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$50 Aerial Digital Photography from a Balloon
jizmonkey writes "This guy built
a balloon to
take digital aerial photographs from thousands of feet up. It cost
less than $50 altogether, including the image sensor, controller, and
balloon. The circuit is surprisingly straightforward: just a hacked Vivitar
minicamera, a 555 timer
chip driving a relay through a voltage regulator, and a one-meter
party balloon like the ones you see at used car dealerships. It just so
happens that the entire circuit, strapped to a piece of a pizza box and
tied to a really long string, is light enough to be lifted by the balloon.
What could low-cost aerial photography be used for? I'm sure some people have
some ideas...."
Implications? An increased number of one-meter-balloon purchases and camera-raining-down-from-sky events in suburbia... Incidentally, you can get nice high-res aerial images of almost every major populated area in the US for just under the price tag of this rigged weather balloon: Keyhole's Earthviewer software and service, $49.95 a month... By all means, though, if it's an image from above of the new 2:1 scale Star Wars vessel you built in your backyard that you need and Keyhole's archived shots won't do it for you, be my guest and rig one of these babies up!
...how long will it be before he gets sued by Barbra Streisand?
Bash script for FP whores
Since most are private - no public access - then .... well .... here's the soution
I guess after you publish a 6th grade book report as a review, there's no point left in pretending to have any shame.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You have the perfect "It was an alien spacecraft that crashed" story which the government tried to cover up by saying it was a photography balloon.
Good thing it's so cheap -- he'll have to study the photos very carefully if he wants to recover it when the helium finally leaks out!
It would have to have WindowsCE Goverment edition - with the tag-line, "Who do you want to watch today?"
...so, what does the Stanford quad look like from the air?
Being near the SF Bay Area he could have come up with better picture locations. How about the Golden Gate Bridge? Palace of Fine Arts? Nice job with the balloon and camera though.
Maybe he's friends with this guy...
Anybody know the regulations that apply for balloons? I know the rules for gliders (I'm a glider pilot) but I have no clue about balloons.
As a private pilot, I hope he keeps this thing below 1,000 feet.
This guy is building weapons that rival Iraq's! Invade!
"Mother, should I run for President? Mother, should I trust the government?"
Pictures of healthy people doing fun things outdoors in the sun!??!
NOOOOO!!!!1 THIS IS SLASHDOT
...as Kite Aerial Photography. Same idea, except you suspend the camera from a kite.
Naked Sunbathing
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
What, was Penisbird's submission not good enough?
You know what every guy is thinking...some sweet shots of your neighborhood babe suntanning!
this criticism from a guy named "larry bagina?"
/.
Too funny. Only on
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Kite Aerial Photography
Mosaics of kite aerial photographs
Aerial photography using a balloon at Burning Man
Other types of aerial photography (balloon, helicopter, kite, even periscope!)
It reads as follows:In english, it basically means that you are out of luck trying to get camera footage of anything if there is so much as a cloud in the sky.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
But if you're gonna take photos, this is far more entertaining
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Speaking of gadgets to use in projects like this one...
In the July 24th Boston Globe, Ritz is advertising something called a "Dakota Digital Single-Use Camera."
Now, I've seen a "digital single-use cameras" from Kodak which just used film, and the only thing "digital" about them is that when you send them in for processing, they scan the negatives and send you a CD along with the prints.
But this one SAYS "Delete and Retake Last Shot," which, to me, suggests that it really IS digital. It's $10.99. It says it will take 25 images. No indication of resolution. And no indication of precisely what you do after you have taken the pictures.
I probably need to get one and crack one open. It sounds like a very interesting device for hacking.
It will be very annoying if it turns out that $10.99 means that you pay $60.00 up front and get $49.01 back when you bring it in for "processing," though.
Googling on "Dakota Digital Single-Use Camera" and even "Digital Single-Use Camera" doesn't turn up anything except that phony Kodak film camera...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
it's not funny - it's true
I spoke to a guy doing aerial photogrophy using a blimp (not motorized ... essentially a balloon). He said his main business was doing promotional photos for land developers and local governements (Gold Coast, Australia).
I just had a vision of releasing prisoners early, and using this balloon/camera thingy to track their every move. It hovers over them all the time, and feeds pictures back to some central point so their whereabouts can be monitored at all times. They're free to go wherever the rest of us can go, but they have this camera hovering over them all the time until their sentence is up. Think of the savings in jail accomodation!
Then the fatal flaw hit me: the ex-con goes for a job interview, holding a 1m balloon with a camera suspended below it, on a piece of string, in an office trying to describe how he'd be a great employee.
The local bad guys' public bar would look like a fairground, full of shiny balloons. "Mum, can we go play in that new inside park?" would be the cry from the kindergarten set.
Or imagine a typical NBA game. With the number of balloons that would be floating over the players, nobody would be able to watch the game. Hold on - there's no reason the balloons couldn't contain advertising.
Well, actually that's several fatal flaws, but I still think it has "weird and cool" merits that override the "it's a really, really dumb idea" issues. This idea has a really great application somewhere, but I just can't see it at the moment.
Gotta get more sleep tonight
Uncompressed Bitmaps + Slashdot = Very Bad
http://vpizza.org/~jmeehan/balloon/
A-OK \A-O-'kA\, adverb or adjective, very definitely OK.(Websters http://www.m-w.com/)
If the government wanted to use this baloon to spy on its citizens, this would cost 50 million dollars.
This is an unmanned tethered balloon. Unless I'm missing an obscure bit of aeronautical jargon here, this regulation doesn't apply. And for good reason I'd gather, since a tethered balloon can be reeled in, but a free balloon (like most weather balloons) goes where it wants once you release it.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Please quantify "ass expensive".
Ok, so I have two ideas here. One i think someone has already implemented.
I'm first thinking that balloons could be a really easy way to get a wireless network to cover a large area. A stripped down wireless unit, a super light battery ( or solar/wind power source), and a really large balloon. Put a few of these up on long strings, and i could cover cambridge or back bay (Boston) pretty quickly I would think.
Ok, second idea. What about some wireless hookup for the digital camera, so that you could put a camera up there, and not take it down often, but control the camera (zoom?) - or at least take the pictures, and then transfer them to the ground. I would think that this could really rock. Get 4-8 of those party balloons (at what point is this a 'weather balloon' and are there any laws about these?), so you could pick up 2-4 lbs, then, mount the stuff on a little box. Put a few strings on it, and let it fly. Snap snap snap, download the camera, zoom in, etc...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Funny that this story should come up; I was making an exceptionally long commute to a project today (80 miles each way, 40 of which were in heavy traffic) and was thinking about an analysis of traffic patterns - starting with the hypothesis that the density and speed of vehicles in each lane constitutes a form of pressure and the how this is affected by the number of cars entering and exiting at each intersection, and also the addition / subtraction of lanes along the course of the route. I was thinking that this could be accomplished with some custom image recognition software and a medium-resolution video stream from a several cameras a few thousand feet up (I was thinking helicopters, circling aircraft, and even blimps, but all would be much too expensive). I hadn't considered that a balloon might work so well.....
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Photos
or
High Altitude Balloon Project
William Freeman has a good page on his MIT AI lab homepage about doing the same thing except using kites to take pictures. (Btw, check out William T Freemans MIT e-mail address...)
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/wtf/kite.html
And another link to a good site is Charles Benton's site.
http://www.arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/
Its interesting to note that there are lots of methos for creating unstructured panoramas. Where you have a set of images and the algorithm does its best to determine how to stick the images together to form a panorama. You could imagine a similar algorithm using these images to auotmatically create aerial maps... might make a good paper.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/22/171124 2&mode=nested&tid=137
copy and paste, for those of you mad that i didn't use html!
The article is located here, and it basically talks about a guy who built a balloon with a mobile computer accessible over ham radio through ssh. It is a very good read and he gives plenty of technical details and photos (though not the kind of photos you might be looking for).
Wait, so this involves going outside? Forget that.
matguy(.com)
The FAA would have a hemorage. This is illegal. If it's anywhere near a flight path, people could get seriously hurt. Think of the damage this could do sucked into an engine.
This isn't cool tech - it's stupid.
Poking around this guy's site: http://www.stanford.edu/~lindholm/chinf_tal.html (WARNINGNot lunch safe; don't look at this and eat.)
I'm all for individuality. But posting scat shots on your Stanford web page is nuts.
Besides being just gross (a not presented in any sort of artistic manner; it's just "here's some scat"), it's hardly a way to get on the good side of future employers. But I read elsewhere that he flits about the globe: Ireland, Scotland, Japan, all during his stay at college. So perhaps working for a living like the rest of us is not a concern.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
In populated areas fixedwing can't go below 1000' (legally) but rotor can. I routinely fly between 500 and 1000' feet. I'd probably see one of these things in time but if I didn't it wouldn't be fun. Probably wouldn't damage the aircraft (unless I got real unlucky and a blade hit the camera itself) but it would surely scare the bejeezus out of me. Birds are bad enough, lots of little cameras in ballons does not sound fun.
ehintz
For a modest increase in budget, you can get a big increase in the quality of the photos. In the really light, fairly cheap, and better quality digtal camera catagory are the AIPTek Pencam 1.3 and Mustek Mini3 cameras. I bought my AIPTek Pencam for about $70 and it takes pretty good digital photos at 1.3MP.
Both of them are fairly easy to modify as well and there are sites that show in detail how to take them apart and enable other triggering options - such as a 555 or a radio controlled trigger. One example: http://www.rc-cam.com/camman.htm
Haha secret squirrel paparazzi shots.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
how about this cheaper alternative.
While a 555 timer offers flexibility, I decided a christmas tree light and relay required less effort. Let's see if I've got that page up. Yep Dinky Cox page lacks space!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm working on a similar project (well, if you consider trying to raise the money to be "working"). Being a professional photographer, I want professional results, and that means remote preview through the camera via USB (why oh why don't prosumer cameras come with FireWire?) and of course USB craps out after about 5 meters. But I just found out that someone finally did the impossible, a 1000ft USB extension device. It's an active microprocessor controlled relay device, you need one at both ends, runs off 12v so I could use a 12v battery to power it. But now I can't find the damn vendor. Anyone know who makes this device?
this guy is taking pictures of stuff he shouldnt be. he needs to be sent to guantanamo bay and tortured/killed immediately!!
someone's probably mentioned these already
a service of this sort could be useful to municipalities , civil engineering firms , as well as commercial/residential developers
Well, you got the monitoring part right, but we all know that the primary use of balloons as applied to misbehaving prisoners is to smother them for later retrieval.
Be seeing you.
This is nothing new. This has been done in agriculture for decades. A guy at my church, who is an agriculture professor at a local community college, used this method to take aerial photos of the site for our congregation's new church. I know him pretty well, he said that method has been used for a long, long time.
Here's some of what I saw.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
ah, come on. You really want a 4 MPixel camera up there.
--- Eat my sig.
More voyeur for us /.ers
Did it land hundreds of miles away? Did you go chasing it across the corn fields with a four-wheeler?
...The site is neato, but one thing..This guy must not have spooled alot of line in his lifetime...I used to fish a whole lot and changing line can be about as annoying as getting a rootcanal in the back of a pickup truck (Another thing I've gone through, but its too difficult to talk about right now..someone pass the scotch..)..
And don't forguet to drop one in roswell... :)
news sidenote. Rapper Ice T and white girlfriend at SPIKE launch party at the Playboy Mansion. Rapper Ice T and white girlfriend
I bought a $37 Sipix Digital Cam which is pretty much identical to the Vivitar one used in the article.
It took one AAA battery but on a little sticker on the battery case it said it was rated for 3V. Which explains why it was crap. It was horribly under powered. Out of a several dozen pictures all of two came out. I took it back and got the AipTek Trio for $10 more and it works far better. Every picture I take comes out fine. It takes 2 AAA but that makes all the difference.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
If you don't want to spend all the time, you can download some pretty cool aerial maps from Terra Server USA. The pics are B&W and circa 1994 (at least, in Southern California), which makes them less current, but kinda cool to "look back in history".
... these are in color, and might be a year old.
Additionally, MapQuest has added aerial maps as an option (enter address, retreive regular map, then click the "Aerial Photo" tab
when this guy built this he really went on the
cheap side. that ballon is a condom with cardboard
and electrical tape all over it. it's pretty funny
and no doubt a valid slashdot story all the way.
Total (Balloon) Information Awareness. That's right. I can see you, right now. By the way, put that down, it's disgusting.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
The AipTek can run on a single 1.5v battery but it has the same problems as the Sipix: it can't process an image fast enough and ends up with horribly blurred and underdeveloped pictures.
It's trivial to take the camera apart and end up with a 1"x2" camera. A small wire is needed to hold the lens in place and then a 2 AAA holder can be wired up to it. The LCD status display isn't needed.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I could see myself using this for survelliance...when I get my PI license...if I have a case watching someone at a car dealership...
Set them up and use them for Airborne recon of M$ and RIAA Headquarters, and if the returned pictures show the HQ below, you press a button to release a small canister of urine, or other disgusting liquid of your choice.
Just a sec, there's some guy in a black trenchcoat at the door...
This isn't a good idea unless you are a terrorist.
Many states require that you have an overhead shot of large parcels of land ie. farm sales before the deal can be compleated.
Look at the last picture. See that latex ring? That is no part of a balloon. It's a condom!
Sometimes I by those cheap plastic delta kites and see how high I can get them. It's a cheap date and alows for much much more talking and getting to know a girl than a movie.
They mentioned using $2 900 yard spools of monofilament at Target and Wal-mart. In my expirience the $2 spool are adequate but they break easy, have horible stretch characteristics, have massive diameter (thus weight) and are just a general pain to work with.
When I fly kites past 1,600 yards I much prefer Berkely XL or XT (6lb or higher) fishing line. Much higher quality, lower diameter, less stretch (for the XT) and very forgiving (for the XL). Of course loosing a $1 platic kite is really no big deal. My record is 3,000 yards (not straight up of course), and yes... I was to lazy to wind the whole thing back up, I snipped the line.
I should look into this ballon photography, sounds like a fun hobby.
~Z
The pizza you bought to get that pizza box cost at least $10... More like $20 :P
- Voxel
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
http://www.californiacoastline.org/
has a link to the latest in Barbra Steisands lawsuit.. Her house is on the coast and is included in there CA coast photo collection.
This is the page on the lawsuit with links to stories and a picture of her house on it.. Funny those guys. I hope they win.
Of course, you have to avoid the problems this guy had. (There a number of versions of this one. Apply salt.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Just hang out near a college dumpster for a few minutes and you're sure to find some for free. I get 2 pizzas every 3 days.
Of course, you should check also check out "$240 Worth of Pudding," but now I'm off topic....
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
but what about Kite Aerial PANORAMIC Photography ?
http://www.philohome.com/kitephoto/kapp.htm
Dude, letting 3,000 yards of monofilament line loose is SERIOUS LITTERING!!! YOu should get a big ass fine for that one, $5000 is not enough.
To get the camera in the air, there are basically three options: a balloon, a kite, and a rocket. ...or a helicopter or a plane or a trebuchet or a ballista or a bow and arrow or a bird or...
All things in moderation; including moderation
What would be really cool is a radio control blimp with a webcam, small computer, a wireless nic. A balloon just seems to limited and hard to recover..With a good enough radio, or other long range method once could deflate the blimp to a safe landing in high winds and maybe use gps to go get it..
no shit serious littering.
Next time just use a cheap fishing rod and reel, you lazy beotch.
That's pretty cool, but check out Kite Aerial Panoramic Photography from one of my heros, Philo!
here you go......
n /i ndex.htm
http://mysite.verizon.net/johnsullivan2k/balloo
He could save some weight with just a few little mods. First, get rid of the voltage regulator and just put a current limiting resistor in series with the relay. Second, use the 9v battery as the power supply for the camera. All he would have to do is measure the current the camera uses and put a resistor in series with it to drop the voltage (or maybe two resistors acting as a voltage divider if the camera doesn't use much current). Third, remove the case from the camera and just use a couple pieces of tape to hold everything together. 4, if he's using the 9v to power the whole thing, the timer is going to have a common ground with the camera so he can use another method to trigger the shutter and save the weight of the relay. One option would be to tie the output of the 555 to the shutter through a couple voltage dividing resistors to trigger it directly bypassing the switch, but this would depend on how the trigger circuit in the camera works.
As for the timing, he could add another 555 timer as a delay to start the second one after the balloon is at the desired height. Then it wouldn't matter how long it took to get it in the air and more of the pictures would be usable.
I did this, almost... At least I downloaded a whole suite of high detail aerial photographs of our lake, which is fairly big (about 20 by 4 km).
Then I glued all aerial photographs together in Gimp producing a huuuge map.
Then I imported it into Sodipodi and drew a vectorised contour.
Now, I am searching for a nice GIS program where I incorprate my freshy-fresh +4000 GPS-coordinates! Any help appreciated! Perhaps Grass is the best? It seems intimidating however.
I'm sure some people have some ideas....
They're going to take aerial photos of CNN transcripts?
"thousands" of feet? He says that he gets up to 600 feet and talks about the possibility of getting to 900 feet.
-deane
... but I could have taken that from atop a step ladder.
Photoplane takes aerial pictures using a small remote-controlled plane.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I'd love to see an application of this combined with wardriving. Warballooning perhaps?
http://extnasa.usu.edu/on_target/nir_tutorial/ni r_seven_webpage.html
I have been working as a graduate student at Utah State University where we have been using a helium filled blimp to collect near-infrared (NIR) imagery of bare soil and vegetation. It is similar to the one shown, but we use two Nikon 950 digital cameras and attach a NIR filter to one of them. The filter is very close to those used on Sony "night-vision" cameras to see through clothing. The imagery is then taken into Photoshop and analyzed to determine crop stress. Some of the other uses that we are looking at include measuring soil organic carbon (carbon sequestration) levels and weed detection. These experiments have been performed in conjunction with a NASA Geospatial Extension grant at the University. You can check out the blimp in all its glory at the URL.
If you really want to do this, you are probably looking into a *very* custom board - I would be thinking something like a camera connected to a microcontroller communicating via 802.11 to the ground. It would have to be completely wireless for what you are wanting to do, unless you are planning on using a very large balloon envelope, or hydrogen (and even then, you would need a large envelope, but not quite as big - probably 12-20 feet in diameter)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
or radio-controlled airplanes and helocopters?
Shouldn't be too difficult to put a camera on one of those...video camera even. The ever shrinking size and weight of digital devices opens up a lot of possibilities.
Screw monofilament. Braided dacron is the way to go. Its much stronger and lighter and almost zero stretch. Yeah it'll cost you more, but what the hey, its for science. Sold at a fly fishing shop near you, unless you live at the South Pole.
You get 2 pizzas every 3 days by hanging out near dumpsters?
No thanks, I'd rather not get my pizza out of dumpsters.. I prefer my pizza with cheese not encrusted with fly's.
- VOxel
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
There was more than one level to the hoax, not just the condom balloon. For the shot of the guy holding the condom, he dropped his shorts in the Stanford Quad. His floppy disk casts a shadow on his nuts and leg.
I live in an apartment where a newlywed couple sneaks up to the roof to do something every night. So, I am going to build one using a big yellow smiley-face balloon to find out exactly what these two are up to =).
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Check out Mapquest for areial photos of much of the country. Resolution, color, and age of photos vary by location.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
The 'experiment' in the parent post was not scientific. It was for impressing a girl. This might be even more impressive.
I guess this means that there will be a new set of annoying pop-up ads replacing the existing set of annoying pop-up ads for x10 cameras.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
I worked on an archaeological survey last summer and constantly wondered why my crew of about a dozen or so people was hired in the first place to survey the land. We had to hike to previously "found" sites and use a bunch of pretty unimportant measures of erosion, vegetation cover, as well as photograph and map sites. It was all circa 1920's technology (with the exception of our GPS's), and the data we colleted was very questionable (like the slope of cliff sides and the soil content). The work we did took about three months, and we only covered a tiny part of the national park we worked in.
/. post wanted suggestions about what this could be used for:
I remember talking with one of the crew members about all of this stuff. He had worked on survey teams for about 20 years and he agreed that there were better ways to get things done. He pointed out that a pilot in a prop airplane equipped with some sort of high grade photography equipment (that would let you take infrared and other sorts of photographs) could do all of our work in less than a week. Those photos coupled with already established means of having computers analyze photos could give us extremely accurate data on soil content, vegetation cover, slope, site size, etc. He said that, unfortunatley, it is extremely expensive to do this as well (it could be done with satellites, but we did't have access to satellites that would give us the resolution we needed).
So our conversation moved on, and I wondered about a more human scaled flying baloon-digital- photography idea. He mentioned a friend of his in grad school who had tried this, and had basically been rejected by his faculty for trying such things.
This article shows that we weren't the only ones thinking about this sort of thing. It's too bad that the invention of a technology does not always lead to its widespread use. But since the
Survey Archaeology.
Ok, I'm an EE so I need to offer some advice...
First, I don't see a protection diode on that relay. You need a diode that will be normally reverse-biased on the coil... otherwise, when the relay clicks off, the inductance of the coil will kick back enough voltage to blow out the 555. It's a reliability issue.
Second, the 555 is a nice analog circuit that's rated for 4.5-15 volts, so no need to use a 7805 voltage regulator; you can connect to the battery directly.
Third, a battery idea: Radioshack has some 12 volt batteries that are about N-size (sub AA). They are typically used for lighters, pagers, or remotes.
Lastly, as you mentioned, the ultimate would be to get rid of the relay and connect directly to the camera. The CMOS version of the 555 would be ideal because (1) it's low power, so you might be able to drive if from the camera's step-up power supply and (2) it has a FET output, so it'll drive much closer the the GND&VCC rails than the TTL version (this should help compatibility)
Good luck, and nice photos!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:KLNlUqjhDEoJ: balloons.space.edu/habp/project_4/airphotos.html+& hl=en&ie=UTF-8
i imagine such an image intensive page might not handle /. so well?
We just bought a piece of remote mountain property and the USGS and satellite shots of the area are over 10 years old - frankly useless for showing the access roads created in the last two years. A quick aerial shot with this rig might be just what we need. I've easily spent >$50 in time trying to find what I want from satellite companies. To get anything current (5 years) it seems to be rather pricey. Anyone with better info? I'm open to it.
"What could low-cost aerial photography be used for?"
Photographing coastlines....
As long as they can make an infra-red version, anyway. Suppose you were leasing a house to a bunch of hippies and you suspected them of growing some happy herbs in the attic using high-powered electric lights which give off infra-red radiation. If a police helicopter with infra-red camera were flying overhead, you might get asked some awkward questions. So it would be good to use to make sure that your tenants weren't doing anything naughty. You could get an overhead infra-red image before the helicopter does, and perhaps have a quiet word with your tenants.
;-) .....} and, if that was the case, you could line the roof space with insulatuon, with reflective foil on the inside, and use an extractor fan to draw out hot air into a disused chimney. Then you could use the camera to check the effectiveness of your stray heat management measures.
Or, of course, you might be a bunch of hippies growing some happy herbs in your attic, and want to make sure you weren't putting on too much of a light show for the Old Bill.
Of course, if you had some legitimate business growing legal plants in you attic, you might want to avoid attracting unwanted attention from the authorities {and wasting their time while they could be going after evil drug barons
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
A bit of googling turned it up...
http://www.californiacoastline.org/
Enjoy
Gr*g
Loopsh of fury.
The guy didn't think of a remote control model aircraft. These can be built either from scratch or in kit form in sizes that can lift far more weight than a balloon. Do-it-yoursel Predator, anyone?
California Coastal Records Project
Barbara's lair
1. Obtain balloons and fill with hydrogen (for superior lifting)
2. Launch balloons with compact Linux box with an 802.11b card, gnutella and a bunch of MP3's
3. Set it up to connect to any open 802.11 network
4. See how long it takes the RIAA to find a place to send the subpoena.
I wondered why you were hired in the first place, too.
they only care about naked. And female human.
We used to have helicopters hovering over our backyard, instead of doing traffic reports, in the futile hope that we'd roll over. The choppers didn't exactly have "whisper mode" so it was easy to avoid showing them anything titillating. And there was nothing hot about us unless you like bleached whale.