Category Archives: random

Asian Aviation

In America, people think they’re cool when they fly R/C aircraft and pretend they’re real (remember that article a a while back when they tried to mount a full rescue on a downed R/C helicopter?).

In China, they do it differently. They build a full-size helicopter (or gyrocopter) out of motorcycle parts and wood. Isn’t that awesome?:

They don’t need fancy military tech if even the farmers can build primitive attack helicopters…

But wait… It doesn’t end there: Tao Xiangli builds his very own submarine on the outskirts of Beijing!
[aslideshow]
Tao Xiangli in the water
Tao Xiangli getting ready to go
[/aslideshow]

Read More Leave a Comment

September 6, 2009

Categories:

random

Super Velcro

There’s this German company who’s developed a super-charged version of Velcro. You know how normal Velcro comes apart pretty quickly, and without too much force? This full-steel type takes 35 tons of parallel force or 7 tons of perpendicular force per square meter.

Basically, they recreated the hooks-and-loops of Velcro with steel brushes and steel hooks, all out of 0.2 mm sheets of steel. With this stuff, you could tack stuff onto the side of hi-rise buildings, no problem.

Here’s another question though: if it takes so much force to remove, isn’t it one-time use?
New Scientist via Gizmodo

Read More Leave a Comment

September 4, 2009

Categories:

random

The first weekend of this school year

Well, the first week of school is over, and it’s been pretty busy. There’s been a rather large homework load compared to last year, and other than the day of my previous post, I haven’t had much free time. On the plus side, the homework isn’t incredibly boring and I’m actually learning things in some of my classes (gasp).

Of course, I’ve realized today that California’s weather is about a season off. Over the summer it wasn’t all that hot, and probably closer to spring than summer. However, for the past week (and especially today), the temperature has been around 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s just about unbearable. Sure, I’ve had worse, but on a day where I’m stuck at home with no air conditioner (my house doesn’t have one), it’s not fun.
I do realize, however, that going outside will be worse… =(

Earlier today I spent a bit of time converting the images sent to me by IKain into the ones on the website, you can preview here. I hope that this design will be much better than the original (here). Coincidentally, I’m once more getting SSL errors on their page.

On the topic of school:

Korsunsky’s having me kill a couple of trees on my own this year, with worksheets on colored paper, lots of stuff to print (seems to be daily, I think) and plenty of calculus homework. My parents are more concerned about the ink, though.

We haven’t really done much of anything in chem, history, and lit, so I don’t have anything to say about them. Revilla (spanish) has given us a Spanish 2 HowMuchDoYouRemember© test, I’m not too sure how well I did. We’re apparently going to be starting with reviewing the preterito and the imperfecto, then going on to the subjunctive.

Don’t have anything more to say so…. yeah. Comments?

Read More Leave a Comment

August 29, 2009

Categories:

News, random, School

Portable Apps

I just got a pair of USB flash drives yesterday. Of course, seeing as I like to carry my personal preferences around, I installed a full Portable Apps suite on each one, including but not limited to:

  • Clamwin
  • Eclipse
  • Filezilla
  • Keepass
  • Firefox
  • Thunderbird
  • Notepad++
  • Openoffice.org
  • Pidgin

I don’t know if the exe-blocking “antivirus” program is still on the school computers, but if it isn’t, these programs will allow me to do a much larger varieties of functions than the school computers’ defaults allow. At the very least, they’ll be useful when I go to other places and don’t bring my laptop with me.

Read More Leave a Comment

August 16, 2009

Categories:

random, School

Shipping Fails

I didn’t think that shipping companies felt like wasting money like this in our current economy, but…

[aslideshow]
Crushed, upside-down, and alone on a truck...
A truck. On another truck‽ a bigger truck‽
[/aslideshow]

This is kinda fail, don’t you think?

Read More Leave a Comment

August 8, 2009

Categories:

random

 
Content-Type: text/html