sonium's blog

Use frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice), mix it with water and pipe the steam into a PET bottle. When the bottle at roughly 22bar explodes you can shoot for example a toy chicken over more than 80 meters (We had serious problems to build a projectile that is not destroyed by the power of the launch). We built the device for a creativity competition at our university. And well, we could not place an object accurate on 20m but for shure we did it with the biggest impact. Music on Amazon and iTunes If you are curious, here some detail about the construction: For us secure handling was not only an option. We have seen some people that put water and dry-ice together into an bottle close it and put it into a pipe. But you have good chances that it will explode in your hands. So we put an PET bottle into our pipe and connect it with an CNC made adapter to the presure reservoir outside. Beside that, all parts are made from steel and welded. We experienced that a 1.5l coke bottle (actually we used

Hi, I finally got accepted for Google's Summer of Code 2008 . One interesting thing is, that I my semester are two more SoC participants, so the University of Regensburg probably has one of the highest rate of participants at all. For SoC I plan to update my blog about once a week, to allow people to keep track of my progress on creating "A Wizard for PicardQt". PicardQt is a quite innovative mp3 tagger using the Musicbrainz database run by the Metabrainz foundation. From the software side it is written in python and using Qt I really would recommend it to everyone who would like to have a clean and structured music collection. The purpose of the Wizard is, in short, helping new users to set up PicardQt correctly and provide help on further steps after. So having mentioned Qt, this will be my first investment in the project: Buying a book on Qt. As I did stuff with wxWidgets and Gtk using the reference was ok, but a book is simply more comfortable if you don't have

I just wanted to mention my latest work also in this place. It's called pyfmgraph and it's a visualization on listening customs using the data collected by last.fm . I need to mention that this is actually not my idea. If seen this before on http://megamu.com/lastfm/ but since this guy didn't reply on my email I decided doing this by myself. While first looking for a convenient program for this task I found none and decided creating my own using Python . The biggest problem actually was smoothing the curves to have something nice looking. I decided using bezier curves as they are easy to implement and look good. Now the thickness of each colorstream represents the listening frequency at the time which represents the x axis. Furthermore the colors fade from blue tones to red tones which represents the time the artist has been listened for the first time. Blue means earlier while red references to a later time. My current work on the pyfmgraph focuses on implementing vector

Just wanted to mention that I have a new project I'm working on. It's called vortextanks because the player should once be able control some kind of tank and fire simple ballistics like in the game Worm. The special thing however is that the ballistics are influenced by an arbitrary shaped force field. So it like a battle happening between two planets. In the picture you can see the gradient map used to calculate the force on the projectile.