I've met him in person. During the short time they had a store front in Michigan I went in and he was just sitting there manning the register. He showed off the 500 mW infrared laser they had in the store front for sale (powered it up without water cooling briefly). He also let me walk around in the back of the store with bins of Thorium chunks just sitting around. Was a very interesting place. I bought beyond the legal limit of a certain oxidizer and paid cash for it lol. (To be clear the law is to not sell beyond a certain amount, not to not buy it.) Makes sense why it got closed down.
I want a Zero Blaster gun, that shoots fog rings! How does that work?! Doesn't mention what kind of power supply it uses. "Additional fluid is available if your a maniac and need to shoot the gun more than 25,000 times."
it just takes AAs or AAAs for the smoke evaporator, the ring function is simple enough-
cylindrical chamber at front of device is where the magic happens- rubber diaphragm at the back, small-ish hole at the front (hole is roughly half the radius of the chamber)
holding the handletrigger fills the chamber with smoke, so that you can see the ring at all..
pulling the trigger results in a flat piece of plastic lightly thunking against a rubber diaphragm (black plastic and green diaphram in the image), sending forward the ring
you can also find much larger air vortex cannon 'bazookas' that lack the smoke function but are large enough to send farts and disturb paperwork across the room
Image intensifiers are really awesome. Microchannel plate CRTs use the same technology and allowed capturing single high speed events on film before digital oscilloscopes.
They are difficult to beat with modern technology (CMOS sensor) because they are much lower power than equivalent digital system, and have no latency. Think night vision goggles using 9V alkaline battery..
I still remember the "Got Uranium?" title with the guy raising his eyebrows. Definitely felt weird/awesome to order from a site like that as a kid haha.
Wow, that name sounds all wrong, "spinthariscope". It should be "spinth_i_roscope" or "spinth_e_roscope" (from Greek σπινθήρ, "spark", probably transliterated as "spinther", given how other Greek words are transliterated). But, wikipedia has an article on it with that spelling so I guess it's legit.
Speaking of radioactive sources surprisingly used for casual activities, I liked this video from Applied Science guy on record(the music kind) static removers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBHIp967TD8
