By simply modifying the “trucks” at each end, Royal College of Art graduate Po-Chih Lai created a skateboard that can tackle stairs with ease.
Called the Stair Rover, each set of wheels simply pivots, allowing the board (or “deck”) to accommodate right angles.
SCIENCE!
[Source: Po-Chih Lai / Via Gizmodo]
Oh my god, Microsoft actually did something that works really, really well. Who would’ve thought it?
I’m currently travelling and there’s nothing like going on a holiday to test out travel apps and see what can and can’t work when you’re on the move, going on tours and have limited Internet connection.
First let me say, I’m writing this of my own accord and I’m not being paid or anything – I just like to write about the apps that I use that I find useful and reckon the rest of the geek community will find useful too.
A while ago my friend showed me this cool app called Photosynth that looked awesome, but I didn’t really have much opportunity to use it. Basically it is a panorama stitching application that allows you to move your iPhone around and it automatically captures images and then once you press done, it stitches the image together into a full sphere panorama that you can scroll around a and look at from all angles.
It has actually been really fun creating some awesome panoramas of some of the ancient sites I’ve visited.
Here are a few links to some of the ones I’ve been creating while in Turkey:
The courtyard to the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul.
A view from the top of a mountain in Cavusin.
The view from the top of the Daphne Hotel in Istanbul.
A full 360 while on a hot air balloon ride – this one I didn’t move my hand. I just held my phone and let it capture as the basket itself rotated around. Was magnificent!
A breathtaking Cathedral carved into a mountain at the Selimiye Monastery.
At Pammukkale – Heirapolis under the Byzantine rule. – Pammukkale means “cotton castle” and you can see why with these undulating waves of calcium carbonate, weathered down by the natural hot springs.
If you go to the Photosynth website (or the apps) you can check out some of the other cool ones people have created and uploaded publicly.
The app has a function of geo-tagging your photos and uploading them to Bing maps (of course, because it’s Microsoft) and you can also upload a link to your interactive panorama to Facebook and share it with your friends (even if they don’t have Photosynth). I suppose it would be to much too to ask for a Google Plus uploading function though.
The annoying thing is I don’t have a constant 3G connection (everyone knows roaming data charges is how you drain your bank account) so I can’t tag the places I am at when I am at those places. I don’t know if it’s just because Turkey isn’t covered very well by Bing Maps but I am having trouble trying to give some of my photos a place later – and some of them have randomly decided they were taken without a place and I can’t add one. It’s a bit of a frustrating feature if you are keen to share your panoramas with the world.
I also found that the application took a bit of practice. The first few panoramas I created had a few inconsistencies and didn’t come out too well, but eventually I got the hang of it, with only a few glitchy bits in the stitching that can be overlooked.
But I think functionality goes beyond just tourism: I would imagine it would be a great way to capture rooms in a house you were inspecting for housemates who couldn’t make it to the inspection time. I’m sure there are other ingenious ways to use it that creative people across the world will soon think of – homemade interactive adventure games maybe? That could be a fun project…
What other uses could you think of for this app?
[Photosynth available on iPhone and Windows 7.5 and above available on iTunes and the Windows Market Place]
This 18′ x 24′ chart features the literally hundreds of villains who have terrorized Gotham in for 70 years. Each villain is broken down by category and sub-category.
Each print is limited edition and signed and numbered by the artists.
To enlarge the image or to order yours now, click here.
It would be the conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing never happened that would be first in line, I would think, for a commercial trip to the moon, to witness the site for themselves and analyze whether it was all set up or not. However, NASA is less concerned with the conspiracy theorists than the annoying, overexcited tourists who want to walk in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong, or to take away precious relics of the untouched celestial object away with them.
While the prospect of moon tourism is probably still some way off, NASA is determined to not let this attraction begin badly, like many of Earth’s most prized cultural heritage objects such as the Rosetta Stone or the Pyramids of Giza, where initial tourists caused irreparable damage touching and breathing on them.
Objects left behind are, indeed, the property of the United States, but the surface itself does not belong to any one jurisdiction according to international treaties. Google’s Lunar X Prize, a competition to award the first privately funded team to land a probe on the moon with $30 million, requested guidelines for treatments of the Apollo landing site. With the team of anthropologists and archaeologists from NASA they drew up the NASA Recommendations for Space Faring Entities, which indeed cannot be enforced according to international treaties, but Google is currently honour-bound to follow them.
However, if NASA can get the Tranquility Base, the landing site of Apollo 11, recognized as a national landmark, it will then become eligible to be included as a UNSECO World Heritage site, protecting it from those unruly tourists with hard and fast rules.
Of course, the conspiracy theorists might say that it’s all pointless anyway – the site will only be built once the tourism starts right? And made to look older than it is…but I’ll leave that to them to explain.
[Via The Mary Sue]
Awwwww… It just wants to hug your face and impregnate you.
Available in many styles, sizes, and colors!
Or simply before and after having kids would be appropriate as well I suppose…
[Source: Inkontheside (CC)]
This simple video will teach you on how you can build a bottle radio, which requires no external power source and will let you hear nearby radio transmissions.
Crystal radio technology has been around for many years. This “bottle radio” take on a crystal radio requires no power source, operates on the power from radio waves, and receives signal from a long wire antenna. As radio stations slowly move away from the AM band, the “window of opportunity” to experience this remarkable technology is dwindling. The “crystal” in question is contained inside a germanium diode, and is used to rectify the radio signal so that our ears can hear it.
[Make]