Bag of Beans

This is tragic news for the Kim Family. If you haven’t been following the story, James, a senior editor at CNet, and his family were reported missing when both James and his wife, Kati, failed to show up for work last week. They were returning from a Thanksgiving road trip, but had gotten lost along the way. On Monday, Kati and their two daughters were rescued, but James had not been found since he had gone off to search for help. Kati kept herself and her daughters alive by burning their car’s tires for warmth and nursing the girls. Today, rescue crews located James, but were too late to save him.

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• More here
• Website set up by friends and family

Make Magazine has posted a great list of open source hardware and software for Makers.

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy - but a lot of time you actually don’t own it, you can’t improve upon it, you can’t share it or make it better, you certainly can’t post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we’ve put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source. Some are kits, some are open software projects that you’ll need to build hardware for before gifting, and some are just support for the projects/groups that do open source. Included in this guide are things you can get from the MAKE store too (we try and have as many open source goods as possible).

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Leah Culver funded the purchase of a new Macbook Pro by selling ad space on the cover for $150 per square inch. The ads were then laser etched at her workplace.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)
• Cool video of the laser etching process
• Backstory

Related:

• How to make $1M in 4 months

A 17-year-old amateur scientist has built his own Fusor.

In the basement of his parents’ Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren’t privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build — a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.

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In fact, on www.fusor.net, the Stoney Creek senior is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion. So, how does he do it?

Pointing to the steel chamber where all the magic happens, Thiago said on Friday that this piece of the puzzle serves as a vacuum. The air is sucked out and into a filter.

Then, deuterium gas — a form of hydrogen — is injected into the vacuum. About 40,000 volts of electricity are charged into the chamber from a piece of equipment taken from an old mammogram machine. As the machine runs, the atoms in the chamber are attracted to the center and soon — ta da — nuclear fusion.

• Link (via Slashdot)
• The Radioactive Boy Scout is a gripping account of another teen who almost succeeded in building a much more dangerous breeder reactor without anyone’s knowledge.

This is a fantastic homemade computer project. Look at the schematic for this thing. Yikes!

This is an actual computer, built completely from scratch. I began the project in the spring of 2006, while I was taking a course on microcomputers. My Z80 system will remain a work in progress as long as I can think of new things to add to it.

The current specs are:

2MHz 8 bit Zilog Z80 processor
56 KB static RAM (7 x 8k x 8 )
8 KB EEPROM
1 Mb Flash Memory “hard drive”
Interrupt controller with 8 interrupt levels
20 character x 2 line backlit LCD with contrast control
RS232 serial port
2 programmable timers
Programmable beeper
8X DIP switch and 8X LED’s for general purpose I/O
Strobe button for clocked input from the DIP switches
Parallel port programming interface with parity

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I do all the programming on my PC, using Z80 assembly. I wrote a simple drag and drop utility in C++ that uploads the assembled code into the microcomputer’s memory.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Here’s an interesting write up for a project to build a Cintiq-like interactive pen tablet.

This is hybrid screen/graphics tablet which makes me drool. The price however makes me weep, £2000ish for the 20” version. They also do a thing called the PL at 17” for a more reasonable £500ish. Occasionally they appear on the site in their bargain basement ex-demo section. Still hard for me to justify though.

Then I had one of those “spang” moments. None of the tech involved is new and all is readily available second hand, it’s just a matter of putting it together. My Wacom at work will happily operate with the stylus off the surface, after that it’s just an LCD screen, right? Anyhow where’s the fun in just buying something?

The finished product:

• Link (via hack a day)

Another list of tech innovations of the past year.

The world is better in 100 different ways this year. On these pages you’ll find a collection of the year’s most stunning innovations. The future is now–and it looks good.

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This is a fascinating though useless diversion on how to perform basic computations using dominoes.

My friend Cory and I were sitting around one day, as we often do, contemplating the mysteries of the universe, when one of us brought up the possibility of building digital logic using only dominoes. We did a web search, figuring that someone must have done something like that before, but guess what? Nary a page was to be found. Cory immediately made a trip the local toy store and bought a package of faux ivory dominoes, and we began work.

Here’s a single-bit adder:

• Link (via reddit)

Time’s list of their favorite inventions of the year.

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IEEE Spectrum has written a nice article on Blake Ross, one of the co-founders of the Firefox project, and on what he is working on next.

But there were others in the cubicle trenches who hadn’t conceded the browser war to Microsoft. Late one night in the summer of 2002, at a nearby Denny’s restaurant, Ross fell into an impassioned discussion with Dave Hyatt, a senior engineer at Netscape who shared his vision for a leaner but more flexible browser for the masses. Rather than starting from scratch, the two took the Mozilla browser, which they thought was bloated with super­fluous features such as chat rooms and an e-mail client, and began stripping it to the bare essentials. They felt they were raising the Netscape browser from the ashes and so named their stripped-down version Phoenix. But the rebel project became anathema to some Mozilla diehards. “I don’t see the need for Phoenix,” posted one detractor at the time. Another was more succinct: “Phoenix sucks,” he blogged.

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Wired has posted an article that explains why lithium-ion batteries explode, and what might replace them in the future.

But such technical excuses sidestep the fact that flammability and heat intolerance are long-standing problems that have plagued Li-ion batteries since they were invented almost 30 years ago. And as devices have gotten smaller in size but richer in features, things have only worsened. Forced to produce more energy in less space, Li-ions die faster (as early iPod owners found when their batteries wore out long before their players did), and their propensity for thermal runaway greatly increases.

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This is a rather interesting post on the current state of the software industry, and it has sparked a lively discussion in the comments section.

These things are fairly typical of the modern relationship with computers. I’ve gotten so used to it that I didn’t really think about how odd this is until this morning, when I read somebody on LiveJournal talking about a video game crash, saying “I should know better than to purchase a game before the first patch is out…” Then it hit me: Has there ever been a bigger con job pulled on consumers than the modern software industry?

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Engadget has put up part 1 of a how-to for building an HD projector.

Been eyeballing those sweet new high definition projectors? So have we. We’re not going to feel guilty for it either, we know what we like. But if your wallet is a little light from your last Engadget inspired shopping session you might dig our how-to latest project. In Today’s how-to, we’ll start taking a look at building your own HD projector… from an LCD Monitor. This isn’t one to be missed.

Building your own projector isn’t a new idea. Disassemble a desktop LCD display, put a really, really bright light behind it and add some optics and voila! you’ve got a projector. The real question: is it worth it? Since you might be a little leery of dropping several hundred dollars on parts and gutting a nice display because people you don’t know on an online forum said so, we’re going to do it for you.

• Link (via hack a day)

An article on how some early, extremely high-speed photographs were taken.

During the early days of atomic bomb experiments in the 1940s, nuclear weapons scientists had some difficulty studying the growth of nuclear fireballs in test detonations. These fireballs expanded so rapidly that even the best cameras of that time were unable to capture anything more than a blurry, over-exposed frame for the first several seconds of the explosion.

Before long a professor of electrical engineering from MIT named Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton invented the rapatronic camera, a device capable of capturing images from the fleeting instant directly following a nuclear explosion. These single-use cameras were able to snap a photo one ten-millionth of a second after detonation from about seven miles away, with an exposure time of as little as ten nanoseconds. At that instant, a typical fireball had already reached about 100 feet in diameter, with temperatures three times hotter than the surface of the sun.

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This is an extremely cool java applet that graphically demonstrates how a file is shared over Bittorrent. Just add some seeds and peers and watch the packets fly!

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This site has a large collection of articles on how various things are manufactured.

How Products Are Made explains and details the manufacturing process of a wide variety of products, from daily household items to complicated electronic equipment and heavy machinery. The site provides step by step descriptions of the assembly and the manufacturing process (complemented with illustrations and diagrams) Each product also has related information such as the background, how the item works, who invented the product, raw materials that were used, product applications, by-products that are generated, possible future developments, quality control procedures, etc.

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This site has a really nice Flash implementation of the German Enigma cipher machine. It does a great job of illustrating conceptually how the internal mechanism worked.

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Inventgeek has a fascinating project that uses a webcam and a small radiation source from common household fire alarms to visualize radioactive decay. This could have applications as a source of entropy for a true random number generator.

I started this project with more of an idea of creating a system that would visualize Cherenkov radiation via webcam utilizing a Gamma radiation source and heavy water in some heavy lead shielding to produce the tell tale bursts of blue light. Perhaps hook it up to the LCD window kit system we did and display it on the windowed screen. When I decided to ramp up the project and also was experimenting with other types and sources of radiation for the project I stumbled across a myriad of new ideas for possible systems with some far reaching and profound results. While this write-up is just discussing in detail the implementation of this apparatus for ones personal amusement via screensaver, there are other far reaching possibilities for this system I will discuss later in the article.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Wired has some great photos of buildings lit with LEDs at night.

Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, are reinventing the look and feel of skylines, bridges, facades and other architectural surfaces around the globe. The light bulb is being unscrewed by energy-efficient LEDs that are both environmentally friendly and cost-effective. The $10.2 billion industry is growing to provide new design options for architects and planners.

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This page has a detailed description of the PC and Windows boot processes, beginning with the stabilization of the power supply, through to user logon.

• Link (via Digg)