I think MIT coined the term Open Courseware, but there are several other universities that are releasing lecture videos for free online. Now, tracking down a particular subject matter is made quite a bit easier because of a project titled Lecturefox. From the about page:
What is Lecturefox?
It’s all about the joy of learning.
Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. In the category “faculty mix” you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.
I really like what they’ve done in collating these resources into a single index. Tracking the companion blog’s RSS feed, you can get updates about new material that’s become available. Video, audio and text courseware are included in the index and it appears to be actively maintained and comprehensive, especially for computer science and other math/science related courses.
Forget your other new years resolutions. You couldn’t do much better than treating yourself to a free lecture every weekend.
Lecturefox: Free University Lecture Index – Link
Lecturefox Blog – Link
Previously: Bootstrap Education – Link
Christmas time is a great time to obtain large numbers of LEDs very cheaply. This instructable uses 80 LEDs from an LED christmas tree light string to make the venerable 3D LED cube. In this case a 5x4x4 cube.
3D LED Charlieplex Cube from Chrismas Tree Lights – Link
Bidding is over, but check out this PC mod – it’s a TV receiver REKORD (Alexander Radio Factory 1961 – “a victory for soviet union – 12 channels, 16 lamps unseen image quality for the working class folks”) – Link.
If you are worried about crooks scaling the walls to your house, the colored pencil fence will mark your assailant’s clothes before they even get to your door. This should make it much easier to identify them in a police lineup, that is if they don’t change their clothes.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is the process of taking several images at different shutter speeds and combining them into a single photo that contains no washed out or underexposed areas. The result is a surreal, almost too perfectly lit photograph that contains a high level of detail throughout the image.
Photoshop has a built-in HDR photo merging tool which produces some incredible results without too much effort. The image above, from Ryan McGinnis’ excellent Photoshop HDR tutorial, is pretty surreal. It reminds me of a high-res rendering from a video game.
If you’re using the GIMP, you can get similar results by carefully masking and merging layers, or you can download and use the exposure-blend plugin which will simplify the process a little. Below are links to both processes – you can see which works best for you.
Whatever package you use, the important thing is to use a solid tripod and only adjust the shutter speed between shots. For the best results, you’ll also want to set your camera to RAW mode.
More:
How to Create Professional HDR Images in Photoshop – Link
