Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi for your weekly review of the best projects, hacks, and bits of news that we can cram into 45 minutes or so. We’ll look at the latest developments in DIY air-powered engines, discuss the whimsical combination of GitHub’s API and a cheap thermal printer, and marvel at impressive pieces of homebrew biology equipment. We’ve also got an exceptionally polished folding cyberdeck, a bevy of high-tech cloud chambers, and some soda bottles that are more than meets the eye. Finally we’ll go over the pros and cons of today’s super-smart cameras, and speculate wildly about what a new EU law means for our battery powered gadgets.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download, and listen whenever you like.
Episode 162 Show Notes:
News This Week:
What’s that Sound?
- Think you know this week’s sound? Enter for a chance to win a coveted Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Gravity-Water-Air Powered Engine
- Get GitHub Tickets IRL With A Raspberry Pi And A Receipt Printer
- Kenneth Finnegan’s Cow Oracle Reveal (Supercon 2019)
- Tube Tumbler Provides The Perfect Culture
- Retro Portable Computer Packs Printer For The Trip
- Peltier Cloud Chamber Produces Some Lovely Trails
- You Can Turn Soft Drink Bottles Into Handy Solar Lamps
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Tom’s Picks:
People don’t appreciate how much simply the ability to choose which picture among a hundred to publish changes how photographs relay reality. When there were only 24 pictures on a roll, you had to live with your mistakes and you could not take the effort to construct and choose the perfect photo.
As a result, people in photos did not look their best. They looked exactly how they were in sober harsh daylight. You could not hide the fact: you had your picture taken from the point of view of a cheap pocket film camera with a crappy overpowered flash in a room that was lit up by a single 60 Watt incandescent bulb and/or a 20″ television screen. It was not flattering in the least.
And yet the most popular filters mimic these effect on your 26 megapixel camera. Go figure!
But your point about selection is absolutely true. I used to shoot for the college newspaper, and our fastest camera would do like ten frames per second — so a full roll in around four seconds. But reloading the camera still took around 60 seconds, so we always shot single, even for sports. You develop good reflexes, but basically you also get lucky. I had a disproportionate number of puck-just-passing-the-goal-line shots. No idea how I pulled that off, in retrospect.
You mean the latest instagram filters make you look like a blurry, slightly surprised ghoul with a bad posture, complete with red eyes?
That’s the one! But with vignetting!
I use Samsung Galaxy XCover 5. Replacable battery, waterproof (IP68), and ruggged housing (one of those MILSpec things). Sure, it is not as slick, but it does not feel that bad on my hands, especially since it does not need those absurd protective cases.
Leave around 1/8 of the water in a cheap(super thin walled)water bottle. Put the cap on. Twist very hard to compress the air. Let it untwist quickly. Poof a little cloud inside. You can open the lid and squeeze out the vapor.
I’ve been thinking about buying that phone, but I’ve seen so many mixed and bad reviews: not really waterproof, mediocre battery life, slow, dim screen, broken out of the box… and the lack of a physical home button is a definite downgrade over the XCover 4. My experience with the XCover series is that you can drop it once – then it’s no longer IP68 because the frame cracks.
There’s also a problem with each new generation of phones getting bigger than the last. This year’s phones are so long you have to stand up to take it out of our front pocket, because it won’t make the bend. Super annoying when you’re sitting in a car. They hardly fit in any pocket anymore, so I’m considering a belt case like it was 1995 again.
I still have my Kyocera Hydro. A waterproof Android phone with a replaceable battery.