So, you’re shooting a futuristic short film, and you want to create balls of plasma to shoot out of a plasma rifle. How do you do it? Most productions nowadays use digital effects to create the plasma ball. But that can be a tough thing to do as a guerrilla filmmaker. So here’s my really simple mechanical solution to this problem: Glowing Night Balls. You get a batch of them, fasten up a small air canon prop that will look like the plasma rifle, and shoot them around. For added visual effects, you can always composite some shots of arcing electricity over the top of the flying night ball to give it that nice scifi look. And the great part of this is that you don’t need to create a digital effect and then have to make it look realistic, which is really the tough part.
Posted by g1powermac under Filming | Comments Off
For the past few weeks, we’ve been taking our new puppy (shots are in the photoblog) to a puppy obedience school. And I must say dog training is quite interesting and rewarding too if you can get your dog to actually pay attention, which seems to be the tough part with Buddy. But I have gotten him to come, sit, stay, and lay down with some simple practice and using some real chicken as a reward. Now if I can only get him to listen to me when I’m not holding any chicken…
Posted by g1powermac under Other | Comments Off
And a picture of a bunch of old cameras has to be worth more, considering how many photos they took in their day…
After working on the oak shelving on and off for the past few weeks, I finally attached them to the wall today and decided to put my old camera collection back out on display. These cameras have been sitting in a box for the past 4 or 5 years or so and haven’t seen much love after I decided that computer science was more interesting than history.
I do miss that time of my life though. My bedroom looked literally like a museum. I had a very large collection of antiques on shelving all around my room. It was definitely not your typical teenage bedroom, that’s for sure. For the amount of stuff that was in that room, it was always kept organized for the most part.
But after moving out here to Kentucky, I really lost interest in it all. I discovered my new passion of algorithms and computers. My room turned into what some would call a small computer lab of sorts which now has grown into a basement lab that would rival most labs in small colleges.
I do wish I had more of the antiques from that time since I now keep all my tech stuff in the basement, and my bedroom is now strictly a bedroom again. Unfortunately, most of it was lost 4 years ago when we lost our house to a major toxic mold infestation causing most of our possesions to be contaminated. We were able to salvage alot, but we just couldn’t save it all. Those were really tough years…
Posted by g1powermac under Construction,Other | Comments Off
Normally, I avoid writing about politics on my blog. But since this year is an important Presidential election, I decided to write a little bit. First off, I’m quite surprised to see who won the nominations for the Republican and Democratic parties. I would never think McCain and Obama would win either nomination, but now we have both. And really, neither is wonderful. McCain is really just another Bush. For Obama, I had some hope for him till he voted for the Telecom Immunity Bill a while back. That piece of legislation is a real outrage in my not so humble opinion. It’s right up there with the DMCA and PATRIOT Act. So, now as a semi liberal with a geek stance toward life, who do I vote for? They both clearly show that they are backed by mega corporations which means they really don’t care about the people. Do I go with the lesser of two evils? Or is there a different option?
Well, even though many probably feel voting for an independent party is just throwing your vote away, I decided to pick one of the bigger alternative parties out there, the Green Party. The party’s platform stands for quite a few things I think are good, and personally, it at least lets me vote with a meaning. A meaning to end the two party system we have in this country. With more equally dominant parties, it would become much more difficult for corporations to back all the different candidates ending at least some of the mess we have today. Plus, it would allow the public to have greater choice than just A or B which should lead to a more sane government.
Posted by g1powermac under Other | Comments Off
It seems a study regarding the chemical additive of many plastics, called Bisphenol A, shows that people with heart disease and diabetes have more of the chemical in their body than people without those diseases, according to a Reuter’s article. Of course you can’t say from this article that BPA is causing heart disease and diabetes, but this does leave me to wonder. This chemical is used primarily in polycarbonate and epoxies which are used greatly in our food supply. So, what if you stopped eating or drinking anything that touched plastic? Obviously if you live on processed food, you really can’t avoid the chemical. But if you grew all your own food and/or bought only fresh produce not wrapped in plastic from the grocery store, how much healthier would you be? Obviously, you must take in the fact that eating this way is healthier to begin with. But would removing the plastic from your diet help? Could this be expanded further with removing pesticides by eating only organic foods from the grocery store? What about all the chemicals around the house, like flame retardents, VOCs from paints and carpets, and chemicals found in cleaners? What if you decided to live a completely ‘natural’ life, away from all man made chemicals? Would disease rates fall considerably versus someone who eats a comparable diet but is exposed to these chemicals? These are the times I’d like to be a scientist doing a study like this.
Posted by g1powermac under Interesting Stuff | Comments Off
Alright, getting back to the extreme green garden, I got a couple of more ideas. The biggest thing I want to do is to make the entire garden ‘off the grid,’ which basically means that it doesn’t depend on anything from the outside once it gets started. This includes electricity, water, and organic matter. From my last post about the garden, I mentioned I wanted to do solar panels and rain collection off the shed. However, I’m also thinking of setting up some small wind turbines to gain some power off the constant wind we get out here. This then may allow me to power an electric lawn mower so I can collect lots of organic matter for the compost piles.
The other idea I have is built upon my previous one with moisture sensors to determine if the plants need water. What I’d like to do is have multiple different sensors. I’m thinking of possible soil acidity sensors in the planting beds and temperature sensors in the compost pile to make sure it’s working correctly.
And finally, I’d like to use salvaged building supplies for the shed and garden to make it as green as possible. Oh, and yes, that’s the first pumpkin I harvested from the current garden we have. It’s an organically raised pie pumpkin, just waiting to be used in a fresh pumpkin pie, mmm.
Posted by g1powermac under Construction | Comments Off
I was at our local Brookstone store today and bought this really neat digital picture frame for $50. It matches the look of my iMac quite nicely. Besides that, it has a very nice 3 inch LCD rivaling the quality of the LCD in my iMac, and it will display pictures and movies from MMC/SD and MemoryStick cards.
Of course, like everything else I buy, I couldn’t resist cracking it open to see what kind of stuff is in it. After struggling with the white bezel around the LCD that was double sided taped on, I was able to gain access to the screws to disassemble the frame. Inside, there’s very few chips. There appears to be only a CPU chip, a SDRAM chip, and maybe a flash chip. The CPU seems to be an x86 like chip built by SQ called the SQ812B. The SDRAM chip is S6416AJTA. And, unfortunately, I can’t determine what the possible flash chip is as half the chip’s markings are missing. There’s also a USB port that registers as a mass storage device. If there’s a way to load custom software on this picture frame, it could be quite a nice little device.
Posted by g1powermac under Electronics | Comments Off
Alright, so I got this wild idea. Since I now have the fence completed for the new garden area, I’m thinking of building this really nice shed/greenhouse within the garden area. Not only that, I want to put solar panels on the shed to power the electronics in the greenhouse that will control the vents, fans and possibly heating units during the winter. But why stop there? I might as well add a rain water collection system for the rain coming off the shed’s roof. So now I got a barrel of water that can be pumped out to drip irrigation within the raised beds and greenhouse when needed using moisture sensors. This will allow me to have a completely self sufficient garden without using any external utilities. And not only that, I’ll have it so wired up that all I’ll need to do is just plant the plants, set the computer system, and forget it till I need to harvest the food. I need to plan this out…
Posted by g1powermac under Construction | Comments Off
Well, this is just amazing. I went out to some stores today and found the grocery stores, gas pumps, and banks to be incredibly busy as if the end of the world was tomorrow. It’s really crazy. I can understand people heading to the gas pump to fill up before the gas prices go up, but everything else is just not needed. We’re hundreds of miles away from the hurricane, and the only effect we’ll see here is maybe a bit rain which we really need.
Anyway, I finished up the chain link fence today. Check out the photoblog to see the progress. It came out quite nice, especially being built by someone who never really built a chain link fence of that size before.
Posted by g1powermac under Construction,Other | Comments Off
Now this is something interesting. Engadget is reporting that the new iPod Touch has a Bluetooth chip inside it. However, it is actually used only for the Nike+ integrated module on the Touch which uses a proprietary interface. But this leads me to a few questions.
First, the actual chip is a Broadcom BCM4325 Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, which actually does more than just Bluetooth. It also does wifi and fm receiving. So is this chip physically wired in a particular way to render all these functions completely useless? Or is the custom Nike+ interface based on the firmware loaded on the chip? If this is so, I wonder how hard it would be to find a general firmware for this chip found on another device and reflash the chip in the Touch to allow full access to these other features. It may even be easier where the interface is built ontop of the firmware loaded on the BCM4325. I wish I could get my hands on a few devices with this chip as I’d love to see if this is actually possible.
Posted by g1powermac under Electronics,Interesting Stuff | Comments Off
