Technabob » macro

Macro Cell Lens Band Lets Your Smartphone Get Up Close and Personal

Range — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:00:50 +0000

I’ve never been one to add gizmos to my smartphone, but this handy little macro lens band does make a lot of sense, especially if you are using your cell phone to take a lot of close-ups. The added benefit is that it doesn’t cost much, but looks effective.

This low-tech solution to adding a close-up lens to your smartphone is definitely interesting. The Macro Cell Lens Band allows you to easily mount a tiny convex lens onto your phone, thanks to the included elastic band, which can stretch up to a diameter of 16 inches. This means it will also work on tablets, but hopefully it won’t snap easily.

Once attached, it provides the ability to grab sharp images of stuff just inches from your phone, though they do blur and distort towards the edges, as you can see in the example images below:

Photojojo sells the Macro Cell Lens Band for $15 (USD).

Brinno Gardenwatchcam: Time-Lapse Digital Garden Camera Shoots Video Slightly More Interesting Than Watching Paint Dry

Technabob — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:50:58 +0000

Want to know if your green thumb is really green? This nifty garden gadget lets you keep watch over your budding plants 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from across the globe if you want.

The Brinno GardenWatchCam observes your flowers as they grow, taking time lapse digital photos at intervals ranging from 1 minute to 24 hours apart. Just set the camera in front of your plants, set the desired interval, and start capturing your garden as it takes shape. You can also include time and date stamps on your images if you want. Here’s an example video taken from the GardenWatchCam’s time lapse images.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The camera is designed to take 1.2 megapixel macro images from as little as 20-inches away from your subject, or can be set to a distance focus mode for plants more than 20 inches away. Images are captured in JPEG format and can be saved into an AVI video file, and you can store up to 2GB of pictures on any USB flash drive. The camera runs on 4-AA batteries and should be able to shoot images for 4 to 6 months depending on the interval you set.

Of course, you don’t have to use it to shoot time lapse videos of flowers. Pretty much anything that takes a long time to happen is a potential subject…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

You can find the GardenWatchCam over at Amazon for $139.99 (USD). More example videos can be seen here.

Digital Clock Needs 48 Analog Hands to Tells Time

Technabob — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:37:39 +0000

It took me a second to figure out what was going on when I first got a look at this table full of analog clocks. But once I stood back from my screen, I realized that none of the clocks have the correct time and the whole thing is a macro timepiece that tells the time using 24 individual clocks.

Created by Swedish designers Humans Since 1982, the Clock Clock installation features 48 electronically-controlled analog clock hands which automatically rotate into the proper positions to form a giant digital display.

Here’s a video of Clock Clock in action to give you a better idea of how it works:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

If you happen to be in Sweden this summer, the Clock Clock will be on display at the Röhsska Design Museum June through mid-August 2009.

Brilliant idea. Maybe someday they’ll build a miniature version I can put up on my mantle.

[via dezeen]

Classic Arcade Games Excel in Spreadsheets

Technabob — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 11:30:53 +0000

Sure, you could use your copy of Microsoft Excel to create the business model for your next big multi-million dollar venture, or to calculate last month’s sales for your used car dealership, but why not put it to some really good use and play some arcade games with it instead?

Apparently, programming video games using insanely complex Excel Visual Basic macros is a bit of an art form in Japan. As a matter of fact, everything from Pac-Man to Space Invaders to Missile Command has been recreated with astounding detail using Excel macros.

Other spreadsheet games include versions of Donkey Kong, Dig Dug and Tetris. All in all, there are literally dozens of arcade classics that can be played in Excel. I’m especially impressed by the version of Arkanoid, complete with mouse and audio support (you don’t even know you’re in Excel when this one plays).

To play these games for yourself, just download the game you want from this website. Simply extract the .XLS from the archive (you may need something that can open LZH archives for some of these files), enable macros, and run the macro titled “start” or similar. Some of the games are a bit hit or miss due to problems with Japanese characters in the code, but I was able to get quite a few of them to play just fine on my machine. As a matter of fact, I was able to get a number of these games to run in the latest, greatest version of Excel 2007.

Once you’re up and running you can play all your favorites in between calculating standard deviations and building your loan amortization worksheet.