Programming Primate

Space – who needs a rocket?

Monday, 23 March 2009 01:25 by bendaniel

Four teenage Spanish students have successfully managed to capture magnificent photos of space from over 30 kilometres above Earth using a home-made, unmanned space vessel.

Phhhf, I call photoshop on those rays of light coming from the top-right corner...

Proving you don’t need a billion dollar budget to accomplish such a feat, the main components of their unmanned space probe was a 117 dollar digital camera and a latex balloon!

Neeeeerrrrrrds!!

Nerds.

So, inspired by their achievement and convinced I could out-geek a team of pimple-faced nerd burgers, I set out to one up their efforts with my own remote controlled space vessel. The first step was coming up with a superior design.

Initial Blueprint 

As you can see my design was fully sick and kicked their ship’s design’s ass. Unfortunately the local Tandy store didn't have the parts I needed so I had to make do with a slightly scaled back model.

Budget Space Exploration

It wasn’t long assembled before all systems were go and it was ready to launch.  No doubt much to NASA’s embarrassment the launch was a complete success – no part of the ship exploded or anything and in no time the vessel was well over hundreds of centimetres in the air. I tracked the probe’s flight path using a pair of binoculars. Eventually the probe’s fuel supply (helium) depleted and it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. I salvaged the camera and got the film developed. Check out these awesome pics!

Here’s a great shot of Toowoomba (overcast as usual).

The Gardin City

I was really glad that I splashed out for a disposable camera with a flash on it, otherwise this photo of the dark side of the moon wouldn’t have come out:

 What a second, that's no moon

Here’s a fantastic photo of…errr…umm?…hmmm….

What happens when you pull God's finger?...

Here’s a lucky shot of The Cow Nebula.

The Cow Nebula

But this last shot is perhaps the most amazing and controversial. It looks like just a bunch of stars right? Wrong! If you look really hard you will notice a mysterious blurred object in the top left corner of the photo! <Cue X-Files music> Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woooooo.

Foo

Categories:   Happenings
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Hello World 2.0

Saturday, 7 March 2009 19:21 by bendaniel

Hi there and welcome to my new blog Programming Primate. Put your feet up and make yourself at home. Okay, I didn’t mean that literally, please get your feet off my coffee table!

Even if you’re not a programmer don’t be scared off by the website name. Most of my blog posts aren’t even programming related and I try to keep all my posts humorous. If you’re not already familiar with my old blog then here’s a few things you can expect to see here:

  • Happenings
  • Jokes / Cartoons
  • Gadgets
  • Explosions
  • Robots
  • World Domination Plans
  • And possibly the odd programming post but mostly all that other stuff
    Feel free to check out some of my older posts and/or subscribe to my blog to get notified of updates.

Cheers, Ben

Categories:   Happenings
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Guitar Hero World Tour

Tuesday, 10 February 2009 01:04 by bendaniel

Being fans of Guitar Hero 3 for X-Box 360 we decided to buy Guitar Hero World Tour.

GHWT Box

We bought the full kit which includes:

  • A much better looking guitar: check out that beautifully vanished plastic base!

New Guitar

  • A rocking USB microphone:

Microphone 

  • And perhaps most exciting: the drum kit:

Drums

Star Power!

If you've played Guitar Hero before you'll be familiar with Star Power.

It's basically a power up which doubles the amount of points you earn while playing.

Tilting your guitar up activates star power (acting like a tool is optional).

Also once activated, electricity shoots off your character and for a moment everything tastes blue.

Tool Power!

Star Power on the drums?

So it doesn't take a genius to work out that if tilting one's axe activates star power for a guitarist then tilting the drum kit must activate it for a drummer!

Drummer Noob 

Unfortunately I couldn't seem to activate star power on our defective drum kit. In fact there must have been something really wrong with our drum kit because I was completely rubbish at it, lol.

At least that's what I thought until my diva wife pushed me off and jumped on! ;-)

Drumming Diva, Jules Grohl!

In fact, Jules got so into it she didn’t even notice part of the drum kit break and fly right off as she hammered down on the kit!!

In all seriousness though, we had the kids on the weekend and all four of us played in a band together. It was great family fun. Chloe played lead guitar, Alex played bass, I played the drums (mainly cause neither of the kids wanted to, lol) and Jules showed us she's a closet rapper on the mic! Her rendition of "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" would have made the Beasty Boy's proud! lol ;-)

Categories:   Games | Happenings | Toys
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