hole is for the little pop up doodad to help with alignment. If your tripod doesn’t have this, it probably isn’t making sense, and it’s probably nothing to worry about anyway. Just screw the mounting plate down nice and tight, and you’ll be in good shape.
I got to thinking that if you turn the iSight bracket around the other way, that mould make it easier to adjust the camera if you were recording something like woodworking, or sewing, or what-have-you. I think I’ll probably end up leaving it like this.
Technorati Tags: apple, diy, isight, make, photography, tools, tripod, woodworking
I found a place for AJAX at work! It’s so rad! :D It’s not in a customer-facing application, but where I was able to use it, it’s increased the speed of the app by about 300% or so. I’d love to show you! but, I probably shouldn’t. You can ask me about it in general terms, though!
The application feels more like a desktop app now.. and a lot less like a web app. This is very exciting stuff, I just needed to find a place for it. Now I can see lots of other places for it.
Technorati Tags: ajax
I’ve made a leap back into helping develop the back end of the
themes.Wordpress.net theme viewer after a brief hiatus. Things are moving along so nicely. Alphaoide and Shadow have been doing some absolutely fantastic work, and I’m extremely pleased with how cool this project is. There’s a page set up to show you the feature/bug list and the changelog.
What a hoot, Rudy Rucker and Bruce freakin‘ Sterling in my recently old stomping grounds. I’ve purchased luggage from that store in the back ground!
We walked down to Sharper Image on Santa Cruz Ave. in Los Gatos and looked at some of the robots for sale. Bruce is into design these days, he's been a guest professor at Art Center in Pasadena, and has a book on Ubiquitous Computatoin coming out from MIT Press. This morning when I woke up he was gone, off to get some righteous bucks from the Global Business Network in SF. You gotta get up pretty dang early in the morning to keep up with my man Bruce!
This is very cool. You can change the site the BBEdit uses to “find in reference”, as helpfully noted by Peter Rukavina… thank you Peter!
If you use TextWrangler BBEdit to edit PHP files, you may find the following shell command useful (pointer from here):
defaults write com.barebones.bbeditServices:ADCReferenceSearchTemplate "http://www.php.net/%@"This will set the TextWrangler “Find in Reference” contextual menu item to look up the selected text on the PHP website (rather than on the Apple Developer Connection site, which is the default).
Technorati Tags: php, programming, bbedit, Mac
Day 2, I’m loving this machine! check out the video I did today of the first run of embroidery with a stabilizer.
I ran this cool jacket my brother in law Justin gave me as a gift through the machine… it had this big blank white outline box on the front.. screaming out for a slogan… so I put one in:
Ahhhhh, this is way cool!!
Technorati Tags: brother se270, diy, embroidery, wtf
Our Brother SE-270D sewing/embroidery machine arrived yesterday, woot!
Here’s what was in the box, woot indeed!
Hey, look, it even embroiders into the wrong fabric, without stabilizer! Crapily! AMAZING!!
This is the backside of the cloth in the previous photo. Yuck.
Lots to like in this machine!! I’ll take some video and post it later tonight if I get a chance.
FREE LAND FOR KATRINA RELIEF?:
A recreation of New Orleans’ French quarter, a live music telethon with a 100+ live audience, a Mardi Gras march with avatars made up as floats– the possibilities are infinite. Springboarding off the gratifying success of so many SL-based Katrina relief efforts (scroll down this blog to see just a sampling) Linden Lab has offered to loan out a multi-simulator plot of 32 to 64 acres for benefits and events to help the hurricane’s many victims. If enough Residents express interest, this land will for a time be opened wide to the wildest events that can be conceived on such a vast space.
Details here– express interest in getting involved (in any capacity) here.
This is an excellent idea. charge a reasonable price for admission to a new orleans recreation sim, and have those proceeds go to the red cross. Wicked cool.
Technorati Tags: katrina, second life
impossibly small, indeed. Anyone want to buy a slightly dinged 3G iPod? 
um, yeah. Can you please make a lanyard/headphone adapter for my shuffle now? That’s wicked cool.
Not only does he write the songs that make the whole world sing…:
…Barry Manilow will match your Hurricane Katrina donation $2 for every $1 you donate.
Awesome! I was waiting to see if my work was going to offer contribution matching… and waiting, and waiting… but this is way better. Thanks for pointint that out, Joanna!
Technorati Tags: donate, katrina, red cross
