Hasta La Gadget!

Alan Sailer’s incredible high-speed photos are taken with a death-dealing home-made flash. Photo: Alan Sailer

Alan Sailer is a photographer. He fires things very fast at other things, and then uses a homemade high-speed flash to capture some quite stunning images. Here’s how he got famous:

Was a very, very obscure photographer working in his garage shooting stuff with a pellet rifle and photographing the results with a home built flash.

Then in early 2009, someone linked one of my pictures to a social networking site. My boss came by one day and told me my site was getting a huge number of views. Emails from magazines, newspapers and even Good Morning America started clogging my FlickrMail box.

It was very stressful.

Stressful indeed. Thankfully, things settled down a bit for Alan and now he continues to add to the almost 1,000 high-speed photos on his Flickr photostream.

Why build a special flash? Because even with a flash duration of just 1/40,000th of a second, a typical flashgun isn’t fast enough to capture a speeding bullet, which will travel a blur-inducing third of an inch in that time. An air-gap microflash, however, lights up for just 1/1,000,000th of a second, fast enough to freeze pretty much anything.

The makings of a high-speed air-gap flash are detailed over at the Hobby Robotocs blog, although the author — Maurice Ribble — warns against making one thanks to the dangerous high voltages (35,000v) involved. He is fairly emphatic about this: “Do not build one! If you go against my advice and do build one, I am not responsible for any injury, death, or any other problems it causes,” he says.

The general principle, though, is that you load up a capacitor with 35,000 volts and then dump the electricity into a tiny glass tube which houses two wires with a gap between them. The resulting spark causes an incredibly short burst of light, perfect for capturing the moment that a lime tears through a hunk of raw meat.

Almost as inventive as the flash is Alan’s choice of subject matter. These include bullets hitting Christmas bulbs filled with water or jello, limes hitting, well, everything, and the amazing picture above, of a junk-store ceramic figurine with jello for a brain.

Alan Sailer’s Photostream [Flickr via BoingBoing]

High Speed Air-gap Flash [Hobby Robotics]

See Also:

• Low-Tech Geekery Makes Beautiful High-Speed Photography
• Super Slow-Motion Camera Catches a Wave
• Casio EX-F1 Is a Speed-Demon Snapper
• Lightning Reveals Its Power in Slow Motion

Instead of turning up the lights, the Belkin sisters of the DUO Restaurant & Lounge decided to make their menus glow

The catering business is a weird place. A restaurant or bar will pay minimum wage to its employees, and endure endless staff turnover, but it will waste cash on the most pointless things. Exhibit A, from the DUO Restaurant and Lounge in New York, is the illuminated menu.

Faced with customers squinting to read menus in the subdued mood lighting, the owners — Lorraine and Sabina Belkin — decided against simply turning up the lights. Instead, they had illuminated menus custom built and imported. These two-sided folders are charged every night (by an underpaid minion no doubt) and use a “special backlit film paper” to shine through a paper menu placed on the front.

I tease. It’s actually a pretty neat idea, and certainly beats hosing down your diners with a fire extinguisher every time they try to read a paper menu by candlelight. And even custom made, these illuminated menus (hopefully) cost less than springing for a bunch of iPads, which seems to be another catering industry trend.

DUO Restaurant & Lounge [Sorry — it’s a Facebook page. Thanks, Mary!]

See Also:

• Your Restaurant's Next Menu Is An iPad
• London Restaurant Uses Touchpads for Orders, Projectors for Mood …

In one of many tweaks to the Android interface, a customized boot screen features scrolling lines of code. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

CyanogenMod is one of the biggest hacks to ever hit the Android mobile platform.

It’s got an estimated 500,000 users. Many Android programmers use it as a starting point for their own coding projects. And according to the project’s founder, a number of Google employees have it installed on their Android devices.

Essentially, CyanogenMod is a tricked-out version of the software you’re already running on your Android phone.

Every Android-powered device comes running a version of the operating system, from 1.5 (Cupcake) all the way up to 3.1 (Honeycomb).

CyanogenMod replaces that stock OS with a custom build, letting you make adjustments to your phone that the official version prevents. It opens the door to more sophisticated custom wallpaper, changing the graphic that appears when the phone boots up, or more significantly, tethering your laptop to your phone’s data connection. With CyanogenMod installed, you can even overclock your phone’s CPU, so you can wring every last drop of processing power from it.

“You can customize the hell out of it,” says Steve Kondik, founder of the CyanogenMod project.

How a Hack Got its Start

Of course, it all began with a phone.

Debuting in 2007 as the flagship device for Google’s Android mobile platform, HTC’s G1 smartphone was the alternative to Apple’s immensely popular iPhone.

The G1 — also known as the HTC Dream — could be easily rooted, which meant giving you superuser access to the phone’s naughty bits. Essentially, it made customizing your G1 as easy as pie.

Steve Kondik had been waiting for a phone like the G1 for a long time.

“I had followed a few other Linux-based phones before,” says Kondik, citing offerings from Motorola and Nokia, “but they never had the sort of momentum that a company like Google could bring.”

And Google’s philosophy fit with what Kondik, a software developer working for a mobile content delivery company in Pittsburgh, was looking for: a more “open” platform for coders coming from a background in open source code, like Linux. Android, after all, is built on the Linux kernel.

After each version of Android was made available for download to the public, Google pushed all of the code to an online repository called Kernel.org, free for all to poke, prod and play around with. Developers could take any and all of that code and modify it to their heart’s desire.

Which is exactly what Kondik proceeded to do. “I had been using desktop Linux for ages,” he says, “and I just tried using some of those concepts to tweak the code. I had no idea what I actually wanted to do with the phone.”

After finishing his first version of CyanogenMod, Kondik posted the file to XDA forums, a popular message board in the Android modding community. “All of a sudden, my single-page thread is one hundred pages long,” Kondik says.

Cyanogen Comes of Age

CyanogenMod was a hit. It racked up downloads from community members, each expressing how they liked the amount of control they finally had over their phones.

“As a mobile enthusiast, I like the ability to make changes to the way that my operating system runs,” says Chris Soyars, who works on CyanogenMod.

In essence, CyanogenMod’s popularity can be attributed to the very thing that draws so many to the Android platform: openness, flexibility, control. The Google-led Open Handset Alliance — a coalition of 80 carriers, manufacturers and tech companies all backing the Android platform — espouses these principles, as seen in the Open Source Project mission statement: “We wanted to make sure that there would always be an open platform available for carriers, OEMs and developers to use to make their innovative ideas a reality.”

Apple, on the other hand, fought aggressively to outlaw the practice of jailbreaking its phones, which is akin to rooting an Android device. The U.S. Copyright Office ultimately granted a three-year DMCA exemption for rooting phones, so iPhone users are free to jailbreak their devices without any legal repercussions for the time being. They don’t, however, have access to the operating system’s underlying source code to the same extent Android users do.

While Apple’s controlling, “walled garden” approach has obviously worked well for the company — the company has sold 100 million iPhones as of March of this year — Android has become the alternative solution for geeks and hackers who want more control over their devices.

For many, CyanogenMod is the key to unlocking that control.