I just ran across this great website where you can print patterns for lens hoods for just about every lens made today. The site allows you to download PDF files with the patterns for you to print. Though they recommend A4, A3, or A2 paper, I found that printing to standard 8 1/2″ by 11″ paper with the Adobe Reader auto cropping allowed me to have the same results. These look like a great alternative to paying $45+ for the custom hoods from Canon. I’ll finish cutting mine out and snap a few pictures to see how well they work.

Update: The results were less than exciting, but, it does provide a temporary fix until you get fed up with it and decide to either opt for the rubber retractable lens hoods found at the local camera shop or shell out the big bucks for the real deal lens hoods from the manufacturer.

[via LifeHacker]

I just successfully hacked my CVS video camera a few hours ago and was able to liberate the videos of our little kittens only weeks old from the contents of the memory. The image quality, for a $30 “one-time-use” camera, was quite nice! That was the good news…

The bad news is that I got a little “greedy” and wanted to modify the image resolution size to get better sized movies out of the thing and bricked it. Upon tweaking the flash, it got stuck and restarted… or at least tried to… it never started back up again. I now have a nice little paper weight reminding me that I should have been happy after getting the thing hacked after 100+ attempts and getting the videos off of it that I had been hoping to save.

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/LEDMinifigs

I tend to like reading MAKE’s blog often to get ideas for future projects and came across a blog post recently about using your electronic skills to help celebrate the Holiday season.

I’m thinking of trying my hand at programming one of the character LEDs and building a menorah from scratch. From what I can tell about the project, the following psudocode is a good guess at how the programs work:

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That is the moon taken with a manual 16 second exposure on my digital camera. Amazing shot!