http://www.geekbuying.com/item/MK808-Dual-Core-Android-4-1-Jelly-Bean-TV-BOX-Rockchip-RK3066-Cortex-A9-Mini-PC-stick-307415.html

$42, but free shipping so I'll let that slide - no ethernet or GPIO, but does have built-in WiFi and 8GB flash storage and includes a mains adaptor. Will run Linux (with hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES) via the unfortunately-named Picuntu.

Interesting. Anyone got anything better?

If someone finds me a similarly-sized Raspberry Pi alternative for $35 (plus reasonable postage and packing) that has a semi-decent GPU, USB, ethernet, audio and GPIO, and runs Linux - I will buy it and report back.

(The BeagleBone Black looks interesting at $45. I think I might get one of those anyway...)

I put my Raspberry Pi in a box and it appeared on national radio. :-(

(Full documentation here. It's a 1970s transistor radio with WiFi, streaming Radio 4 over a SSH tunnel to the UK, time-delaying audio playback by eight hours or so, in order that everything gets played back at the correct local time in Seattle.)

I don't know what you mean by "old", but my father's old Canon (film) SLR's EF-mount lenses pop right onto my relatively new Canon EOS Rebel T2i (EOS 550D for you non-Americans) which takes EF-S-mount lenses.

EF-S is a subset of the redesigned-from-scratch EF lens mount from 1987 - still considered terribly modern 'cause it's fully electronic with no mechanical linkages between the camera and lens. New EF lenses are definitely still being designed, but yes - EF-S lenses won't fit on an EF-only camera, be it film or full-frame digital.

Canon's 'old' system is the FD lens mount, from 1971. The newer EF mount is almost completely incompatible - you'd need that overly-complicated-adaptor-with-included-optical-elements to get an FD lens to mount on an EF camera.

Compare Nikon's F-mount - lenses from 1959 are potentially mechanically compatible with the latest Nikon dSLRs, but there are huge compatibility charts describing which features may or may not work from any particular lens on any particular camera.

I have other CanonDSLRs that do the "video thing" out of the box, but it sounds. like an interesting experiment.

The particularly exciting thing about this hack is that it's not just a previous non-video-capable camera recording video, it's a camera recording 14-bits-per-channel linear uncompressed RAW video. Much better highlight and shadow recovery, white balance defined afterwards, much more information to work with in general. Some really tricky shots are now possible.

It does not have enough RAM to buffer frames continuously at uncompressed DNG format rates for continuous video recording to SD card, whereas other cameras that were designed specifically for video recording have enough memory to be capable of doing this.

The buffer is important, but it's more about being able to stream a metric shitload of data to a unwholesomely speedy memory card - once you can do the latter, the buffer helps smooth over hiccups but won't let you record indefinitely. The 50D's CompactFlash interface probably shares a design with a higher-end camera, Canon not wanting to waste effort in building a second, deliberately crippled version.

Thus my interpretation is that this camera model's hardware specs were deemed insufficient by the manufacturer for this specific capability, and considering that it can only do burst mode up to $X$ frames before capping out its memory buffer, the manufacturer may have been correct.

Being able to record RAW video is a pretty new feature on any vaguely consumer-oriented camera - it's more sheer luck that Canon's dSLRs have features which make it possible, albeit in a hacky manner. I get the impression that on the 50D, it's grabbing data from the sensor in a manner intended for the rear display or for feeding into the (non-existent) H.264 encoder, and then streaming it out to a big file on the memory card before the memory runs out.

When you've captured the data, it's in a big, opaque file that needs post-processing on a PC to do anything with it - in this case, it gets split into sane DNG files for further processing in software like Lightroom or similar. You can record the video on the camera, but you can't (unless I'm horribly mistaken) play the video on the camera - you need to do plenty of subsequent processing to get it into video form.

Don't get me wrong, it's an incredibly cool hack - partly because it gives access to a feature which few high-end cameras have even today. It's not the manufacturer deliberately locking users out of an easily-implemented feature, it's the manufacturer not even realising that such a feature was possible - albeit in a restricted, but still usable, form.

Canon's actually pretty cool about the use of custom firmware. Plus projects like CHDK and Magic Lantern (and the thing that hacked the 300D into something fancier) have been around for quite a few years, and Canon hasn't tried squashing them.

(Although apparently their hacker-friendly nature most definitely stops when it comes to the EOS-1 line.)

A (cheapskate) friend of mine had an old Russian Lada which inexplicably came with a keyhole for engaging a 'launch mode'. Of course, he didn't have the key, but eventually he managed to pick the lock.

It would appear there'd been some kind of mixup in the relevant Soviet factories and it actually was a launch mode - and this peculiar Lada-Soyuz hybrid launched straight up into the sky, friend included.

He's probably still up there. Wonder if he ever tried docking with Mir?

Temperatures took the longest to get intuitively as I had to live through the various weather patterns before I could feel it. But, even then there wasn't really any advantage to it as I was still comparing it to what I consider a comfortable temperature.

Temperatures are easy.

-18degC: typical freezer.
0degC: freezing! Literally.
4degC: typical fridge.
10degC: bit parky out, definitely put a jumper on.
20degC: room temperature.
30degC: really quite warm.
37degC: human body temperature.
40degC: really bloody hot innit.
100degC: boiling (literally!)

Some of the Europeans I've run into say that Amtrak's on-board experience compares favorably to what they get in their countries, even if the trains are slower.

As someone who's travelled on more than his fair share of trains in Europeland - at least on the west coast, Amtrak trains are super-comfy. Big seats, loads of legroom, decent food (on the last trip - previous trip a few years ago involved a fossilised, tepid space-burger).

Best of all, there's often a carriage specifically for viewing the scenery going past. Of which there is a lot. Possibly including someone describing the scenery going past. I learned a lot about Mount Saint Helens that way. (Main reason for choosing trains - I fly a fair amount also.) Way better views than, say, the Eurostar - where you never even glimpse the sea you've been under.

I vaguely recall the WiFi working when I went from Seattle to Vancouver BC. Not terribly fast, but enough to email friends and family about the delays. (A swing-bridge had got stuck in the 'open' position, and the train had to wait for half an hour or so. The driver had then disappeared somewhere to get a sandwich, causing another ten minutes delay.)

Amtrak is great fun (some of the announcements on that Vancouver trip were gloriously surreal) but it's hardly an efficient means of transportation. I got the train from Seattle to Portland once, and realised it's a similar distance between the two cities as it is from Brussels to Paris. I used to catch the Thalys between Brussels and Paris - in the time it took to go from Seattle to Portland (including a freight-train-induced pause in sidings), I could have gone from Brussels to Paris to Brussels then back to Paris again.

Here you go.

It's not too hard to spot the ISS going overhead when the conditions are right - it's like a fairly bright star going at a fair speed across the sky. It's visible for just minutes at a time - it's sufficiently close to the Earth that you'd definitely need a hefty world-wide network to communicate directly.

(NASA ISS sightings site here.)

Someone comes along playing the sound of a drone on their smartphone and you realized what a waste of time and money it was.

Here you go! Down near "Sound can be a "two-sided coin" in war, he argues."