Mitxela decided to make his own game console. He built the whole thing: the hardware, bios, sound, and even games (in assembly language no less). It uses an oscilloscope to generate the output.
What a guy. Read more about it here.
The new style of jump starters that use rechargeable battery packs are amazing – but not created equal. It’s worth doing your homework first.
A reminder that things are only as secure as the absolute weakest link – and that is often the doors themselves.
Land lines are getting hard to find these days. Almost as hard to find as old modems.
Back when I was a kid, I wanted to play a network game between two computers in my own house. I achieved this by hooking the modems up in a daisy chain. One modem plugged into the phone line like normal. On the ‘out’ port of the modem, I ran another line from it to the IN line of the 2nd modem. I then had the 2nd modem call our home phone number – which caused our phone to ring, the other modem picked up, and they made their normal connection sounds and connected! I could then unplug modem 1 from the phone line and the computers stayed in contact without issue.
At the time, I thought I needed a dialtone generator or line generator. Little did I know, I could have done it with a simple 9 volt battery and the right sized resistor. Skip along to 8:25 to see how to wire them together.
Nova is an “untethered VR motion simulator,” making virtual reality games and training programs feel more real by rotating in any direction. Their 5.9 foot diameter sphere, which has been compared to a “human-sized hamster ball,” weighs about 1,100 lbs and simulate vehicles of all sorts by being able to move 360 degrees in any direction.
These units are too expensive for the home gaming market, the company leases each Nova unit with ongoing maintenance and upgrades, at a cost of $150,000 US Dollars per year. Eight360 is working with defense forces, mining and forestry industries, where vehicles cost millions of dollars, accidents are a very big deal and training needs to encompass tilt angles.
Scaffolding used to be done a completely different way. With guys like Fred Dibnah.
Once you’re up at the top, you still have to build the plank scaffolding.
A recent Meetup event I went to featured Alexis Menard talking about development for foldable devices.
Check out some current and future developments in the world of VR.
Epic Games and Unreal Engine helped to develop the amazing virtual environments used in The Mandalorian.
As I have reviewed before, this is not done with greenscreens – but instead are projected backgrounds that are rendered realtime based on camera position. This solves almost all the visual problems created when using greenscreens.
As this highlight reel shows, their technique of combining projected, camera-tracked CG environments with live actors and props can be used for all levels of production, not just blockbusters.
I suspect we’re going to see some very interesting applications soon.
This February was the sixth iteration of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS. Since 2013, small groups of people have made this drive (up the Northern slope of Mauna Loa) and moved into the dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.
HI-SEAS is a social experiment, and the participants are the lab rats. They wear devices to track their vitals, movements, and sleep, answer countless questionnaires about their own behavior and their interactions with others, and journal several times a week about their feelings. The durations have varied, from four months to a full year, and participants come from all over the world and different fields.
However, on February 19th, the most recent experiment came to an abrupt end. The batteries powered by a solar array for the habitat lost power due to lingering clouds over the volcano. Two crew members donned their space suits, went outside, and started a backup propane generator while the two other crew members flipped a switch on a circuit breaker inside the habitat.
When the suited-up crew members returned to the habitat, a crew member was typing furiously at a computer. The other looked stricken and pale. They said they didn’t feel well. They said they had sustained an electric shock.
It’s a reminder that even small tasks can become matters of life and death. Fortunately for this team, help was just a short drive away. Learn about the HI-SEAS program, previous missions and what went wrong during Mission Six at The Atantic via Get Pocket.