Posts tagged DIY

Home Hacks 2010

How to do… almost everything. It’s a big page. I never knew that instead of washing, you could just freeze your jeans for a week. Or that you could chill wine by adding salt to the ice bucket (which makes perfect sense now that I recall my Chemistry classes).

Boing Boing linked the Howtoons how-to guides for kids and adults alike. Such as this Visual Communication guide, a godsend for someone as inept at drawing with pen and paper as me.

There should be more things like this. It really pisses me off the fact that despite the exponential growth in access to information, there’s a thorough lack of great explainers in many areas. I wonder, for instance, if I could have learned any degree of programming without the kid-friendly ZX Spectrum programming books I read back in the day. I probably wouldn’t.

Cory Doctorow has a new novel out called Makers, which you can, as usual, download for free from his website.

I have a colossal number of pages to read as part of my Master’s thesis investigations, but I’ll read this as soon as I feel I need a break from those readings.

Invisible flash takes photos without the glare

The Null Device links to the ‘dark flash’, which is an infrared flash that could turn bright flashes in the night obsolete (saving all those people in say, football stadiums, the embarrassement of being seen using a light source with a range of 8 meters to snap a picture of the far side goal). But I started thinking, isn’t this something you can already do. There are plenty of tutorials on how to remove your camera sensor’s infrared filter, and I’m pretty sure you can fit a IR-transmitting filter to a flash to achieve the same effect. Lots of interesting exposure calculations (as you need to compensate exposure in higher wavelenghts) will follow, I’m sure.