Largest Amateur Rocket Launches Successfully!

Filed Under Fire, News, Video | 2011-06-03, 10:33

The non-profit, open source suborbital space endeavor out of Denmark known as Copenhagen Suborbitals had a successful launch of their rocket today. The rocket, designed to carry a human into suborbital space launched in a test run with a human dummy payload this time. As you can see it was a success, with the rocket reaching about 2 miles (final calculations are still being done) before engine cut off and then parachute deployment. The engine burned for 21 seconds and the largest amateur rocket reached supersonic speeds. The parachutes were deployed while the rocket was on the way down rather than at the apex of the trajectory. The speed of the rocket returning to earth is believed to be the cause of the parachute getting destroyed. The rocket sustained some minor damage upon impact, but was successfully recovered with the dummy in good shape. This launch provided Peter Madsen and Kristan von Bengtson, Copenhagen Suborbital’s founders, with lots of data to help build better rockets.

Photo: Thomas Pedersen

As I mentioned, Copenhagen Suborbitals is non-profit and open source. If you’d like to help support them, they’ll gladly accept donations.

Copenhagen Suborbital’s site
Danish article about the launch

22 Comments

DJ Shadow On Tesla Coils

Filed Under Geek, Video | 2010-06-02, 13:02

Anyone that’s peeked into my music collection knows I love DJ Shadow. And if you follow my Flickr stream, you know I spent Monday night checking out Omega Recoil’s test of their tesla coil and that I dig tesla coils. What happens when you combine the two? Pure awesomeness.

More info on Arc Attack, the people behind this, over on Doc Pop’s Laughing Squid post. Oh, and they also cover Dr Who.

6 Comments

Crazy Autonomous Quadrotors

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Geek, Video | 2010-06-01, 23:50

We’re all doomed if they ever become sentient and pissed off.

via danger_ranger

10 Comments

HexaKopter: Awesome Times 6

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Geek, Video | 2010-04-28, 13:19

MikroKopter – HexaKopter from Holger Buss on Vimeo.

File this one under “Amazing Things I Want”. The HexaKopter is the product of some brilliant Germans and is a partially autonomous helicopter * 6. In addition to being remote controlled, it has several modes that allow it to operate on it’s own. It can maintain a GPS position, go into elevator mode (straight up in the air and maintain that height), and even return home on it’s own. In addition it can handle a 1kg payload, and takes some great aerial video and photos due to it’s stability. Besides looking like an incredible amount of fun to fly, there’s also a list of “SeriousUseCases”.

The best part? You can make your own. all the plans (with photos!) are on their wiki and you can buy a kit.

I blame Brendan for inspiring this new techno-lust

13 Comments

Multitetris – Cooperative Tetris Playing

Filed Under Geek, Hacks and Mods, Video | 2010-04-05, 12:50

I love Tetris. If I had to count the number of hours I’ve spent playing this game, I’d probably exceed sys.maxint. Although in all those hours I never played it this way.

Multitetris is a Python-based version of the classic game that allows for multiple players on a large multitouch console. It bends the rules of Tetris with new features such as the ability to steal pieces (actually reaching over and taking them) from other players, transporting pieces to empty spots, and looks like a couple of new shapes just to mix things up. Multitetris was written by Ping at the 26C3 hackfest, with most of the code being finished in the first day! In the video above you can see it being played on c-base‘s multitouch console in Berlin.

via Rubin

17 Comments

Video of San Francisco Before and After the Earthquake of 1906

Filed Under SF Bay Area, Video | 2010-03-08, 12:56

I love old footage of the early 1900s, especially of San Francisco. You may have recognize part of the above video with an unknown filmmaker’s trip down Market St from the Prelinger Archives. But I didn’t know there was a second film taken of the same trip down Market St a year later, after the Great Earthquake of 1906. Matt Lake combined these two films into what you see above, highlighting the significant change in Market St.

4 Comments

Avatar LARP

Filed Under Funny, Video | 2010-02-13, 21:01

It was only a matter of time, right? Pool Worldwide, a creative agency, takes us into the lives of some die-hard “Live Avatar Role Players” from Hometree, Wisconsin in this short documentary.

via Danger Ranger

2 Comments

A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything (in Stop Motion)

Filed Under Art, Video | 2010-02-11, 14:13

For his final piece in an art course, Jamie Bell (an art student from the UK) made a flipbook video titled “A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything”. It’s comprised of 2100 pages of pen doodles and took roughly 3 weeks to complete. It chronicles several key moments in the history of the universe, including an important one at 1:35.

via Giannii

1 Comment

Thunder and Lightning in SF

Filed Under Photography, SF Bay Area, Video | 2010-01-19, 17:34

The way that Twitter blows up during large thunderstorms, you’d think that lightning and thunder in the Bay Area is rarer than earthquakes. Well, I’m not sure of the stats, but it just might be. Early this morning I ~~woke up~~ gained some semblance of consciousness as thunder rolled through San Francisco along with storms that have continued on and off all day.

After seeing the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder half a dozen times, I decided to setup my Zoom H2 audio recorder and Flip video camera to see what I could capture. Only three minutes later lightning struck again. My Flip video camera isn’t quite up to the task of recording lightning, but you can see a flickr and hear the thunder (along with some guy on the street yelling). The audio recorder is slightly better at it’s job, picking up the echoing thunder as it traveled across the city.

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And of course, once the rain tapered off, it was up to the roof with a camera to catch the awesome light as blue skies returned.

2 Comments

The Matrix Bullet Scene In Lego Stop Motion

Filed Under Art, Movies and Music, Video | 2009-11-25, 13:46

I love stop motion and I love Legos. LegoMatrix put them together to recreate the classic roof-top bullet-time scene from The Matrix. The accuracy with which they’ve recreated this defining scene is amazing. They took each frame of the 44 seconds of this scene and recreated it with as much accuracy as Legos would allow, and then some. While the video itself is amazing, even more impressive is the “behind the scenes” of how they actually put it all together. Building camera rigs, figuring out all the tricks they’d have to do to make it accurate, let alone what Lego pieces to choose!