The advent of the mobile phone camera has caused a revolution in film making over the last couple of decades, lowering the barrier to entry significantly, and as the cameras have improved, delivering near-professional-grade quality in some cases. Mobile phone manufacturers hire film makers to promote their new flagship models and the results are very […]
If you’ve been following the hubbub about 3I/ATLAS, you’re probably either in the camp that thinks it’s just a comet from ridiculously far away that’s managed to find its way into our solar system, or you’re preparing for an alien invasion. (Lukewarm take: it’s just a fast moving comet.) But that doesn’t stop it from […]
Every Boy Scout or Girl Guide probably had the experience of building a simple solar oven: an insulated box, some aluminum foil, and plastic wrap, and voila! On warm, sunny, summer days, you can bake. On cloudy days, well, you need another plan. The redoubtable [Kris De Decker] and [Marie Verdeil] provide one, with this […]
Over on YouTube [Matt Brown] hacks a Chinese security camera recently banned by the US government. If you didn’t hear about this you can find out more over here: Major US online retailers remove listings for millions of prohibited Chinese electronics. After powering the camera with a power-over-Ethernet (PoE) adapter [Matt] sets about monitoring network […]
As any generation of people get older, they tend to look back fondly on their formative years when there was less responsibility and more wonder. Even if things have objectively improved, we often have a fondness for the past. Such is the case for cable television, where even though ads were everywhere and nothing was […]
When you think of a radio telescope, you usually think of a giant dish antenna pointing skyward. But [vhuvanmakes] built Wavy-Scope, a handheld radio telescope that can find the Sun and the Moon, among other things. The build is relatively straightforward, using a commercial LNB to detect signals in the 10-12 GHz range. The detector […]
Over on YouTube [Applied Science] shows us how to make an f/0.38 camera lens using an oil immersion microscope objective. The f-number of a lens indicates how well it will perform in low-light. To calculate the f-number you divide the focal length by the diameter of the aperture. A common f-number is f/1.4 which is […]