What do you get when you take Angry Birds and Christmas lights? 25,000 Angry Christmas Lights video shows that you get 25,000 Christmas lights pumping to the Angry Bird Theme song covered by Pomplamoose.
The video description tells that the lights don’t actually go on until after Thanksgiving. This video is shot at a middle of the night test run according to the video description. More information on this light show can be found at http://www.listentoourlights.com/
The Most Useless Machine EVER!
Somebody has also made a LEGO version useless machine
Write-only memory has been one of the best practical jokes on the electronics industry field.
Write-only memory (WOM) is the antithesis of read-only memory (ROM). By definition, a WOM is a memory device which can be written but never read. The WOM concept is most often used as a joke or a euphemism for a failed memory device.
An engineer at Signetics, frustrated by the long and useless sequence of approvals for data sheets (during which no actual checking occurred), once made up a spec for a “Write Only Memory” (a “WOM”) and sent it along with a batch of other data sheets to be approved. The WOM data sheet went through the approval chain, just fine, and wound up in Signetics’ new products catalog at 1970’s. Only after customers began asking for price and delivery. Signetics shortly printed up new “corrected” databooks, without any WOMs, and asked for the “erroneous” ones to be returned.
About 1974, Signetics bought a two-page, full-color spread in the April issue of ELECTRONICS Magazine, and published the WOM data sheet, as a (rather expensive) April Fool’s Joke. The data sheet is quite funny reading even today.
Friday special: Groovy Video Coat video I found on Internet:
More details on electronics can be found on Groovy Video Coat pictures and this Video Coat Prototype video:
Ever worry that robots are getting a little too smart? Thankfully, some people are dedicated to keeping our metal friends dumb.
Bacarobo, the Stupid Robot Championship, is a showcase for just such robots. The contest originated in Japan (running in 2007 and 2008) before moving to Hungary in 2010. The competition has three main rules: the robots must operate automatically, they must be useless and they must be funny.
I visited Denmark in summer. This is normal grounded mains outlet I saw there. It looks just like a smiling face.
See Girl Talk, Lady Gaga Performed on Tesla Coils article tells about Open Spark Project that plays music with Tesla coils. Watch the videos.
Tesla Orchestra performing Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face”:
I have earlier written about 555 timer design contest. The contest is over and winning circuits have been found. Here is one very interesting contest entry (got second place in Minimalist category): AM radio receiver built around 555 timer IC.
Look at the following video that presents the circuit.
You can now play Angry Birds on the web! If you did not know earlier, let’s tell you now that Angry Birds is a puzzle video game developed by Finland-based Rovio Mobile. In the game, players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs stationed on or within various structures, with the intent of destroying all the pigs on the playfield. Angry Birds has been praised for its successful combination of addictive gameplay, comical style, and low price. With 140 million downloads across all platforms, the game has been called “one of the most mainstream games out right now”. It is quite funny and addictive to play.
Angry Birds comes to Chrome. Google and Rovio have announced the deal to bring Angry Birds game to Chrome. Angry Birds is available in Chrome Web Store for free.
A fractal is a figure with a self-similar pattern. Usually the fractals are calculated with a computer, but is is possible to produce Fractals without a Computer! It’s very cool – partly because it looks neat, but also partly because it shows you something important about fractals.
Optical video feedback is a well-known phenomenon. If you hook a camera up to a TV and then point it at the TV, you get an infinite regression of images. I remember playing with this effect at 1980’s when first time playing with video camera. You can get some interesting effect in this way (was cool at that time, nothing spectacular at today’s standards when computer special effects are widely used in videos).
This video shows that you can use the same feedback phenomenon with multiple displays to make fractals.
