Here’s an interesting video for you.. a HD camera (Canon Vixia HF20) launched in a balloon to a height of roughly 107145 feet (20 miles or 33 kilometers). The camera, named Bear-4 parachuted back to Earth safely.

From the project website (which, frankly, looks horrible):

The balloon was launched at 7:44 AM, burst at 10:51 AM at 107,145 ft. and the camera landed via parachute at 11:40 AM, 89 miles from the launch site after a 3 hr. & 56 min. flight. The camera recorded a total of 4 hrs. & 22 min. of Hi-Def Video before it stopped recording 53 sec’s after landing when its 32GB of memory was full. The only thing better would have been if the camera could have recorded for several minutes more to captured the sound of us approaching and video of us opening its Styrofoam container.

Here’s the last 10 minutes of the flight (and the moment the big balloon pops, presumably due to reaching the maximum expansion limit for the balloon’s membrane) at 8:26…

The Bear-4 website goes on to mention…

Balloon remains can be seen falling past the lens at 6:27 [8:28 in the video above - sn0r] and then the fun begins as the foam box and camera inside is repeatedly struck by the antenna hanging below and the several pounds of latex remaining from the burst balloon as everything tumbles every which way back to earth at up to 7900 ft./min (90 mph) in the near vacuum until there’s enough air for the parachute to start functioning.

I also encourage you to watch the whole thing, including the set-up and launch. The full 1 hour video is similarly available for you on Youtube.

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Since our previous post about the unfortunate products of Etsy.com someone (you know who you are) pointed out Regretsy.com, a spoof site which takes the worst of the Etsy site. Its a laugh a minute as you come across ‘Hair of the Dog’ as well as some more sexually explicit and funny stuff being sold on Etsy.

Here’s a sample from the site…

More on Regretsy.com

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The 9th of November will always be the day the wall came down in Berlin for me.

I remember coming home from school and being dumbfounded and almost driven to tears by the sheer enormity of the fall. In subsequent days and weeks the suddenness of the transformation which was sweeping through a significant part of the world.

Today thousands of people gathered to celebrate the destruction of the symbol of the division between east and west. Ceremonies were witnessed by German P.M. Angela Merkel, who was one of the East German people who fled across the gap when the wall came down in 1989. Also on hand to witness the 20th year of celebration of the beginning of the end for the Wall and Communism were world leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev.

And although in one fell stroke it killed the booming cold war novel industry, this monumental milestone on the way to German reunification fared little other casualties except for perhaps the dampening of Germany’s economy due to debts incurred by the failed East German state. It also helped overshadow the start of the terror of Nazism in Germany; Die Kristallnacht.

Wikipedia reports for this day:

• 1938 – Kristallnacht began in Nazi Germany as a part of Adolf Hitler‘s anti-Semitic policy, leading to the murder of over 90 Jews, and the arrest and deportation of over 25,000 others to concentration camps.

With Germany, which is still sometimes looking for a new post-war identity, people gladly forget the past horrors and go with the more recent past of reunification and the establishment of Germany as we know it today. Hookers and Porn and all.

Here’s a video for you to enjoy showing the collapse of the wall and what led up to it.

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Hi everyone! It;s been a busy, busy weekend for me.

Next to enjoying the Guy Fawkes Nightly fireworks which have lit up the sky around Woking with blasts of gunpowder and colour I’ve been working non-stop on a few upgrades and fun things for the web page and blogs.

As you can see I’ve flipped the sidebar from right to left to emphasize the side bar a bit more. Considering that most of our content is videos rather than text I thought the emphasis wouldn’t matter much to the enjoyment of the overall content. I’m in the middle of implementing some ajax functionalities and a better front page as well as a news agregator which will hopefully provide you with a quick way to get the news and enjoy some poetry at the same time… stay tuned for that. I’ve also commissioned Ged to do some newer and bigger banners for our little home away from home on the web.

I’ve also thought it’d be neat to do a perhaps weekly podcast, broadcast via Youtube. I won’t be making any new appearances on ustream.tv for now as I’m more comfortable behind a microphone than talking to a camera.

Anyway, please let me know what your thoughts on the improvements are as they are rolled out. Most probably the poetry site and the podcast will be available first.

So, to keep you all happy while I work on the webpage, here’s a video taken from inside a Guy Fawkes dummy.

Enjoy.

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Here’s our favorite news presenter Molly (in the infamous words of Borat: wawawiwa) again presenting today’s news with many a nomnomnom…