Icarus Project

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Icarus Project - Photo of space from balloon and digital camera

A man from Highburton, West Yorkshire, Great Britain takes pictures of space and Earth using a helium balloon and a Canon digital camera he purchased on ebay.

He buys weather balloons from a supplier in the United States; pictures from balloon-borne cameras long pre-date the space program. He uses an off-the-shelf GPS locator, which gets signals from U.S. satellites, so he can track the balloon on Google maps. He bought a Canon pocket digital camera (a model discontinued in 2008) and attached a circuit board so that it would take pictures every five minutes.

I have to say that this is one interesting bit of engineering, and the results are quite impressive. The photos are just as good as the ones from the NASA program.

Tweets of the Week

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  • Famous NBA player sighting: Kevin Johnson (KJ) from the Phonix Suns, sitting in a breakfast joint in the NY Times Building, NYC #
  • http://bit.ly/8ZsyBU. Wether you support HCR or not, have to laugh at JoeBiden's frank assessment of the bill as he introduced Barak #
  • Syracuse looking good. Keep it going for one more half! #
  • Holy crap. Go Northern Iowa!! #

Night Owls

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This is interesting but not surprising. A recent study said that people check their social sites at all times of the day – morning, noon and night. Checking Facebook at 3AM in the morning? Seeing what folks are doing on Foursquare at 2:30AM on a Monday? You are not alone! What is most interesting is that folks are checking their social graph to find out what the big news of the day is. And we wonder why the big news organizations are struggling.

Tweets of the Week

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  • Lets Go Orange!! Lets not make the 1st round of the Tournament a complete disaster for the Big East #
  • The Big Least in the NCAA Tournament. Hoyas get crushed, Marquette loses, Nova barely won, ND lost. Not good. #
  • Murrrrrrrrrrrrray State! #
  • Syracuse stumbled to a no. 1 seed..don't like draw in West. SU lost to UVM a few years ago in 1st rd and if we win, we get the Zags. Not #
  • Crazy weekend storm knocked out power all over the place. Trees down, branches all over the place. Someone take me away! #
  • Just changed my twitter background, check it out! Found it at http://www.TwitterBackgrounds.com #

The Future of Display Advertising

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…runs through Google.  On the official Google Blog today, a “pat on the back” post about the future of display advertising, and the integrations they have launched over the past two years since the acquisition of DoubleClick.  Yet another step towards ensuring that all significant online advertising will be run through either Google’s AdSense platform, or DoubleClick’s display platform.

I find it ironic that Google assails Apple for creating a “closed” platform when it comes to technology and applications via iPhone/iTunes, yet it is turning around and building just as closed, centralized a platform when it comes to online advertising.

The CM Summit

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I’m settling in nicely to my new job over here at Federated Media. I’m working on some great stuff. And to that end, I wanted to let everyone know of an event that FM is hosting in June here in NYC.

So I’m proud to announce the 2010 CM Summit, which will take place on June 7th and 8th at the Hudson Theater and Millennium Broadway Hotel in NYC. We will have some amazing speakers and conversation, which I will let our fearless leader John Battelle speak to in his post on the FM blog. As a preview, some of the booked speakers include Avner Ronen of Boxee, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of The New York Times Corp. Here is the full list of speakers.

Some additional resources for your viewing pleasure:

CM Summit Website: http://www.cmsummit.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cmsummit
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/CM-Summit-NY
LinkedIn Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1005697

So book early. Every previous one has been sold out. Its going to rock!

Lego Star Wars Droid Control Ship

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A guy named Paul Yperman spent the past two years constructing a scale model of the Star Wars Droid Control Ship from scratch, using schematics he found in a Star Wars Cross Sections book in a bookstore.

He found a software on the Internet that helped him figure out the orb in the middle and then he continued from there. 30,000 pieces later and 2 years of building, he was finished. The God sent idea was finally done, and as a result, he constructed one of the worlds most elaborate Star Wars LEGO creations. Forget the small 200 piece builds you can buy off the shelf. This one was carefully executed and took some custom ordering to fit the purpose.

This is just another amazing example of the super cool things that can be built with Lego.