Check this out.
You may already know it since it's not very new. I didn't and I think it's fucking great.
Now, tell me what you think. This damn thing costs like 9400 EUR. Its really damn awesome, don't you think you'd need such a thing? I do.
I looked a bit deeper in how it works and discovered ReactiVision, which is a framework for building such stuff.
I am at the moment learning SuperCollider. I'll take a look if I can build such a thing myself, it should be possible.
I need
A beamer for feedback, i.e. projection of lines and circles etc. on the table
A nice webcam for capturing user input
a decent PC for the software
a program, that parses the stuff the webcam sees = reactivision
a gateway, which is written in Java, takes the parsed stuff and sends sound signals to the supercollider server
a supercollider server that can synthesize such stuff
a decent soundcard for nice output
a glass plate, and this is not as easy as it sounds, since it has to be a fish-eye-lense or something similar I believe; otherwise, I'd have to make the table really high so that the webcam and the beamer are far enough away.
Well, certainly not easy. Maybe I'll never do it, but its worth a try. I got some stuff to do the next months then ;)
Greets and keep up reading!
Monday, June 20, 2011
Oh dudes, I guess you thought I died somehow or something.
I am back now, and it was rough times. My account got hacked by some guy that I had to deal with. I now sorted it all out and I am ready to go again.
Lot of stuff going on these days.
Bitcoins are still interesting to me, you may have heard of them as well now.
Silkroad is used for buying drugs, mtgox got hacked. Well.
I found this pretty interesting tutorial, if you want to know how to set up an anonymous Paypal account.
I'll just cite it over here since the site keeps going down for me, but I copied it. If some guy has a problem with that, do tell me. Source
"
Okay so a lot of people use PayPal (obviously), and a lot of people have been banned in the past and want to get back in, or want a 2nd account for their "blackhat" activities. Point is I'm gonna try and outline the basics on having a 100% anonymous (or close to it) PayPal account, and none of your activities being traceable. Sounds impossible? It's not. I've used PayPal a lot in the past and I know quite a bit on how their system works. A lot of what I say below is pretty basic stuff, so I apologise if it's no use to some. But it might help a few out, so it's worth it IMHO. First thing to understand is that the majority of PayPal's activities are automated. That means they have security algorithms (bots) running 24/7 365. Think about it, PayPal has over 70 million active accounts! There is no way humans could monitor them all. So yeah, this is basic shit, but it's an important point to keep in mind. EVERYTHING you do is being monitored by some bot, not a human. Of course if your account is limited, or someone makes a direct complaint, a human will look into it, but until that point it's automated. Second thing to understand is that they literally do monitor EVERYTHING. From basic things to what IP you log in under, to complex stuff like how many seconds you take to do certain tasks. Seriously, if you can think of it, most chances are PayPal have a bot monitoring it. Now I only know a hand full of what they monitor, I'm sure there are 100s of things I have no clue about. The main ones you have to worry about though in my experience are your IP, how much money you pump through your account, and charge backs. If you keep a clean IP, keep money transactions reasonable, and get no charge backs, chances are PayPal will leave you alone. The first important step is setting up a clean IP. FORGET proxies. Do not even bother going there. They are totally useless for accounts that you are logging into more than once. The only real solution is a dedicated VPN. This will cost you about $15 a month, and there are a shit load of places to buy them from. Now if you're really security concious, you need to buy the VPN itself anonymously. So find someone who accepts WebMoney. Once you have your VPN take note of the state it's in. This is where your profile information is going to come from. So now simply go to one of the online directories (example switchboard.com) and look for someone in the area your VPN is located. If your VPN is in Miami, FL, go do a search for John Smith in Miami, FL. Simple. Make note of the address info and save this to a file. Go make your PayPal account with those details and be sure to enter everything correctly. For email use AOL. It looks pretty legit. Gmail or Yahoo are fine also. PayPal know the majority of online users either have a Yahoo, AOL, or Gmail account, so they don't care too much about that (unless you're applying as a business). Once you've verified your email address now comes the important part. We're going to add an anonymous bank account to fully verify the account. How we gonna do that? No not with one of those shitty online wallet systems, we need to go find a prepaid debit card that supports direct deposit. This can be really easy, or really hard, depending on your location. If you're in the US chances are a local store will sell one. If you're outside the US you need to buy one from someone else. Assuming you are indeed within America go to your local store and look for something called an nFinanSe card. These things are awesome for PayPal. Or if you're not bothered about getting a personalised card sent to your address, you can use another one called Mio Card. They work fine too. I'm skipping over quite a few things here, but the basic premise is we don't care what address is registered on the prepaid card because it doesn't matter. PayPal cannot tell. When you withdraw money via ACH the only problem you might have is different names on your PayPal account and prepaid card, but I've found that most times that doesn't matter either. Assuming you've purchased an nFinanSe card, first thing to do is activate it by calling their automated number and setting an ATM PIN. The minimum load for this card is $50, so you want to get as much of your investment back as possible. You should have no problem going straight to an ATM and withdrawing $40. So you total investment (out of pocket money) will be around 10 bucks. Once you've done that you need to register the card for direct deposit. nFinanSe needs your SSN which you enter online. It's instant activation, so no delay or speaking to a human. This is where the anonymous point kicks in again. If you want to break the law (I am in no way recommending you do), then finding SSN info online can be done for a couple of bucks. If not and you still want to stay anonymous, then you could ask the permission of a friend or family member. Remember, this information is never seen by PayPal, so it has no real tie to your account. Either way, once you've registered your card you will be given a unique account number and routing code. Go back to PayPal, enter this info, and they will send you 2 security deposits. In my experience this usually takes 1 or 2 working days. Once you have those codes (they will show on your online nFinanSe statement), you enter them into PayPal and BOOM, fully verified account. Now if you want you can also enter a credit/debit card and do a similar sort of thing, but it's not necessary. If you do enter a credit/debit card make sure it's not one of the mass used ones. PayPal check BINs (bank identification numbers) a lot, and using a simon.com gift card is gonna through up a red flag on their system. That's pretty much it. 1 anonymous/untraceable PayPal account (or close to it depending on how "blackhat" you wanna go). Also small point about ATM withdrawals, you can research online the different makes and models of ATM machines. Some have cameras, others do not. Again if you want to be truly 100% anonymous wear some glasses when you withdraw the money, or pay some kid to do it. If PayPal ever do limit your account, and chances are they will, then you need ID and a utility bill ready for the profile info you signed up with. One word. Photoshop. Again, not gonna go into details but there are plenty of sources online to get this done, or you can do it yourself. The people who check this at PayPal probably don't know WTF they're doing. I bet they take a quick 3 second clance at your image attachments and pass it along. Hope this thread helped. If not then that's cool. Yes a lot of it is very basic stuff, but I see some really stupid advice being given to people asking PayPal questions, so what I'm saying really isn't that bad. Also I am in no way suggesting you use PayPal for illegal activities. I am just showing a way to use their services anonymously.
"
So I guess that's pretty interesting to some people ;)
Also, I have some other cool stuff to share, I will keep posting the next days. I have to make time up ;)
Sorry for my absence by the way.
Over and out, peace
Okay, as promised, here is something less nerdy, I hope!
Did you know about Bitcoins yet?
Assuming that you don't, this post will explain them to you. I stumbled upon Bitcoins a few days ago.
Bitcoins are a anonymous and decentralized Cryptocurrency.
What does this mean?
Well, let's see this Video, it will clear a lot up.
So, you may not understand it yet. Its a currency you can use for anonymous, free and fast digital payments. It's not the only clue that there aren't necessarily any fees you have to pay for transactions. Moreover, you are pretty anonymous as long as you use enough different account adresses (which isn't quite a problem). The transactions are probably really fast even in peak times.
The in my opinion best thing is that it's decentralized and not controlled by any government. They can't freeze your account, like paypal does all the time (wikileaks for example). In fact, the amount of bitcoins that is there is clearly predictable and thus the inflation rate is only influenced by speculation: the inflation will fade until approximately the year 2033, because the amount of bitcoins is limited to 21 millions.
What Bitcoin does need yet is a further offer of goods to buy via bitcoins. The only thing limiting bitcoins is the stuff you can buy with it.
So, if you like the idea, support it via selling stuff for bitcoins! This will rise the demand and spread the idea!
I really love the idea and appreciate the thought that we create our own currency, without limitations of governments and the biased print-money-policy of them.
Use bitcoins!
They will get very expensive soon, so get involved now as long as the deflation hasn't stepped up!
Greets!
PS: I know there will be a lot of objections in the comments. They will mainly be to the point that you like an authority like paypal to be safer for your transactions. This is discussed on the bitcoin wiki and in the forum. BITCOINS
Well, I wanted to show you guys a little calculation on a rather big question.
What do you think how long there will be humans on this planet left? How long will man survive?
The big deal about the calculation is that there is no need of any knowledge of the actual situation of mankind and its planet. It's just some piece of math...
Here it goes: Imagine all humans that ever lived and is going to live, set up in a row by chronological order. Just think as if you knew how long this row was (You don't, since you don't know how many humans will live in the future). You are somewhere in this row. Now, if you don't know where you are, there is a 50% chance that you are in the first half of the row (of course, since the half of the row is 50% of its length and you don't have any information that would favor some position for yourself). For you being in the second half, there is a 50% chance, too. You can extend this: There is a 5% chance that you are in the first 1/20th of the row.
I read that there lived like 100 billons of people on the earth yet.
Now, with regards to the 50%, we can say, there is a 50% chance for humankind to survive the birth of the next 100 billon people. In fact, there is a 50% chance that humankind is NOT going to make it for another 100 billon humans.
If you think about how fast population is growing, you can either think
a) the humankind will be wiped out in the next few hundred years
or
b) in a few hundred years there will be only few people and not anymore billons of them living...
This calculation is not really useful and somehow inaccurate. However, it is fun to take a look at the question from this point of view, because you don't need to care about actual problems we are facing.
A less nerdy post later this day or tomorrow is incoming, hang on and don't care if you don't get what I'm saying ;)
Well, arbitur in Germany, you know. Just had my english tests. I am sorry that I have so little time meanwhile, in a few weeks this will change... meanwhile...
Here is a little game I'd like to promote. You may already know it. That's just the demo: VVVVVV Five times the letter V
(just to make it clear, the pic isn't by me. found it on flashpunk.net)
It's a really neat kind of jump-and-run game, in its very own cool style. The full version is much larger and just costs 5$ to download, so you may want to check it out. I spent hours already when I should have learned physics, lol.
Have a nice rest of the day, ladies!
I decided to put up a tutorial to build a coil gun.
You can read the basics at Wikipedia. Its basically one or more coils accelerating a bullet via a strong magnetic field triggered in the correct timing. There are two different core designs to build a coil gun: a) multistage coil gun
This means, there are more coils to get the projectile forward. The problem behind this is that you have to time the coils so that the ones behind the projectile are off while the ones in front of it need to be turned on. This requires you to build up some kind of circuit which triggers the coils. However, the potential behind this is that you can accelerate the projectile much better and accurater, resulting in a higher fire power.
b) single stage coil gun
So, the alternative to the multi stage is a coil gun which just uses one coil, turned on with a high current flowing and let it be off before the projectile is through. It results in a much more inaccurate acceleration, giving less potential firepower. However, its a much simpler design requiring nearly no extra circuits.
This tutorial will yet cover only the basics of a single-stage coil gun, and as soon as my multi-stage coil gun is working fine, I will post a tutorial to build it.
So, here is what we need:
a) A capacitor. You need an electrolyte capacitor. They have two important measures: The voltage and the capacity. You'd like some with a decent high voltage and a middle-high capacity. The formula for the energy contained in a capacitor is E = 1/2 C U ², which means, if you double the voltage, you get a four times higher energy. If you double the capacity, you get the double energy. So guess what, you try to get the highest voltage possible. However, I recommend to not exceed 100 Volt for newbs and for nerds I recommend to not exceed 330V (Why this? It means you can still charge it on a regular plug. Ofc, if you have a 110 Volt plug, you'd not want to exceed 160V. Don't get why 160 Volt for a 110 Volt plug? Its the peak voltage). The more Voltage, the more dangerous it is if you touch it. Then, you do not wan't to have an exceedingly high capacity because that mean's it'll take too long to let the capacitor run empty, resulting in a possible pull back effect for the projectile. Get what I'm saying? The projectile runs through the coil. Now, if the coil is not turned off by the time the projectile is through, it will pull the projectile back. You would not want that. (Moreover, a high capacity may cause a short in the batteries because its basically no resistance at the beginning of the charging process)
For my first coil gun which ofc was just built in 3 hours and was maybe as strong as a decent softair, I had a capacitor with 25000 microF and 100 V (charged to just 90V). You can get capacitors from the internet of course, or you visit some kind of speaker shop. I got mine from that speaker nerd around the corner, I just asked him if he had some capacitors left. Worked fine.
b) a voltage source
You'll need something matching your capacitor's voltage. So, as my first capacitor had 100V, I had 10 9-Volt blocks which means it did charge with 90V (yeah it was just for aestethic reasons not 11 blocks with 99V). Well, you can calculate how long the batteries will last. Let's say you got 600 mAh, this means 600 mA one hour long at 9V. So, this is 0.6*9*3600 ~ 19 kJ of energy. My capacitor with 25000 micF and 90V (charged) contains 1/2CU²=101 J of energy per shot, so it will last around 190 shots. It's enough.
Now, I better don't tell you how I charged my second coil gun, because it's too dangerous. It involves a glass of water, some salt, some wires and a plug with 230V (and a bridge rectifier).
c) A coil
Well, this basically means a lot of wire with a thin isolating layer to prevent shorts. I did the coils myself, so I went to the speaker nerd guy and asked him about old coils. He gave me alot with 1-3mm thick wire. Basically you just spin it around the barrel as long as you want the coil to be, and then you add the next layer right away. You have to watch out to keep the same direction all the time, otherwise your coil will be useless. Don't worry, the coil will look a bit shitty, but it's alright though. However, try to keep the first 1-2 layers as clean as possible. The coil shouldn't be too long, this will make the magnetic field too low. However, having the coil too short is worse because it may pull the projectile back in and moreover, its harder to spin a shorter coil.
d) a barrel
you should use some massive plastic or aluminum here. Really no iron or steel, because it's magnetic and will make the magnetic field veeerrry, very slow, unable to shoot a projectile. I used some thin plastic barrel.
You have to spin the coil around it.
So, what you actually do is (I will not explain how exactly you do this very well, because that depends on your favors):
You take the capacitor and attach it to the voltage source for a few seconds (batteries should do the trick under 15 seconds normally). You then put a projectile 1-4 cm before the coil and in a single clean strike attach the capacitor to the coil. Beware, you need to seperate it from the batteries before to not cause a short.
The result is a strong magnetic field. Why? Well, if your wire has a resistance of 0.05-2 Ohm, which is realistic (since its just a wire, probably even pretty thick), and you attach a voltage of (for example) 90 Volt to it, you have a current of 1800-45 Ampere. Well, I had like 300 probably at the peak. This is really high.
PS: Watch out to not make the coil wire too long, a high inductivity will lead to slow magnetic buildup times.
And since you all don't care and I wouldn't either, here are some Videos of such guns to satisfy your real needs ;)
Nice made coil gun, not too strong though.
Decent one as well, especially it's pretty strong for the energy I feel.
Very strong, but for the energy and the SCR triggering (it's a multistage) not that high.
Really weird rail gun, makes a huge EMP as well. Neat!
The navy researches as well:
So far, thanks for ignoring the upper part of that posting. I'll provide some images of my 680J Coil gun the next days as well, at least it pierces 1.5 mm steel. That's tough isn't it? ;)
Monday, March 21, 2011
Two little videos I liked, you know, modern animation arts and stuff...
this evening I'll post a little tutorial about how to build a coil gun, so if you're a nerd, stay prepared! If not, just ignore that since it's pretty technical ;)
