You know….when I read this…my first reaction was…you have GOT to be kidding me. Watched the video, and thought…dear god thats stupid.
It works.

To spare you the video: take a car with locked doors. Take tennis ball with small hole in it. Place tennis ball on the keyhold, with hole lined up with the keyhole. Press the ball as hard as you can, forcing air into the hole. Watch in amazment and disgust as your car now magically opens. Watch the video on Crooked Brains

Thank you PCIN.net, for this very nice tutorial. The Orton Effect is usually using an overexposed image with an out of focus image that are then added together. Now…you can do this digitally using Photoshop. All photoshop tutorials and, in fact all other tutorials will eventually make it to the Flashladybug Wiki. If you would like to help add stuff to it, come and join! Flashladybug Wiki

And now…the Orton Effect

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Yes, it’s time for a “random post” post.

Caffinated Donuts

“How about a Buzz Donut or a Buzzed Bagel? That’s
what Doctor Robert Bohannon, a Durham, North Carolina, molecular
scientist, has come up with. Bohannon says he’s developed a way to add
caffeine to baked goods, without the bitter taste of caffeine”

http://breakingnews.nypost.com/dynamic/stories/B/BUZZ_DOUGHNUTS?
SITE=NYNYP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME
=2007-01-26-07-40-47

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How To Disinfect a Sponge in a Microwave

“ A team at the University of Florida found that two minutes
in the microwave at full power could kill a range of bacteria,
viruses and parasites on kitchen sponges.”

1.  WET SPONGE.
2.  Microwave on HIGH for 2 minutes.

Very usefull information.  However, too many people forgot to wet the sponge.  A dry sponge is combustable, and burns quite easily.  Especially when placed inside a microwave for 2 minutes, when it’s bone dry.  So, remember.  WET the SPONGE!

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=2822160

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Overturned Truck Spills Bottled Water and Soup on highway 401 in below freezing temperatures.

I’d hope by now everyone has figured out where this post is going.  Soup, bottled water, and cooking oil were all spilled over the highway, and then froze to the lanes of traffic.  There was one minor injury in the truck crash, and one bus got a flat tire from striking a bottle of water in another lane, although there were no injuries to any passengers.  Sand and salt was distributed to clean the mess.

(Personally, I’d have light the cooking oil on fire to boil off the water, then enjoyed the nice hot steaming soup.  Roadkill stew anyone?)

http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20070125/highway_truck_crash_
070125/20070125?hub=TorontoHome

Well start with the Pi, its a quickie.

“Upper Darby Man Takes Pi Further Afield“

“

Remember pi? Most of us learned the 3.14 part.

Marc Umile has gone oh-so-much farther.

On Friday, the Upper Darby resident was certified as the North
American record-holder for memorizing digits of the mathematical
constant. He spewed out 12,887 digits, to be exact - a feat that took
him 3 hours and 40 minutes.”

…

“Umile, 40, wrote the numbers out by hand, a thousand at a time, then recorded them in his voice on a portable tape player.

Then, he listened - and listened. During his commute. During his lunch break. While walking down the street.

After 2 1/2 years, 2 worn-out tape players and more than 100 batteries, it sank in.”

…

“Umile is far short of the world record of 43,000 that van
Koningsveld cites on his list, held by Krishan Chahal of India. He’s
even farther from the 67,890 digits listed by the Guinness World
Records, a feat accomplished in China.

But he does hold the world record for memorizing 905 digits of “e” -
another key mathematical constant - which he recited on the same day as
pi. And three months earlier, he notched another world record by doing
the first 5,544 digits of the square root of two.”

Wow….Interesting hobby…..

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/16522064.htm

And,
The solar power for your laptop!

Here’s a link to a blog with a link on how to build a $180 solar laptop charger.
.  The roughtly 2-pound kit should power a laptop for about 105 minutes, with the screen at about 75% brightness (should be fine for a sunny day, no?).  Not a bad idea, but it requires 5 hours of sun.  I don’t really know when the last time I had 5 hours in the sun away from a power outlet, but I applaud the idea.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/01/portable_solar.php

powered by performancing firefox

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Well, here we’ve got a post about canceling services, and a post about creating a new free service.

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“Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!”

This article isn’t just another long rant about the hassles of cancelling an online account.  This is the scientific way, and believe it or not, a few places actually made it easy to cancel.  The author of this article, Tom Spring of PCWorld.com, signed up for 32 different online services, and then promptly canceled them a few weeks after.  Not only has he listed the ease of cancelation, he’s also provided numerous pages about the criteria he used to rank the pages, and some hints to make giving up an online service easy.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128206-page,7-c,webservices/article.html

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San Francisco, EarthLink have

 tentative Wi-Fi deal

San Francisco and Earthlink have, as the headline reads, reached a tentative Wi-Fi deal for the city.

“EarthLink has said it plans to offer the free, 300 kilobit-per-second
Wi-Fi service alongside a premium commercial service at speeds of 1
megabit or faster for around $20 a month. This commercial service would
target consumers and businesses looking for faster Internet access.”

“…The EarthLink wireless access plan contrasts with the current
hodgepodge of wireless connections typically offered by public,
nonprofit and government entities in busy “hot spots” in and around
major public buildings or plazas in many cities.

Other cities
including Philadelphia, New Orleans and Portland, Oregon, are also
developing citywide wireless networks of their own.”

“Details of the San Francisco-EarthLink deal can be found at http://www.sfgov.org/techconnect.”

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=internetNews&story
ID=2007-01-06T030447Z_01_N05306761_RTRUKOC_0_US-
WIRELESS-SANFRANCISCO.xml&pageNumber=1&imageid=&cap=&sz=
13&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage1

Quite randomly, I found this article that had a nifty tip for reading code. Say, someone gives you code and you need to edit it, or you need to add to it, but don’t understand what the person has done. It may be quite obvious, but you can read the code as if you just typed it. So you might type out the code again, thinking about what it actually does. I tried it out with some java code i was writing, and voila! it actually made sense. It was quicker than actually trying to puzzle it out mentally. This could be an obvious trick, i just didn’t think of it before.

Happy Coding

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GPS + Remote Control plane = Google Earth

I found this video showing how a remote control airplane, equipped with a digital camera, a gps, and an operator with a virtual reality headset (i suppose a television would work) could cheaply and easily capture high-resolution images just like the ones on Google Earth.  I think it’s an interesting idea, and, corporately, it might work.  Just image what would happen in people could upload their own images of the Earth to Google Earth!

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/
tech-gadget/video-rc-plane-captures-images-for-google-earth

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Earth from Voyager One

I found this photo, and I was more awed almost by the comments about than the photo itself.   The article introduced the photo, and commentary by famous astronomer Carl Sagan.

From the introduction :

“The photo above
was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more
than 4 billion miles in the distance. Having completed it primary
mission, Voyager at that time was on its way out of the Solar System,”
…
“Dr. Sagan was quite moved
by this image of our tiny world. Here is an enlargement of the area
around our Pale Blue Dot and an excerpt from the late Dr. Sagan’s
talk:”

“”We
succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you
look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever
lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and
sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic
doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every
creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant,
every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother
and father…”"

“Think of the endless cruelties visited by
the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable
inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their
misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent
their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the
delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe,
are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely
speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in
all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere
to save us from ourselves.”

http://www.bigskyastroclub.org/pale_blue_dot.htm

No, these aren’t instructions on how to build a fully controlable, fully functional remote control hovercraft.  But these are instructions on how to make a small, cheap, fun hovercraft out of an old cd, some super glue, a balloon, and the top to an old water bottle.  The only hard part I saw with these instructions is how to blow up the balloon once its atatched to the cd…….

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/video-make-a-mini-hovercraft 

If that’s not your thing, heres another short vid on how to have some fun with a small amount of dry ice.  Add a little water, and you’ve got smoke.  Add some soapy water, and you’ve got very cool (literally) bubbles.  Just as a quick safety warning, if you actually try this, dry ice is very very cold, so be careful.  Burns and/or frostbite just aren’t fun.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/286601/dry_ice/   

Filling out a nasty form that wants your phone number? If you dont trust it enough to give your phone number to, you can use craigsnumber.
Give it the time you want the disposable number for, a cellphone number, and voila! you have it for the time you asked for. Its quite useful, though i haven’t had to use it yet. Probably will come in handy later on.

Craigsnumber

BEFORE anyone reads this, tries it, and gets all nervous over this, MOST PEOPLE DO NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT A BUGGED CELL PHONE.

Okay, now that the boldface is out of the way…..
How to tell if your cell phone is bugged. 
I would not reccomend this as a definitive test at all, merely one of those “what-if’s.”

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive//000202.html

 If those of you (spies, diplomats, etc.) who actually worry about this stuff are reading this here, boy have you come to the wrong source, although we do offer a fully functional (and random) tech blog.