This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch chat with Paweł Karaś about Amber, a modern scripting language that compiles into a Bash script. Want to write scripts with built-in error handling, or prefer strongly typed languages? Amber may be for you!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 790: Better Bash Scripting With Amber”
From animatronic dinosaurs to [Jeff Goldblum]’s prosthetic chest hair, Jurassic Park is known for its practical effects and props. While it’s not as fancy as a breathing triceratops, YouTube’s god of resin casting has recreated one of the more endearing props from this movie. [Peter Brown] and [Pocket83] made a replica of the amber-topped cane carried by John Hammond, and it took him two years to do it.
The ‘mosquito in amber’ walking cane prop from Jurassic Park is just what you think it is – a large mosquito-looking bug trapped in 100 million year old amber. Of course, finding such a chunk of amber with the included mosquito would cost a fortune, so [Peter] turned to polyurethane resin. This block of resin was cast in two halves, with a ‘mosquito eater’ (or a crane fly) embedded in the middle. It took two years for [Peter] to cast this block of amber, but really all but two weeks of that was waiting for a few adult crane flys to appear.
With a bug encased in resin, the project went over to [Pocket83] who turned the walking cane on his lathe. There’s not much to this part of the build except for drilling a three-foot long hole down the center of a piece of wood, although the finish does make this cane look spectacular.
The long wait for crane fly breeding season was worth it. This is one of the best looking functional props from Jurassic Park. You can check out the videos for this build below.
