June 2009 Archives

12-sided dice that have musical notes on their sides. They can be used to add randomness and variety to compositions.

After reading about the 'Dice-o-Matic' featured in the previous article I wondered if I could create my own - much simpler - version. I decided to use the 'Scratch' program so that I could easily post any working project for others to see and share. This one - version 4 - has two sets of dice. There are plenty of notes within the various dice projects to see how I achieved it.

Three versions - 5, 6 and 7 - do not appear to work via the website but if you register on the Scratch site you can download them and see what else I did.

You can see all versions of my dice project at CCS-PK's Dice Gallery.

The 'Games by Email' site needed to generate a lot of dice throws and originally built their own out of LEGO and other bits - as you can see in the picture above. It was capable of generating more than 50,000 rolls per day. (Read more about it here.)

As their site got busier they needed a more capable system still - one able to produce over a million rolls per day. For that they created the "Dice-o-Matic" which can actually provide 1,300,000 rolls per day. You can see it in action in the video below and read more about it here.

It caught my eye because it includes my own Logitech Trackman (pictured above).

So ..... what do you think?

LEDs are still a little way off being widely used to light whole rooms but they are proving very useful in portable devices where their low power requirements are important.

The picture above shows the Energizer Hard Case Tactical Flashlight (USA version) which features a bright white LED along with four additional LEDs - red, green, blue and infrared. It is quite pricey and with its 180 degree swivel-head is aimed at the police and other security forces.

There is a European version - see the pdf here - which strangely seems to be missing the green LED. You can see other Energizer products here at their website.

Other technologies are being developed to provide low-cost, high-brightness and contrast, light and flexible displays. Two closely-related ones are OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) and AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode).

The picture above comes from the Pink Tentacle site which has a nice video - with Japanese audio-track.

It doesn't sound very much really - cover 1000 miles and you've got 1000 hours to do it.

But it is the same mile every time and you can only do one mile in any hour - so no putting in a few miles and then getting a decent rest.

It's 200 years since this challenge was first taken on and completed and over 42 days Richard Dunwoody hopes to do the same while raising money for charity.

Read about it at dunwoody1000mile.com - tell your friends too.

I'll post a follow-up here on the day he is due to finish - exactly 1 month from now - 10th July.

I thought that an item about timekeeping would go down well at the start of a new half-term. (Since writing that I have changed the order of some articles.)

These watches from Phosphor Watches are rather cool and use E-ink rather than LCD technology.

You can read about E-ink here at the E-INK company site (actual details here) with a currently brief Wikipedia page here.

Every field of study or development creates its own system for naming and transportation engineers are no different.

This posting at the "Infrastructurist" covers over 20 different types of road junctions - or interchanges. Each have a name and by reading it you'll find out what a 'spooey' is - that is if you can't tell from the picture.

If you know your stuff about computers you'll be well aware how easy it is for a website to "take a look" at your browsing history. So you probably don't need to look any further here.

On the other hand, if you didn't know that a website can "see" where you've visited on your computer then you might want to take a trip to Start Panic.

You can read a bit more in this Register article too.