Water rocketry
A few of my favorite webpages related to water-rocketry are provided below. Notice the international scope of this hobby.
- Clifford Heath (Australia) maintains probably the most complete list of links relating to water rocketry.
- waterrocketlaunchers discussses making your own launcher from easily sourced parts.
- Ken Schellenberg (Canada), the proprietor of antigravityresearch.com, does some pretty impressive experiments and sells highly-rated water-rocket toys.
- Ulrich Hornstein (Germany) regularly updates his WR site with new and interesting ideas.
- W. Gray Rushin (USA), a chemistry teacher, has his students launch hydrogen-powered soda bottles.
Multimedia freeware
- DivX is a “codec” that allows AVI files in compressed formats to be used. A number of movies on this site are encoded this way. To view them you will need to install the codec. The codec itself is free for personal use (the DivX group charges money or uses adware for special media players with features you don’t necessarily need). Once you install the free codec on a Windows PC, you can play DivX movies using any general-purpose media player and can encode DivX movies using VirtualDub. There are free DivX players for Macintosh and Linux platforms. DivX is functionally equivalent to MPEG4.
- Irfanview - modify/filter/convert image files. Has batch processing. Plays about any kind of media file, including videos. Highly recommended.
- VirtualDub - modify/filter/capture/convert AVI movie files. Accepts MPEG as input. Highly Recommended.
- Avi2mpg2/bbmpeg - a Windows GUI and DOS program that creates MPEG1 or MPEG2 movies from AVIs and/or images. Recommended.
High-speed photography
- Loren Winters - school teacher tells you how to do this at home
- The Edgerton Center at MIT - ‘Doc’ Edgerton was a pioneer in this field.