Slashdot Mirror
Flexiglow UV Reactive Neon Paint
VL is running a review of (no I'm not kidding) UV Reflective Paint for whatever sort of artistic case design aspirations you might have. Various colors and some bad photos make me kind of wonder about the whole thing, but perhaps others have more informed thoughts...
Personally, I think painting my hardware is on the level with doing burnouts in front of the high school with my bitchin Camaro that I will fix up someday. It does nothing for system performance, and can't imagine what it's doing to the thermal properties of the card. It's just tacky. Really tacky. If you have that much energy you should concentrate on Doing something a little harder
Dirty Pirate Hooker
I'm not a photographer, but I play one on /.
Use a tripod or other solid mount when making photos in low light conditions... it keeps your photos from bluring.
I've seen UV-glowy paints around for years. This is nothing new. You still need a blacklight (ie UV light) for it to be visible, it doesn't just glow in the dark magically (that would be more interesting, but still nothing amazing - there are plenty of fluorescent material about). So what's so great about this that it deserves a front-page post on slashdot?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
A computer system that fits into the surrounding decor, seamlessly, as if it were a well-chosen piece of furniture, efficiently serving its prime function, while maintaining a muted physical presence that does not grandly announce its existence to every pair of eyes in the vicinity, thereby diminishing the worth of whatever is being presented upon the screen? Or shouldn't I say that here?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I used to work in a prepress lab where we used UV rigs to expose plates and Matchprints. The units are usually closed boxes so no UV leaks out, but we had a huge freestanding unit that had huge UV-opaque curtains around it. And that's because prolonged UV exposure is a health risk.
The manufacturers of these UV systems made it absolutely clear, prolonged exposure to UV light will dramatically increase your likelyhood of geting cataracts and skin cancer. I don't know anything about the cataracts, but I sure wouldn't do anything to endanger my vision since I depend on being able to read a computer screen.
But I do have personal experience with the effects of UV lights on skin. I worked around UV lights for years, and despite my precautions to minimize exposure, I've already developed a 3 precancerous lesions that had to be removed, one was a basal cell carcinoma in an early stage, the two were neoplastic somethingorother that my dermatologist says would have developed into melanoma (skin cancer) if I hadn't had them removed. Now I have to go to my dermatologist every 6 months for a complete body inspection, and have any lesion that is even the slightest bit suspicious surgically removed. I guarantee that these lesions were solely due to UV exposure in the lab, because I'm a night person and I hate going out in the sun.
DO NOT FUCK WITH MELANOMA. It is one of the deadliest cancers around. Most people are dead within 6 months of discovering they have the disease, it metastasizes rapidly into every organ in your body within weeks, and becomes inoperable. Most people are already fatally afflicted by the time they even discover they melanoma.
So if you want to play around with kewl glowing UV lights, just realize you might be inflicting fatal damage on yourself.