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For all of November, I’m going to be producing a video for every weekday! I’m kicking it off early with this video about Raphael Abrams probe thing!

Raphael Abrams of teuthis is one of those people who doesn’t sit around daydreaming projects up, he just does them. He was recently featured in Wired magazine and is a forerunner in the open source hardware movement.

We were recently chatting about digitizing human bodies and making 3D bodyscans and Raphael jumped into action, created a file to make some lasercut parts. Together with his acrylic bits and a stepper motor and an arcade button he made this probe.

Stay tuned for a follow up episode when he finishes the coffin sized XY platform and starts digitizing humans at an amazing 1 DPI!

This is the first video in a series of videos that I’m calling “Things” I’m going to be putting out a Things video everyday in November! Subscribe in iTunes to stay up to date and have the show downloaded automatically in iTunes

Update: if you want to subscribe using the feed, it’s here! http://brepettis.com/blog/feed/

Probe HD Video File

Now I have the information I need to make a fake me with realistic dental records and put them in the basement like in that movie swordfish.

Dental technology has gotten pretty impressive. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to the dentist and it’s really cool that there are digital xray sensors available.

Best Friends Forever - Silent 700 Model 707, originally uploaded by bre pettis.

So these two machines are connected via a telephone cable.

You start them up and set them both to online. On one, press CMD and then O and it will write out “originate”. This sets it up to put a tone out on the wire that initiates contact.

On the other machine you press CMD A and it will write out “answer” and then they are connected.

Whatever you type on one is typed on the other as well. We had a little bit of luck hooking it up to a computer and attempting to cripple the modem to speak at 300 baud.

Back when these came out in 1983, these terminals were $4000.

Earlier today I was drooling over the Red camera. They are freaking HOTT. They look like some cross between a mad max car and a space satellite. The story I heard was that the guy who started Oakley sunglasses basically said something to the effect of, “The sunglasses were just a way for me to build up enough money to make awesome cameras.”

The cameras look really great and have got some amazing optics and are basically everything I’ve been craving in a camera. The Scarlet, even though it’s the smallest one, looks completely wonderful.

On the flipside, over on Steve’s blog, I found this contraption. I’ve seen a few of these kinds of things around, but this is the cleanest one yet. What they do is make a lightbox kinda thing so that you turn the lens into a slide viewer with a fast old school photography lens and then you throw a macro lens on a video camera and point it at the screen on your viewer and you’ve got an effect that you can really only get with really nice and big 35mm film cameras… well, and now probably, the Red.

Fifty People, One Question: Restored from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

This set up allows for a very thin focal plane so that only a few inches will be in focus. The thing that I like about this video is that even though the focusing effect is a major player in the video, instead of distracting us from the people, it serves the message and brings us closer to the people who are the subjects in the video.

I made a bunch of franken-cameras for shooting stills, but never made a video franken-camera. I’m going to put this one on my todo list!