Aeturnalus

Today I received a pair of 808 Keychain Cameras (#3), available on eBay for cheap. They’re tiny little things, using a microsd card for storage. Their image quality is surprisingly good, but I have yet to find a way to change the timestamp on them.

Sample video:

Yes, my sister’s piano skills could use a little bit of improvement, but that’s not the point of the video. The video is slightly lower quality than the original, due to the flash reencoding. It’s good enough, anyways.

One strange thing about this camera is that it records 720x480px files, but the sensor itself is 640×480. Thus all files must be converted to 640×480.

So today’s date is kinda interesting. Notice how its August 9, 2010, or a rather significant sequence… If you didn’t get it yet its cause its

8-9-10

To compound that, this post is published at 11:12 AM, so the full date and time would be…

8-9-10 11:12AM

8, 9, 10, 11, 12 =)

Happy sequential date day!

These past weeks I’ve been interning at Cypress and learning a ton of stuff, mostly to do with laser optics and the associated waveform physics. Working in the lab is fun, of course, and a good experience for the future.

Of course, when I get really really bored (rarely ever happens), I pull out a … video game (xD). Lately I’ve been playing TF2 again, as people came back to the servers.

I was also bored enough to learn how to play “River Flows In You”. The below mp3 is the second time I’ve played it.

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Philmont’s coming up soon as well, I’m leaving at 3:45AM Friday (annoyingly early). It should be a fun 14 days, lots of hiking and other activities (black powder?). Unfortunately, it cuts in the middle of my internship time, which is a pretty major annoyance. Hopefully I’ll be able to make up the work later.

I was digging around for pens this afternoon and found (gasp) a fountain pen! Sure, it was a cheap Pilot Plumix, but I had forgotten how my handwriting was forced to improve when using a fountain pen… its pretty crazy actually.

Unlike most normal pens (rollerballs and ballpoints), fountain pens utilize capillary action to move the ink to the paper. This is facilitated by an interesting looking nib, but it creates a nice, smooth line. The characteristic ink marks of a fountain pen are recognized by many as “calligraphy”, as in the time modern “calligraphy” was the norm, dip pens and fountain pens were the most common.

These are the parts of a normal fountain pen:

As you can see, its not quite what you’re probably used to.

A pen-to-pen comparison:

It’ll be what I’m writing my APUSH notes and such with, and hopefully will last some time (until I get a better one!)

For the past couple days, in conjunction with homework, I’ve been playing around with these small alcohol based stoves. Colloquially known as “pepsi-can” stoves, they utilize a simple design and cheap materials to produce an ultralight burner.

I’m not too sure if we’ll actually try using these during the Philmont trek, but they should be a good backup, just in case something happens to the primary white gas stoves. I tested one out today, it works reasonably well:

Boil time for 1L of water was approximate 5 minutes and 30 seconds; for one can of Progesso soup, 3 minutes and 15 seconds. The fuel reservoir held about 25 minutes’ worth of fuel, about 2 fl. oz.

Conclusion of this experiment seems to be a success, with no major mishaps.