Hackaday Links: December 21, 2014

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Most of the incredible flight simulator enthusiasts with 737 cockpits in their garage are from the US. What happens when they’re from Slovenia? They built an A320 cockpit. The majority of the build comes from an old Cyprus Airways aircraft, with most of the work being wiring up the switches, lights, and figuring out how to display the simulated world out of the cockpit.

Google Cardboard is the $4 answer to the Oculus Rift – a cardboard box and smartphone you strap to your head. [Frooxius] missed being able to interact with objects in these 3D virtual worlds, so he came up with this thing. He adapted a symbol tracking library for AR, and is now able to hold an object in his hands while looking at a virtual object in 3D.

Heat your house with candles! Yes, it’s the latest Indiegogo campaign that can be debunked with 7th grade math. This “igloo for candles” will heat a room up by 2 or 3 degrees, or a little bit less than a person with an average metabolism will.

Last week, we saw a post that gave the Samsung NX300 the ability to lock the pictures taken by the camera with public key cryptography. [g3gg0] wrote in to tell us he did the same thing with a Canon EOS camera.

The guys at Flite Test put up a video that should be handy for RC enthusiasts and BattleBot contenders alike. They’re tricking out transmitters, putting push buttons where toggle switches should go, on/off switches where pots should go, and generally making a transmitter more useful. It’s also a useful repair guide.

[Frank Zhao] made a mineral oil aquarium and put a computer in it. i7, GTX 970, 16GB RAM, and a 480GB SSD. It’s a little bigger than most of the other aquarium computers we’ve seen thanks to the microATX mobo, and of course there are NeoPixels and a bubbly treasure chest.

16 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: December 21, 2014

  1. Damn, I just lost faith in the humanity’s ability to understand the simplest laws of physics. How many idiots are out there who believe that a candle produces more heat if a stupid black cup is put above it??!? WTF, yes that thing converts the 0.5% light output into heat, if it’s painted back, great. Usually people try it the other way round and invent funny things like Stirling engines or thermoelectric generators for that.

    But then came these great guys and simply say: ‘Fuck that, let’s put a simple, extremely expensive stupid cup over candle and there’ll be enough dumb asses who will spend their money on it” Somewhat genius, nowadays you just need to rob the stupid earn money. Apparently there are enough of them.

    1. Actually, after learning the hard way that you can’t inform those who don’t want to be informed, I have a certain perverse respect for the creators of this campaign. How many kilowatts per hour is that?

  2. My favorite part is that they had to 3D print a dome in order to then make one in terra-cotta. Where would we be if we couldn’t “design using 3D printing”?! Also, the builtin cigarette lighter is a fantastic addition.

  3. What shocks me the most about this Egloo is that in just 1 week the campaign has raised double it’s goal. They still have 5 weeks left! Are there really so many people out there stupid enough to believe something this ridiculous? My father thinks that there will eventually be a large backlash against crowdfunding due to the large number of people that got burned by it. Well, it clearly hasn’t happened yet.

    The idea of using candles to heat a small room isn’t remotely practical, but may be possible provided you ditch the store bought tea candles for something more exotic and dangerous. Composite rocket fuel candles anyone?

    1. “Are there really so many people out there stupid enough to believe something this ridiculous?”

      If I didn’t have these pesky things called morals, I could be a rich man.

      Think of it this way:

      One of the world’s largest branches of Christianity got it’s start by a guy who stared into his hat at a magic rock to receive “God’s Word”; that man in those days was a known con-artist and swindler, yet he still had people who somehow believed him then, and today still has a ton of followers who still believe this BS despite knowing such history (and that’s only the tip of iceberg). They give tons of money to their church – unbelievable sums which, if you suggested that such could go to other arguably better causes, they would think you were crazy (that’s putting it kindly).

      …and that’s just one branch of thousands within one particular form of religion. While such beliefs may bring some comfort to followers – none of the various multitudes of these “supernatural” claims has ever been independently and repeatedly verified via simple double or triple-blind experiments under controlled conditions. Yet a lot of money, among other resources, flows through them and into the pockets of the few.

      If anything, crowd-funding campaigns have made this market of the deluded and gullible more easily accessible than ever. The vast majority of people in this world are not critical thinkers, who question and explore everything about them on a continuous basis – including their own understandings and biases – in order to come into better knowledge about the world. Critical thinking is not something that is readily taught, nor is it a subject unto itself (with the exception of maybe some college or university courses). Thus, most people do not practice it. They aren’t aware of their own cognitive biases and deficiencies, nor how to go about correcting them. Even when pointed out, many don’t even care to correct them (in fact, such attempts at correction can lead such people to entrench further into their mistaken understandings).

      I also don’t believe that all – or even a majority – of the people behind these easily disprovable schemes are necessarily critical thinkers who are out to scam people; while I have no proof, I would be willing to bet that the majority of them are actually people who would be “one of the misled crowd” otherwise – they are an individual or group who have come up with their “invention” and honestly believe it to work, and want to make money on it. Though I would be willing to bet that there are those who are cynically scamming the gullible and know it…

      …and a crowd-funding campaign is much easier to start than a new religion.

    1. unfortunately due to the tight space, the GPU doesn’t get too much fresh cold oil, the fan seems to be cycling warm oil back into the heatsink fins.

      the placement of the outlet tube is directly over the PSU, on the opposite side of the tank. The PSU doesn’t have a fan. I prioritize the PSU over graphics for reliability reasons, the graphics card is only ever loaded during gaming and it is smart enough to thermal throttle if needed. The PSU cannot thermal throttle, and it is what is keeping the rest of the computer alive

      the cold oil falls really fast to the bottom, it doesn’t really mix with the hot oil, you can clearly see the edge of the cold oil and hot oil, where light refracts due to the different diffraction index

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