How Chicken Wire is Made

How Chicken Wire is Made:

I can watch this How It’s Made style factory footage for hours. This beast is called a “gabion machine,” which seems to be a slight misnomer.  A “gabion” is a cage filled with sand or stone used in civil or military engineering, e.g. for erosion control. What this machine is actually making, of course, is wire mesh of the type used to make gabions, which a lot of people call “chicken wire.” Twisting all those strands at once requires a lot of power-check out the size of the crank. [via Boing Boing]

More:

• How Plastic Bottles are Recycled (video)


• How offset printing ink is made


• How combustible gas detectors are made…

You’re looking at it wrong

You’re looking at it wrong:

Confessions: FSDB

Confessions: FSDB:

Robert Horvath shares with us a confession from a system a long, long time ago.

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When I was twelve years old, I wrote my first point-and-shoot game on my Commodore 64. The next year, I burned-out that very same C64 by trying use its sound chip for placing phone calls. At fourteen, I taught myself Pascal and wrote a little program that hid itself in memory and snooped on my classmates’ and teachers’ passwords as they typed them in. There was no question about it. Before I even entered high school, I was a bona fide computer genius.

By the time I graduated high school, I was ready to take on the world – or, more specifically, the World Wide Web. With my technical acumen, I had no problem finding a job as a “webmaster” at a local marketing company. My job mainly consisted of creating and copying static HTML pages on different servers for different websites, but every now a client needed something a little more exciting. And, as obviously the most qualified guy there, I always volunteered.

One client – a fairly large print magazine – wanted to not only bring their content online, but maintain it themselves. With my two months of HTML experience, I was just the person to implement a content management system!

After spending a few hours googling on AltaVista, I quickly became an expert on CGI. I then picked up a copy of “Teach yourself C/C++ in 21 days”, read the first few chapters, and was ready to write my very first CGI script, or “web application” as you’d call it today.

First things first, I re-invented and re-implemented the request parsing wheel. That took a few solid weeks to do, and another couple to debug until it became stable. And then I wrote a simple, file-based dynamic content management system: HTML files were created from the “create article” form contents, saved to the disk with a date-based file name, and the appropriate index.html files were updated to link to the file name. As I was wrapping things up, my boss delivered some great news: the client now wanted a site search feature for the site.

Back then, I hadn’t even heard the word “database” before, let alone knew how to use one. So, I needed to get clever. I figured, a site search should return all articles that matched a particular word and it should also allow for wildcard-like searching. Obviously, opening and searching each file would be would be incredibly slow (especially with wildcards), so I needed to think of something else.

Then it hit me: doing a ls with wildcards was basically instantaneous, so if I could just use that, my search would be instantaneous as well. The algorithm I came up with was pretty simple.

• When an article is uploaded, split it into individual words.


• For each word, check if a file exists on disk with that name, and add it if not.


• Append the article’s file name to the word file name.

As you might image, the search involved little more than an ls *search_word* and a few more file-opens to display the articles on the page. And it worked about as well as you might imagine. I left that company long before I ever had to maintain my mess, but I still shiver when trying to imagine the WTF-moment of my follower.

Artificial Leaf Splits Water Molecules When Exposed to Light

Artificial Leaf Splits Water Molecules When Exposed to Light:

This solar-cell device mimics the ability of a leaf to convert sunlight into usable energy. It’s the brainchild of a team led by MIT’s Daniel G. Nocera, working in conjunction with researchers at SunCatalytix, a company Nocera founded.

The device is based on two water-splitting photocatalysts developed by Nocera’s group. Simply dropping the solar cell in water and exposing it to light, O2 bubbles begin streaming off the side coated with a cobalt borate catalyst, and H2 bubbles begin streaming off the other side coated by a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy catalyst. If placed in a vessel with a barrier, the H2 and O2 could be collected separately and stored, and then later be used to power a fuel cell. Nocera envisions this type of simple, low-cost solar cell, once optimized, could be useful to power individual homes in developing regions around the world.

(Via C&EN)

Tim Goddard’s Lego Horse

Tim Goddard’s Lego Horse:

I love the detail in this horse, created by Tim Goddard, whose impressive Mars Curiosity Rover has been featured here in the past. (I also love his Mustaneer Star Wars diomara!)

Dude Draws His Dad — In 210 Hours and 3.2 Million Dots

Dude Draws His Dad — In 210 Hours and 3.2 Million Dots:

You may have already seen this video — it’s gone viral in the last few days. Miguel Endara drew a portrait of his dad entirely by stippling dots with a Micron pen. When I was into drawing, stippling was my shading method of choice, but this is nuts. And not only did he peck down 3.2 million dots, he counted ‘em, too! Yikes. [Thanks to our awesome Sales Manager Brigitte Kunde for sharing this!]

Miguel Endara

Cryogenics

Cryogenics: Cryogenics:

Submitted by Joe K

Submitted by Joe K:

Submitted by Joe K

Sponsor Appreciation, Careline, laskdfa ksd l;fajs;f dkfas;, and More

Sponsor Appreciation, Careline, laskdfa ksd l;fajs;f dkfas;, and More: null

Can I Give You A Ticket? (With Anna Torv) - CollegeHumor Video

Can I Give You A Ticket? (With Anna Torv) - CollegeHumor Video

Chromium Lime Now Supports Chrome OS on Many More Laptops [Downloads]

Chromium Lime Now Supports Chrome OS on Many More Laptops [Downloads]:

We've shown you how to turn your netbook into a Chromebook with Chromium OS, but if you found that your laptop's Wi-Fi or graphics card wasn't supported, there's a good chance Chromium Lime—Hexxeh's new build of Chromium OS—could work.

In our original guide to installing Chromium OS, we used the vanilla builds from developer Hexxeh. They were great, but didn't work on every device out there, and if your device wasn't fully supported, you were kind of left out in the cold. Now, he's created a new build called Chromium Lime, which adds drivers that you see in a ton of other machines, including Broadcom Wi-Fi cards, Ralink Wi-Fi cards, Realtek Wi-Fi cards, and NVIDIA graphics cards. It also comes with Java, fewer system requirements, and more. If you tried installing Chromium OS before and it didn't work, give it another shot with these new builds—there's a very good chance your machine is now supported. And, if not, you can hit up Hexxeh on Twitter and ask him to support your hardware—he's looking for suggestions on other drivers to add. Hit the link to check it out.

Chromium OS Lime | Hexxeh via Engadget

Submitted by Tom Lovett

Submitted by Tom Lovett:

Submitted by Tom Lovett