Daily Archives: October 11, 2009

Thoughts

Are camera guns a lost art?

A little while back, photos of a camera gun made the rounds on all the cool blogs, and people everywhere thought they were new and exciting. How easily we forget… Camera guns — analog cameras and film cameras mounted to gun barrels or provided with pistol grips — were more common in the 60s and 70s than we might think today.

I watched an episode of Columbo last night, entitled “The Greenhouse Jungle”, released 10/15/72 (almost 37 years ago) and in it, Columbo’s assistant pulled out a camera gun that looked even better than the stuff making the rounds these days.

camera-gun-columbo-episode

As he explained in the episode, the device was a “camera-mounted starlight scope”, used “quite a bit at Berkeley for night work”. camera-gun-columbo-episode-2

camera-gun-columbo-episode-3

Since I can find no modern camera guns, I’m tempted to call them a lost art, perhaps yet another victim of a PC society where everyone’s afraid of everything.

camera-gun-1

camera-gun-2

camera-gun-4

I think the inspiration for camera guns came from the portable video cameras equipped with a pistol grip, sold around the same time period. They looked like this.

gun-camera-3

These last two images came from a site called Atomic Rocket, where they have a whole page dedicated to futuristic sidearms.

Standard
Lists

Condensed Knowledge – October 11, 2009

This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions. I only share a certain number of articles in each of these posts, so if you’d like to see more, visit my full Google Shared Items list.

Standard
Thoughts

Now in top 75K websites on the internet

I took a look at my Quantcast stats today, and got a nice surprise. After hovering around the 100K rank for some time, I’m now ranked in the top 75K websites on the web. I do hope the trend continues along the same route, to the point where I can announce that I’m in the top 50K websites and so forth.

quantcast-raoulpopcom-stats

Why do I reveal this information? Because I believe in transparency, and I’ve been fairly open about my site’s performance from the get-go. (See this post from 2006, or this post from 2007 for a couple of examples.) I started using Quantcast to track the ranking of my site in 2008, and ever since then, I posted a little button in my sidebar that you can always click on to see my live stats.

quantcast-widget

By the way, let me take this opportunity to invite serious, legitimate companies who want to gain exposure to a worldwide audience to get in touch with me. The details are here.

Standard