Viewing profile — alexbock

I'm guessing you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39309409

Thanks. I did not use any frameworks/libraries/dependencies for this project. It's vanilla JavaScript/HTML/CSS from scratch. The general concept of a spreadsheet-like data editor n…

If you want to play with any of these lens descriptions (or look at code for simulating them), I made a free and open source visual web UI for lens design. The default project when…

> (This is mathematically worse for a reason I don't remember; it causes any picture taken at a concert with blacklights or blue spotlights to look bad. The iPhone camera sensor is…

Tesla vehicles display error descriptions prominently whenever an error code is presented, and detailed error diagnostics are available for anyone to browse in the service mode men…

> All the "affordable" consumer FLIR options suffer from low resolution and/or low response time. When I experimented with connecting two thermal cameras to a VR headset for stereo…

I've always been fascinated by this topic as well. As a further experiment, you may be interested to know that these IR lights can pass straight through red wine that looks totally…

I learned of the interesting "spite clause" described in the will section of this article while reading about the common law rule against perpetuities, which limits how far into th…

It sounds like you're thinking of separating coins using eddy current braking [1]. This works even for non-magnetic coins because the effect is a function of the metal's electrical…

I've always been surprised that Apple added this functionality to the iOS home screen without having a solution to the reorder vs nesting UI problem. Trying to move an app into a f…

The single most important and most revealing aspect of this announcement is Apple's framing of the promotional images showing the face display on the front of the headset. I think …

The center of the image it produces is perfectly sharp, but using a single achromatic doublet as a photographic lens at f/2 necessarily produces significant eighteenth-century soft…

I enjoy monochrome infrared photography at wavelengths longer than 1000 nm using a Sigma sd Quattro (no Bayer filter and the sensor IR filter is reversibly user-removable). To redu…

Producing a non-inverted image with only two lenses per eye and no additional prisms implies a Galilean telescope with a convex lens as the objective and a concave lens as the eyep…

> Are there algorithms to select the lens elements for me given the properties I want? I plan to add optimization features in the future to automatically tune design parameters to …

If you want to work with 5000 nm - 10,000 nm in that price range, you can use an affordable thermal camera with a microbolometer sensor. Surplus silicon and germanium lenses can so…

I originally heard about it from this page written by a group who silvered a 28-inch mirror this way: https://sites.google.com/site/spraysilveringtelescopemirrors... It's still ult…

I made several attempts at acetone vapor smoothing on mirrors printed in ABS and ASA and the surfaces always came out very well polished at the micrometer scale but unacceptably wa…

I do it using a $400 Prusa Mini and epoxy resin: https://alexbock.github.io/blog/3d-lenses/index.html It's surprisingly easy to 3D print the shape of a lens and polish by hand. I m…

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is very interesting from a legal standpoint. Regulating wild birds is not one of the enumerated powers of Congress, but the federal government entered…

You do not need a Federal Firearms License nor registration as a Special Occupation Taxpayer to purchase fully automatic weapons that had been registered in the National Firearms R…

The human eye has some interesting optical defects like chromatic aberration that man-made optical systems usually fix in hardware but that the brain fixes in software. These aberr…

The speed of sound is probably more in the latter category as it is dependent on altitude and temperature, and even then only after assuming that someone really meant the speed of …