Modeled after falling maple seeds, this tiny autonomous monocopter has one asymmetric wing and rotates along it’s center of mass to produce lift. On-board camera at about 5:40 into the video, Hack A Day suggested using the microcontroller to take a snapshop at the same position of rotation to make one stable video.
Ares I-X Launch Video
NASA‘s launch of the Ares I-X, the experimental prototype of the new launch vehicle. Pay special attention to around 0:45 into the video and look at the USS (Upper Stage Simulator) – where you can see the effects of the Prandtl-Glauert Singularty, where the sudden massive drop in pressure in the cone of the sonic wave causes water to condense out of the air into a visible vapor cone! Here’s to returning to the moon!
1Mbit BroadBand Internet Access a Legal Right in Finland
Signs of a culture moving forward, or just frivolous waste of government money? Finland has announced that by next July, 1mbit broandband internet access, which is roughly 20 times quicker than dial up (assuming a generous 50kbps assumption for dial-up) is now a legal human right. While it’s certainly a step towards the future, Finland still plans to blast us away by promising 100mbit internet connections by 2015. With this announcement, Finland joins the ranks of Estonia, France, and Greece where internet access is considered a human right.
[Source: cnet news]
8th ring discovered around Saturn
Right here, thanks to Telegraph.co.uk
8th ring discovered around Saturn. Well crap, why didn’t see see this sooner? It turns out that the ring is only visible in the thermal band, not the visible spectrum that we’ve been staring at it for so long with. When you point Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope (which observes in infrared) at it, you get the grand view of the rings, which start at 3.7 million miles out from Saturn and extend an additional 7.4 million miles. Composed of simply space dust, it was observed at a chilly -316F, or about 80 Kelvin.
Thanks to @waybis for pointing this out!
Computer “Chronos” Bites the Dust
So long “Chronos”, it’s been one hell of a five year (going on it’s sixth) ride. All the abuse you took from me, being more or less on 24×7, overclocked from 3.2GHz to 4Ghz, watercooled, and on it’s 4th motherboard and second CPU.
This computer has carried me through countless nights of Starcraft and Counter-Strike, then Counter-Strike Source. This computer has brought me to level 60 in WoW, then level 70. This computer has made countless videos, websites and edited countless pictures. This computer has taken me through BattleField 1942, Battlefield 2, then through EverQuest II, Eve Online, Team Fortress 2, and Left4Dead.
You have helped me produce endless amounts of term papers, exhausting hours of research, Catia, Rhino3D, MatLab and Maple. I have received job offers from you, found friends with you, and resurrected you from the dead more times than I can remember.
Now you don’t remember your BIOS settings, nor do you stay working for more than a few minutes at a time without the BSOD or eerie crackling and beeping noises. I miss you already 🙁
Houston.
Things I like about Houston:
- Elevated driveways to help prevent local flooding
- Road labels and signs painted on the road itself
- EZ-TAG also integrates a real-time traffic monitoring system
- Every day is bright and sunny
Things I don’t like about Houston:
- When it rains, it rains
- Elevated driveways are like small mountains to my car
- Traffic. 🙁
- Traffic. No, really, it’s terrible
The Essence of Eve Online
ERAU Nukes My E-Mail Account, Says “Too Bad”
4 years, over 100 grand, and endless repetition “you must use your e-mail account”, then after graduating and 6 months later, they delete it. I was too busy in the midst of relocating my life halfway across the country, never mind accepting a new job the education helped to provide, and now my account was nuked.
I called up their tech support line, hoping to get it reactivated for just a week or two, so I can move services that were associated with that account over to a new email account, but it’s a no-can-do. They’ve killed it for good and were unwilling to re-activate it. I even offered to pay, since working at the school I also know that the services their email servers provide aren’t free. Come on guys, I just need it turned on for a week.
Honestly I was hoping they would treat their alumni better, but they still don’t mind calling every now and then to ask for money. To make it worse, I can’t sign up on their alumni website either.
What a bunch of jerks. FYI any recent graduates, your account expires in 180 days.
Window Tint Done
I had my window tinting done by “The Beav” over at American Auto Tint. After watching him work, let me say this – the man knows what he is doing. It is like watching the master of an art practicing his form. In under 2 hours he managed to get all 5 rear windows tinted, and we settled down to let the adhesive soak in and started talking about some local car clubs.
When we came back out to see how the tint was adhering to the glass, he discovered that the lower left corner of the rear windshield tint somehow got a hair stuck in it. There is a pretty good sized bubble jammed between the tint and the glass because the hair is lifting the tint. Poop.
Simple right? Pull it off and re-do it? Here’s the problem. I needed to get to work, and the Beav needed to get on his vacation that he planned a long time ago. Eventually we agreed to meet again at a later date to remove and re-do the rear tint, which was fine with me. I would drop off the car, and he would work his magic to get everything fixed and squared away.
However, you can really only see it if you get up close to the car, so I guess for the time being I can deal with it – although I caught myself looking in the rear view mirror a lot, looking for that little spot of imperfection.
For those intestested, I went with maximum legal tint provided by Llumar for Texas all around in an even coat for the 4 door windows – this came out to be 35%. The rear windshield was done in 15%. In case you were wondering, no the dark rear tint does not make it any more difficult to back the car up at night. You need to pay attention more, but it’s not like it’s blacked out as you would think.
Overall, it was well worth the $200 for “The Beav” to get the job done, and get it done right. No imperfections other than the aforementioned hair on the rear tint, which will be fixed in about a week’s time, and also comes with a full lifetime warranty from Llumar.
On the way to work I kept thinking “why didn’t I get this done sooner, my hands don’t feel like they’re on the BBQ grill when out in the Texas sun”.
Enough babbling – on to the pictures!
FaceBook – Set Your Username!
If you haven’t already, head on over to FaceBook and set your username, so you can get (ugh) MySpace style pages – for example my FaceBook page is now http://www.thefacebook.com/andrewpeng
Also, apparently since I am old school, I keep logging in to http://erau.thefacebook.com.
Yep.