Herewith, some more shameless regurgitation of fantastic Lego creations I found on the excellent TechnicBricks.
Hybrid pneumatic/electric robotic arm:
Another feature-packed car (unfortunately, Lego do not make little rubber cones that'd make the suspension authentic):
Combination-lock safe:
And my favourite - a brick-sorter, which can only detect four sizes of brick, but which does it entirely mechanically, using a single motor!
OpenOffice (technically "OpenOffice.org") used to be clunky and slow and questionably compatible with Microsoft Office. But nowadays it's pretty darn good. I've recommended it to many people who need a proper office suite - or just a proper word processor or spreadsheet - but don't want to pay for MS Office, or rip it off.
(Which is not to say that I think you should pirate MS Office, but that does seem to be a pretty popular pastime, and it's silly to pretend that it's not at least an option for a lot of users.)
I just downloaded the current version of OpenOffice to install on this computer, though, and had one of those experiences that us computer suuu-per geniuses can deal with quite easily, but which would have been an utter disaster if I'd just sent some hapless Ordinary User off to openoffice.org to claim their free office suite.
I went to download.openoffice.org, and selected the friendly green option at the top of the list. That earned me a brief look at a "You are about to download OpenOffice.org..." page that redirected, long before any non-cyborg could have read its contents, to this PlanetMirror page.
I got sent to PlanetMirror because I'm in Australia, and so are they. As it turned out, this choice could have been better made.
I, like many of you faithful readers, have been on this particular fairground ride before. So I could quite easily figure out that the thing I wanted would be in the last of the listed directories - "contrib", "developer", "localized", "packages" and "stable". Never mind whether Great-Uncle Fred could figure this out, though; many perfectly competent computer users who know about backups and spyware and other such things would be taken aback by this.
Into "stable" I went, and then into "3.3.0", after briefly checking to make sure that 3.3.0 actually is the version number of the most recent stable release of OpenOffice.
(The "You are about to download..." page actually says "You'll find the OpenOffice.org downloads in the subdirectory stable/version", but only down at the bottom where you won't have time to read it. And I can just see a normal human being looking at these directories with numbers for names and saying "but there's isn't one called 'version'!")
Now PlanetMirror proudly presented an ordinary alphabetic view of all of the very-long-named OpenOffice 3.3.0 downloads, which thanks to alphabetic sorting put the Windows version right at the end, after the SPARC Solaris versions and the source-code archives.
Page down, page down... ah, there it is, "OOo_3.3.0_Win_x86_install-wJRE_en-US.exe". Obviously. So I click on it, and...
File not found.
After all that, the damn file is not actually there.
OK, no problem, how about "OOo_3.3.0_Win_x86_install_en-US.exe", the version that doesn't have the Java Runtime Environment bundled with it?
Nope, that's not there either.
Not a single damn file in that directory listing actually exists.
So I just said "oh, for pity's sake...", and headed off to ftp.iinet.net.au. IiNet is my ISP, and like many ISPs has a general-purpose FTP server dangling off its main domain like a vestigial organ (non-iiNet users probably can't access it).
OpenOffice is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to find on such an FTP server, and indeed I do find it, in "pub", then "openoffice", "stable", "3.3.0", and then the same big list of big-named files, except now they actually bleeding exist.
I'm sure this OpenOffice.org/PlanetMirror Australian-download... issue... will soon be fixed. I shudder to think how many potential Aussie OpenOffice users have given up in entirely justifiable disgust, though. Anybody who already knew about BitTorrent would probably find it easier to rip off Microsoft Office 2010 than go through all this.
And I know, I just know, there's some poor Aussie geek out there on the phone to his mum, trying to walk her through the process and rapidly losing the will to live. You'd rather just e-mail the installer to her, if it weren't 150Mb.
Most, if not all, of the other official OpenOffice mirrors actually work. If, once again, you know what you're doing, you'll be able to go back to the "You are about to download..." page and whack Escape before it redirects, then click the "select a mirror close to you" link, which leads to this page. I picked one of the Indiana University ones, which actually works.
Even if the auto-redirection takes you to a working mirror, though, it could work a lot better. Obviously there should be a brightly-lit and cheerfully-signposted path directly to the Windows, Mac and Linux installers, not just a page-flip to an FTP directory that expects ordinary users to find their way down through "stable", et cetera, by either trial and error or mental telepathy.
I could have avoided this whole rigmarole by downloading LibreOffice instead. It's a recent fork of OpenOffice and thus far pretty much identical, and has exactly the sort of sane download page that I wish OpenOffice.org had. So I'm doing my best to search-and-replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice in my mental tech-support database. If I hadn't been writing this whinge-y blog post, though, I probably wouldn't even have remembered that LibreOffice existed.
I hereby throw the floor open for your own similar tales of woe. Bonus points will be awarded for each hour over the first two which you spent on the phone to a family member on any "five-minute" computing project.
Eleven years, ten months and 25 days ago, I reviewed the original Everglide mouse mats.
Everglide's "Attack Pads" were the first hard-plastic mouse "pads" to achieve any commercial success. The concept of a mouse mat that you actually paid money for was a bit ridiculous at the time, but since most people were still using opto-mechanical mice then, a hard mat with a textured surface actually did help accuracy a bit, and reduced gunking-up of the little rollers a lot.
All-surface optical mice have been the standard for years now, but a lot of gamers are still picky about their mouse-mat, to get exactly the right amount of friction. Or just to get something that doesn't wear out after a year of StarCraft/Team Fortress. The original polypropylene polyethylene Attack Pads lasted bloody forever; five years of frequent use will smooth 'em out a fair bit, but they're still not what you'd call fragile.
The black Everglide mats still work fine with optical mice. Actually, modern opticals may be fine on the translucent-white Everglide mats as well, but don't quote me on that.
The Everglide mats spawned many descendants, and even some mildly hilarious drama. And now, the other day, I got an e-mail from a nice lady who worked for the company that actually manufactured the Everglide mats back in 1998.
(Well, she says that's who she is. If this is some sort of scam, it's targeting a pretty darn narrow niche.)
She's got "about 200" original black mats, of the type Everglide themselves haven't sold for ages, and she's selling them cheap on eBay.
Apparently these mats are all slightly irregular, but perfectly usable. The problems are restricted to "a few uneven edges here and there along with some misprints". (Any small imperfections in these products really are evidence of their hand-crafted nature; the bevelled edges of the early Everglides were routed by hand.)
They're only $US10.95 delivered within the USA, which strikes me as a perfectly acceptable price for a shiny new piece of gaming history that'll last for years of heavy use, even if you do have to pare off a rough bit on the edge somewhere.
(No international shipping, unfortunately. You could try contacting the seller via their eBay store if you're outside the USA and desperate to buy.)
The fellow who made the Lego 3D scanner that worked by poking things with a needle has now made the more conventional kind of 3D scanner.
With a laser.
As with the last scanner, he's using it to import funny-shaped Lego pieces, like Fabuland heads and trees from 1969, into LDraw.
And, needless to say, the new scanner is once again made out of Lego. It's less of a mechanical achievement than the last one, because the Lego isn't much more than a supporting framework for the DAVID 3D Scanner software, that works with a line laser and a webcam.
It's way faster than the pokey-scanner, though, and has startlingly good resolution. Lego isn't generally much use for making precision mechanisms, but this one seems to work great.
I just published a column all about those... distinctive... computer-magazine ads.
You know the ones I mean.
If you've seen a magnificent example of the breed, I invite you to scan it (if it's not already online), upload it somewhere, and bring it to the world's attention in the comments!
(For spam-prevention reasons, you can't embed an image in your comment. Just list the URL in plaintext and I'll image-ify it for you, as per the "Geek Ink" post. An image URL by itself will turn into a clickable link: http://www.dansdata.com/images/ltgf2/fancygraph.png)
The brilliant Matthias Wandel, seeing how fast he can get his air engine to spin.
His wooden air engine.
(Just about everything Matthias makes, at least since the old stuff, is wooden. Wooden combination lock.
Wooden tank tracks. Wooden marble machines. Wooden Jenga pistol. Wooden pen centrifuge. Wooden pager rotator. Wooden gears. Wooden pipe organ. (Mostly) wooden bandsaw. Wooden binary logic. I don't think the Eyeballing Game and the gear template generator are made of wood, but I haven't examined his server. It could be all ropes and pulleys in there.)
I'm not certain that Matthias' video-based speed-estimation is completely sound. A proper tachometer would probably be a good idea.
There are, of course, a lot of ways to do that. Optical and magnetic sensors, point-and-shoot "non-contact
Tachometry often involves multipliers or divisors of some sort; the above-linked Lego sensor tops out at only 500RPM, for instance, so you'd need to point it at something geared down from the thing you're actually measuring, to get a reading. And model-plane-prop tachos need to be told how many blades the prop has. For devices like this motor, which spins in the same range of speeds as computer fans, I wonder if you could use a computer fan to measure their speed?
Chop the blades off the rotor of a a standard three-wire computer fan, disable the motor coils (I think the speed sensor is a separate Hall-effect device), connect the de-bladed rotor to the thing whose rotational speed you want to measure, and then either use a frequency counter to measure the pulse rate on the yellow wire, or just plug the cable into a computer motherboard and run a fan-monitor utility.
Anybody tried it?
That box that just wants to be left alone was not the only excellent thing I just found by scanning the recent Lugnet news updates.
There was also a dog sculpture that's the opposite of Studs Not On Top, and an unassuming little church, and some forced-perspective Star Wars, to warm you up for...
"The Fastest and Funniest LEGO Star Wars story ever told", from "dzine123".
