Jim sent in his backyard foundry project. This is an improved version of his previous attempt. It uses a large holiday popcorn tin for the main case. This is insulated using perlite mixed with high temperature furnace cement. It can reach upwards of 1200F, but you’ll still be able to touch the outside of the can, briefly.
Yeah, I nearly labeled it “Staff of doomed social life”. John, a Penn state undergrad, whipped together this glowing walking stick. Okay “whipped’ is an understatement; he bothered to model it in Rhino before assembly. So, if you’re bored with building lightsabers or you’re just tired of the balrogs in your basement this is the project for you. Keep up the good work John and for your sake I hope I don’t see “gandalfkid.wmv” in my inbox anytime soon.
[thanks Deepomega]
Here’s any easy method for backing out the combination of a Master Lock. In a perfect world there would be 64,000 possible lock combinations (403). The construction of the lock prevents this from happening: sloppiness in the dial and the numbers are not mathematically independent. First step is to determine the last number in the sequence. You can then use that number to determine the other possible numbers in the combination. You will end up with about 100 combinations to try, but that’s far better than having to throw the lock out which I’m sure would happen if you had to try 64,000.
UPDATE: x04d sent in a video demo (DivX) (dead link) of how to open a lock in 2 sec. using a padlock shim.
UPDATE: The linked video above has long been dead. Check out our more recent Master lock post for an embedded shimming video
This looks like a pretty cool toy to build. At the top of the cylinder is a fan that removes air from the center column of the device creating a low pressure zone. This air is then blown back into the cylinder to feed the rotation. Besides the regular construction supplies you’ll need a squirrel cage fan and speed control. The most expensive part of this project is the mist generator. The nice thing is, you can construct the entire device and make sure it’s functioning before you dump money into the mister. I saw a really large one of these last year at NCAR in Boulder, CO. It was pretty cool, but naturally I was there to see the Cray-1A [via]. Lately we’ve been creating our own path of destruction so we’re hosting the pdf which was originally found at weather-photography.com.
[thanks seesoe]
Here’s something cool and refreshing just in time for the weekend and that wild Flag Day celebration you were planning. This is similar to the margarita machine that was circulating last month. They’re both based on garbage disposals. fixer’s design uses an external return pipe. It also uses a 4-gallon stock pot instead of the giant plastic drink cooler. I’m guessing this made attaching the garbage disposal a lot easier. Mentally you still have to overcome the fact that you’re drinking out of something that was originally intended to process waste, and a plastic drain pipe coming out of a chip board box isn’t going to make that any easier to stomach. He says it works great, but the lack of insulation probably means that it doesn’t stay frozen very long. It would be cool if I could turn that dewar we had back on the farm into one of these, wait
That title is really misleading; this hack doesn’t require a lava lamp… anymore. I initially went googling for a 1996 project at SGI that generated random numbers by taking photos of a lava lamp. The lava lamp was chosen because of its chaotic nature. I was suprised to find that SGI had patented/trademarked the lavarandtm technology. The system required you to use IRIX, took up a lot of space, and because of patents wasn’t easy to implement. In 2000 the engineers behind the original decided to develop an open source alternative know as LavaRnd (note the capital “L” and “R” ;-). [Editor’s note 2025: The domain has been taken over by an online casino.]
This iteration doesn’t use a lava lamp. Its source of chaos is camera with the lens cap on. The gain on the CMOS sensor is cranked all the way up to create a really noisy image. The image data is then sent through an algorithm to generate the random numbers. If you want to see the original project you’re going to have to ask the Wayback Machine.
Here is a little something for your Memorial Day. My mouth began to water when this link first showed up. I clicked it and then
