A few months ago, we heard about a random guy finding injection molds for old Commodore computers. He did what the best of us would do and started a Kickstarter to remanufacture these cool old cases. It’s the best story on retrocomputing this year, and someone else figured out they could remanufacture Commodore 64 keycaps. If you got one of these remanufactured cases, give the keycaps a look.
Remember this Android app that will tell you the value of resistors by reading their color code. Another option for the iOS crowd was presented at Maker Faire last weekend. It’s called ResistorVision, and it’s perfect for the colorblind people out there. An Android version of ResistorVision will be released sometime in the near future.
A few folks at Langly Research Center have a very cool job. They built a hybrid electric tilt wing plane with eight motors on the wing and two on the tail. It’s ultimately powered by two 8 hp diesel engines that charge Liion batteries. When it comes to hydrocarbon-powered hovering behemoths, our heart is with Goliath.
A bottom-of-the-line avionics panel for a small private plane costs about $10,000. How do you reduce the cost? Getting rid of FAA certification? Yeah. And by putting a Raspberry Pi in it. It was expoed last month at the Sun ‘N Fun in Florida, and it’s exactly what the pilots out there would expect: a flight system running on a Raspberry Pi. It was installed in a Zenith 750, a 2-seat LSA, registered as an experimental. You can put just about anything in the cabin of one of these, and the FAA is okay with it. If it’ll ever be certified is anyone’s guess.
Color blind people see resistor codes far more accurately than color perceptive people.
Would you care to elaborate on that statement?
The standard for resistor color codes is for the colors to fall into a grey scale from black to white. Colors that are off-color don’t confuse color blind people as they confuse color perceptive people.
Neat. I didn’t know that :)
I don’t know what part of colorblind you are misunderstanding. Color vision deficiency does not somehow make one able to distinguish colors BETTER than a non color vision deficient person. Don’t take my word for it, find a color vision deficient person and show them two resistors.
Color blind people learn to rely on shade much BETTER that non color blind people and because the resistor color code is a grey scale they can see what you can’t. I am color blind (diagnosed when I was 9 yo) and although there are things that I do have trouble with, I have less trouble with resistors than a normal vision person.
I think it depends on how colour blind one is. Some basically see in B&W, some don’t see some colours at all, etc. Back in school my mates and I sort of figured out that our boss basically had an 8-bit colour vision with a brown-ish/orange-ish tint. Not exact, because we knew he could see some green, but kind of close. That helped when we set up a network monitor screen in a way that he could see it.
Full color perception is very rare so technically the vast majority of people have some degree of ‘color blindness’.
‘Color blind’ is a very misleading term as it is applied to those who have a greater degree than average of color blindness and people mistakenly believe it means that a person can only see black and white or shade.
Those who only see in black and white are just as rare as those who have full color perception.
Those of average perception have only the color of color codes as a reference. Those with a greater degree of color blindness have both color and shade as a reference which is an very strong advantage. For instance, for some cars I can tell you the make and model and year range when the car is at such a great distance away that none of its features are visible, only its ‘color’ is discernible because I know that that shade was only released for that make, model, and year range.
Not with my red-green deficient vision…just sayin’…
“People with deuteranomaly and protanomaly are collectively known as red-green colour blind and they generally have difficulty distinguishing between reds, greens, browns and oranges. They also commonly confuse different types of blue and purple hues.” http://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/types-of-colour-blindness/
Cat5 in low light is no picnic either.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/f38bedc23aaa74f6662791646c909d5e/tumblr_mtlgo6E4wq1s7ygpko1_1280.jpg
and people who spell colour without a u!
I like the goliath better as well. The tiltrotor looks like a bunch of engineers drank way too much coffee and had way too big a budget.