He followed that by reintroducing us to a blog he showed in October, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, which has a lot of simple do-it-yourself projects, often involving computers and electronics. He took us to one of EMSL's latest projects, a kind of poor man's Roomba using a Swiffer sweeper and a radio-controlled model car.
From there, Warren took us over to the site through which he had found EMSL: Hack A Day. Hack A Day also showcases amusing do-it-yourself electronics projects. Warren showed us two of them: a Star Wars style light sabre with a violet laser diode from a Blu-Ray DVD player (!) and a George Foreman-type grill made from the recently-released (and expensive) Sony Playstation 3(!!).
As a follow-up to Sony Bravia quarter-million Superball commercial from the October meeting, Warren showed another Superball video. This involved two office workers (grad students?) pelting an unsuspecting collegue at his desk with thousands of Superballs from a chute hidden in a false ceiling, a stunt that earned them Gizmodo's Gold Medal Prank award for 2005. If Warren can find more videos featuring Superballs, maybe he can make this an ABACUS tradition.
Finally, Warren took us to the site for Flip4Mac, which makes a free Mac Quicktime plug-in that plays Windows Media files. It's a replacement for the late, unlamented Windows Media Player for Macintosh, which Microsoft no longer supports. Flip4Mac also sells a number of other tools for working with video files on a Mac.
iBook G4 upgrade:
|
© 2007 ABACUS |