Not much to say here, this is the final result of my latest attempt. Took about 20 days or so. I've still got the camera in place, and I'm going to leave it shooting until that bloom falls off.

The results are in! (well, offloaded from the camera anyway.) This one turned out much better. Much more consistent.

there's a bit of an unfortunate shift at the end where the bloom we really want to see gets a bit cut off, but the movement is really cool!

Partial results are in! They more or less suck.. ; )

I initially set this system up and had it shoot in our living room, on a wobbley tv tray with no flash. (I figured my wife wouldn't be happy about a clamped down monstrosity and a flash going off in the dark every 30 minutes.. turns out, she's fine with it!)

I've been building this thing for quite some time. For the last 2 nights or so, I spent some time finishing up version 1. It is now functional. (and has taken 23 or so pictures of my desk plant in the last couple hours)

Photos of the rig (with notes pointing out the parts) can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/abandc/sets/72157600201419395/

So my friend Nik asked me something about emulating launchbar and quicksilver on the mac, where you can basically type a command at the mac and it will figure out what you're looking for with pattern matching.

This won't do that. Not by a long shot. ; )

The thing he asked me was about the windows run menu, and getting things to run from there with simple commands.

If you're on a windows box, you can do the following:
hold down the windows key,
press 'R'
type 'calc'
hit enter.

Bam! you've got the calculator. Well.. that's handy and all.. but what if you want your own programs in there.

Nik pointed me to the PATH environment variable as the place to change what the run menu searches in.

If you know what your environment variables are, then you probably don't need my hand holding. I added one that points to My Documents\bin\ as I preserve my my documents folder across formats, and I like to keep everything there.

For the rest of you. There's already an environment variable in there pointing to your systemroot. that's C:\Windows\

If you go there, and drop any windows shortcut in that directory, the name of that shortcut becomes the keyword you enter in "run".

Yay! Make a shortcut that points to photoshop, name it 'ps' and put it in C:\Windows\

Then, windowskey-R, type 'ps', hit enter BAM! Photoshop! I'm never going to use my mouse again!

UPDATE

I hadn't a clue how cool this would have been!
1. It passes arguments along.. so.. i made a shortcut called 'ff' that points to firefox. if i use the command 'ff google' firefox opens up and runs google. also, because firefox is soo damned smart, if it's already running, it'll just put google in a new tab.

2. you can do shortcuts to sites. take a firefox shortcut and add a url as an argument after 'firefox.exe'. That pretty much give limitless capacity for web application shortcuts.

3. firefox will take multiple arguments. guess what
"ff aaronpropst.com google.com" does... ; )

I put together another video of what i've been doing with my dorky geektoys. This is a cool steppermotor/gear assembly i got out of an old dot-matrix printer. I originally assembled it all with a mess of 4 radio shack transistors, but then i found this tutorial (and discovered that nice clean transistor array chip) which made it simpler to work with.

It's an ambient orb style pulsating pig!

that's it... really. but i learned to read digital and analog pins, and how to write to the analog out pins, and before that the digital ones. Woot!