Greatest Keycaps And Where To Find Them

April 28, 2020 by Kristina Panos 25 Comments

Look at your keyboard. Do the keycaps excite you? That’s what we thought. You pound on that thing day in and day out. Shouldn’t it at least be attractive? Or even happiness-inducing? You don’t necessarily have to replace every single keycap to spark joy. When it comes to artisan keycaps, the point is to have something that stands out.

How about an Escape key that looks like a tall stack of flapjacks or a tiny, intricate cream puff? From a practical standpoint, how about a spiky Escape key that makes you think twice about rage quitting?

If you’re into games or anime, chances are good that there are more than enough artisan keycaps out there to keep you cash-poor for a while. The same goes for scrumptious foodstuffs with Cherry MX-compatible stems.

In this day and age, you can get just about any type of keycap you want, especially those encapsulating pop culture phenomena and fads. Yes there’s a fidget spinner keycap, and it’s adorable.

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Washing Your Hands With 20,000 Volts

April 28, 2020 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

These last few weeks we’ve all been reminded about the importance of washing our hands. It’s not complicated: you just need soap, water, and about 30 seconds worth of effort. In a pinch you can even use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. But what if there was an even better way of killing bacteria and germs on our hands? One that’s easy, fast, and doesn’t even require you to touch anything. There might be, if you’ve got a high voltage generator laying around.

In his latest video, [Jay Bowles] proposes a novel concept: using the ozone generated by high-voltage corona discharge for rapid and complete hand sterilization. He explains that there’s plenty of research demonstrating the effectiveness of ozone gas a decontamination agent, and since it’s produced in abundance by coronal discharge, the high-voltage generators of the sort he experiments with could double as visually striking hand sanitizers.

Looking to test this theory, [Jay] sets up an experiment using agar plates. He inoculates half of the plates with swabs that he rubbed on his unwashed hands, and then repeats the process after passing his hands over the high-voltage generator for about 15 seconds. The plates were then stored at a relatively constant 23°C (75°F), thanks to the use of his microwave as a makeshift incubator. After 48 hours, the difference between the two sets of plates is pretty striking.

Despite what appears to be the nearly complete eradication of bacteria on his hands after exposing them to the ozone generator, [Jay] is quick to point out that he’s not trying to give out any medical advice with this video. This simple experiment doesn’t cover all forms of bacteria, and he doesn’t have the facilities to test the method against viruses. The safest thing you can do right now is follow the guidelines from agencies like the CDC and just wash your hands the old fashioned way; but the concept outlined here certainly looks worthy of further discussion and experimentation.

Regular viewers of his channel may notice that the device in this video as actually a modified version of the hardware he used to experiment with electrophotography last year.

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Pi Cam Replaces Pinhole And Film For Digital Solargraphy

April 28, 2020 by Dan Maloney 29 Comments

Solargraph from a one-year exposure on film. Elekes Andor / CC BY-SA

Have you ever heard of solargraphy? The name tells you much of what you need to know, but the images created with a homemade pinhole camera and a piece of photographic film can be visually arresting, showing as they do the cumulative tracks of the sun’s daily journey across the sky over many months. But what if you don’t want to use film? Is solargraphy out of reach to the digital photographers of the world?

Not at all, thanks to this digital solargraphy setup. [volzo] searched for a way to make a digital camera perform like a film-based solargraphic camera, first thinking to take a series of images during the day and average them together. He found that this just averaged out the sun from the final image. His solution was to take a pair of photos at each timepoint — one correctly exposed to capture the scene, and one stopped way down to just capture the position of the sun as a pinprick of light. All the foreground images are averaged, while the stopped-down sun images are overlaid upon each other, producing the track of the sun across the sky. Add the two resulting images and you’ve got a solargraph.

To automate the process, [volzo] used a Raspberry Pi and a Pi-Cam fitted in a weatherproof 3D-printed box. A custom hat powers up the Pi every few minutes, which boots up and takes the two pictures. Sadly, the batteries only last for a couple of days, so those long six-month exposures aren’t possible yet. But [volzo] has made all the sources available, so feel free to build on his work. If you prefer to use a DSLR for the job, this Bluetooth intervalometer might help.