Science Projects for Your... um... Your Kids... Yeah
Great site:
http://www.sci-toys.com/index.html with lots of science projects you can do at home. In fact, with just stuff I had laying around the house and this site I had a neat high voltage demonstration to wow my grandkids with big blue sparks. But I did get to explain some science to them too. Now granted, I have a lot of strange things around my house, but honestly the only odd thing were jumper wires with alligator clips on the ends. And I bet you could rig it up with some ordinary wire just as well. Look at
http://www.sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/electro/electro4.html#franklin for more details on that project.
There are plenty of others:
- A simple ion motor
- Your own 3D pictures
- A gauss rifle
- Homemade radios from household items
- World's simplest steam boat
- Making a spectrometer from a CDROM
Lots more and most needing no real exotic parts. This excellent site does sell kits for some of the projects, but all the details are right there on the Web site -- no need to buy anything if you don't want to.
Well done!
Labels: geek, science
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IBM 360 -- Free to Good Homes
Ever wanted to try programming an IBM 360? Well now your little PC can simulate big iron. The simulator, Hercules, will run MVS which is apparently freely available, or it can run other mainframe software that you have licenses for. There is a pretty active user community, and the emulator's support is broad enough that it looks like you can do real work on it. I doubt your PC will keep up with the latest multiprocessor 3090, but it is faster than your typical 70's era 360 (although maybe not as much available DASD -- maybe).
Check it out at
http://www.bsp-gmbh.com/turnkey/Labels: old computer
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Digital Logic Simulator
Here's a cool
Java applet that lets you do pretty sophisticated digital simulation. There's a variety of components available and even a "logic analyzer" that you can use to view the results. You can even hook up switches and LEDs that you can manipulate on the screen.
There are several other similar applets available but this one seems to be the most full featured that I've found.
If you prefer to run on on your own computer, have a look at
http://web.mit.edu/ara/www/ds.html which is free for student use, at least, and somewhat shareware (the author solicts a range of contributions) for everyone else. The program is clearly "older", but it functions fine.
Labels: electronics, webapp
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Rechargable Battery with a Twist
http://www.usbcell.com. Wow! Unfortunately these are not available in the US yet. Kind of a neat idea, a AA NiMh battery that you can plug directly into a USB port to recharge. You can also leave the caps on and charge them in a regular charger too.
Labels: gadgets
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Riddles
All work and no play.... Here's a site that poses a bunch of "riddles" -- but not in the common sense of the word. Instead, each page contains subtle clues about the identity of the next page, which you have to find. You might have to interpret strange encodings, manipulate an image, view the page source, or search for relationships to clues on the Web. Sounds crazy, but very addicitve. Be sure to take the "tutorial" before you start the actual puzzle!
http://www.antiriddle.comLabels: fun
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Free Office Suite
I use Microsoft's Office suite, of course. I suppose just about anyone with a job uses it some times. However, at home I've more or less switched. Sure, you are thinking, another Open Office convert.
Well I do use Open Office sometimes, but I find that lately I'm not using it as much as I used to. Instead I'm using the online (and free) version of ThinkFree (
http://online.thinkfree.com).
This suite is amazing. It runs in your browser and includes Office-compatible word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations. You get 1GB of online storage for your stuff OR you can load and store files locally. You can print, export to PDF, and even publish your documents to the Web in a selected number of ways.
Thinkfree recently underwent a facelift with some great new features, although it is now a little more confusing to get started. The key is to use "Power Edit" and not "Quick Edit" if you want to see the full features.
This works so well, you sometimes forget you aren't using Office. And since it runs in your browser you can use it almost anywhere. I put documents in my online folder and work on them at home or at work (or while on the road). You can share your documents or keep them private. The only problem I've had is that at the office, the firewall keeps the online loading from working right. No problem. I just download the file, edit it from the downloaded copy, and upload it again. Of course, once I download the copy, I can work on it in Office if I want to, but I find I'm just as happy to use ThinkFree.
Try it!
Labels: webapp
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Need 1000 Computers? Ten Cents Each!
Amazon has a beta running of their Elastic Compute Cloud available now at
http://aws.amazon.com. Essentially, you can create virtual Linux machines that Amazon hosts and then run them for a paltry 10 cents an hour. The computer is essentially a 1.7GHz machine with good connectivity and resources. You also pay a very low price for bandwidth to the outside world and storage (20 cents for a Gigabyte of bandwidth, for example).
What can you do with this? Well, the obvious answer is to run a Web server. Running it 24 hours a day costs about $80/month -- less than a dedicated server from most hosting companies. And if you need more servers to handle a spike in the load, you can create more very easily (for another 10 cents/hour).
Traffic inside the cloud is free, so you could have one machine as a load balancer, for example, along with 3 Web servers and a single database back end. These 5 virtual computers would cost you 50 cents an hour!
The beta is limited to 20 machines per user, but Amazon claims you'll be able to create thousands of instances if you like. Maybe I should dust off the cobwebs of an old idea I've had for parallel programming. I just need to find a good problem to apply it to.
Labels: web development
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