Daily Photo

Velcro was invented in 1948 by George de Mestral after he took his dog for a walk and came home to find it covered in things much like the seed pod above. The name is a combination of the French words “velours” (velvet) and “crochet” (hook).

The hard part is apparently getting the nylon hooks to come out just right. Do that and it sticks to most things, though the right loop fabric does help a lot.

“Velcro” remains a registered trademark, though genericised beyond much possibility of rehabilitation. Just think of the possibilities.

Photo: “Pretty Dead Things” by Ian Muttoo. Taken in Brampton, Ontario on 5th October 2007. CC by-sa 2.0.

This is not a painting or (much of) a Photoshop job, but a high dynamic range photo. This is to get all the dynamic range in a scene which you couldn’t capture in a single photo, but could in multiple exposures of the same scene with different settings. Since Photoshop Creative Suite 2 includes a “Merge to HDR” feature that does most of the grunt work for you, these have become increasingly popular.

So you get scenes like the above. That’s a photo from a hotel roof in Las Vegas of the New York New York Hotel. It looks like the remains of the pitiful little Manhattan Island preserved by the Martians hundreds of years after their invasion.

This is a daylight shot. The photographer has a shot of the same scene at dusk and mostly HDR shots on his Flickr.

Photo: “Post Apocalyptic New York” by Shayan (USA). Taken on 23 April 2007. CC by 2.0.

I have four hundred kilograms of vinyl records here that I brought from Australia to London. They take up a stupid amount of space. And all the music I listen to now is on MP3. (Or AAC. Or Ogg.)

The trouble with vinyl is that eventually you’ll need to restore things to play it on. Good things. Nice things. This is a photo from a series about restoring a 1960s Thorens TD 124 Mk II record player. It was tanais’ father’s, bought the year he was born. So he recovered it, cleaned it and restored it and now uses it as his own preferred turntable.

My parents bought one of the last of the HMV four-speed turntables in 1971. Then they decided they should buy some records to play on it. TV compilations. All the K-Tel you can eat. Awful, awful.

Photo: “Oil bath for the bearing shaft” by tanais. Taken 6 June 2008. CC by 2.0.

This one struck a chord with me because (a) swords are cool (no longer being much daily use for combat, they’re the playthings of geeks and obsessives) (b) my girlfriend is pretty handy with a sword as well (c) she didn’t swing it around when she was pregnant, but she probably should have.

The woman in the photo is doing Wudangquan, specifically Wudang Double Sword. But any decent sword practice will help get the arms moving, the metabolism raised and the heart pumping.

And the boys will treat your little girl with remarkable amounts of respect. If they think Dad’s scary … just wait till they see Mum out the back chopping a dummy to bits.

Photo: “pregnant warrior double sword 2” by dizznbonn. Taken 15 December 2006 with a Panasonic DMC-FX01. CC by 2.0.

That’s a portrait of her self, not myself. My image doesn’t show up on CCD.

When I moved to London, I was somewhat surprised to find that the weather was more or less the same as Melbourne, just one or two degrees colder. That one or two degrees, of course, is enough to give us snow a few days a year. Or, rather, SNOW!!! with capitals and three exclamation marks. I’m from Perth, where summer is forty degrees Celsius; I didn’t see snow till I was thirty-six. I still bounce up and down at the sight of it.

(There is snow in Melbourne, but only up in the Dandenongs and not much of it.)

We just had a cold week where a warm front in the Atlantic Ocean led to cold air coming straight down from the Arctic. A few days of snow, then a week of sunny days at minus two. Melbourne weather in extremis: several layers, gloves, scarf and sunglasses.

Photo: “..so…much…snow… *dies*” by *Zara. Taken with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT on 10 March, 2008. CC by-sa 2.0.

Soap bubbles are inherently cool. My daughter thinks so, anyway. She keeps pointing at the bottle of bubble liquid and going “mmm … mmm …” until we pick it up and blow some bubbles.

The miracle of the soap bubble comes from the surface tension of water, decreased but stabilised by the soap — via the Marangoni effect, where the soap goes wherever in the bubble it’s needed. The iridescence comes from the thickness of the film (800 nanometres) being comparable to the wavelength of light (340 to 760 nanometres).

The bit I haven’t managed to find an explanation of is how to make them more stable. The bubble liquid has run out so we topped it up with washing-up liquid, which doesn’t make bubbles nearly as well, and certainly not streams of them. Perhaps if we use more concentrated liquid, that’ll work.

Photo: “Soap bubble” by Raphael Quinet. Taken in Nandrin, Liege, Belgium on 24 June 2007 on a Nikon D70. CC by-sa 2.0.

What’s the first thing a good roboticist thinks of? A robot bartender! This example is a mojito machine, the Robomoji, being shown off at the Roboexotica Festival in Vienna, Austria in November 2007. Engadget coverage.

Other nice robotic bartender projects include this cocktail-making robot at the 2007 Maker Faire, this bartender bot complete with face also at Roboexotica and BaR2D2.

The Mojito original recipe is: 1 teaspoon powdered sugar, 2 oz lime juice, 4 mint leaves, one sprig of mint, 2 shots Havana Club white rum and 2 oz club soda. Put the mint leaves into a long glass. Squeeze the juice over it directly from a cut lime. Add the sugar, then gently smash the mint into the lime juice and sugar with a muddler (a bartender’s pestle). Add crushed ice, add the rum, stir, top off with soda. Garnish with the mint sprig.

Photo: “Mojito machine” by RobotSkirts, taken 22 November 2007 on a Nokia N95. CC by-sa 2.0.

It’s January 6th. Do you know where your Christmas decorations are supposed to go? Will you ever get the plastic tree back in its box? Will the ornaments fit back in their box? Will you find the ones the cat got hold of and whacked under the couch with its paw before the toddler does? Oh look, there’s the battery from her V-Tech robot companion that says “I LOVE YOU” when the child hits it. Yep, we’re living in the future.

Now now, you don’t have to collapse in despair and jump into the bathtub with an armful of plugged-in fairy lights.

You do? Well, don’t do what Mr. Thomas did here. Remember to put the water in first. FIREWORKS!

Our Christmas decorations are staying up another three days for Božić.

Photo: “65/365: Kiddies, don’t try this at home!” by Mr. Thomas, taken 5th December 2007 with a Canon PowerShot Digital Elph SD800 IS. CC by-sa 2.0.

This is a clock that’s on display in the Australian War Memorial museum, in Canberra. It was found near the epicentre of one of the first atom bomb explosions (not sure if it was Hiroshima or Nagasaki).

The hands show the time of the explosion (which would make this more likely the Hiroshima bombing, around 8:30am, rather than the Nagasaki bombing, around 11:00am). You can see how the glass face was melted by the heat and has dripped off the bottom.

Photo: “Japanese clock melted by WWII nuclear bomb” by maembij. Taken 17 February 2005 on a Canon Ixus 40. CC by-sa 2.0.

The title comes from a rejected T-shirt design for kuro5hin.org from several years ago, an aerial photo of a World War I trench system, based on the site’s slogan: “Technology and culture, from the trenches.” Not this photo.

But this one’s pretty spectacular. This is an aerial reconnaissance photo from the Imperial War Museum of the opposing trenches and the no-man’s land between Hulluch and Loos in Artois in France. The German trenches are at the right and the bottom and the British trenches are at the top left.

Photo: “Aerial view Loos-Hulluch trench system July 1917″ from the Imperial War Museum, taken at 7.15 pm, 22 July 1917. Public domain.

Don Knuth, the world’s most frighteningly advanced computer scientist, used to send out cheques as rewards for finding bugs in his software (T_EX or METAFONT) or errors in his computer science books: US$2.56, or one “hexadecimal dollar.” (Errors in 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated get US$3.16.)

He can’t send any more, though, due to international bank fraud: personal cheques are now obsolete as they’re ridiculously easy to commit fraud with. So he now posts a list of balances at the Bank of San Serriffe.

For your further amusement: Knuth 3:16.

Photo: “A reward from Sir Donald Knuth” by Baishampayan Ghose. Taken 9th June, 2008. CC by-sa 2.0.

The Bird Mask Vocal Controller was built by Semiotech (Amy Rose Khoshbin and Michael Clemow) for the ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) 2008 winter show. The mask contains a microphone and buttons for vocal effects and a wireless transmitter.

Here’s what it looks like on and in action and here’s the complete photo set from the show.

Along with the mask, they built a Shadow Puppet Sequencer Table, which is exactly that: a translucent table with a light above and a camera below. You put cutouts on the table, the locations are sent to a synthesizer.

Both have received much admiration in the gadget-hacking press.

Photo: “Semiotech Bird Mask” by Noah Sussmann. Taken on 17 December 2008 on an Olympus Stylus S770SW. CC by 2.0.

Before and after? These days, you can emulate most things on most other things. (I’m typing this in Firefox on Windows XP in a VirtualBox on Ubuntu, having just done the above photos in GIMP on the Linux box.) So you can carry your precious HP-15C (as Craig Lea says, “I’ve had a relationship with this thing longer than I have with my wife!”) or you can use the hpcalc-iphone emulator on your pocket general-purpose computer running Unix that also happens to make phone calls.

The HP-10C series is legendary with good reason.

Photos: “Old Tech” and “New Tech” by craiglea123. Photo taken 24 December 2008 with a Canon EOS 40D. Both CC by-sa 2.0.

(Yes, a week off for Christmas is enough. Back to daily now. Leads on good shots most welcomed.)