Author: John

DigitalLifeTV

I liked TechTV a lot when it was on and I was very upset when it was absorbed by G4. Where on TV could I find my nerd fix? It looks like the answer isn’t on the TV but on the Internet. DigitalLife TV is hosted by TechTV alumni Patrick Norton and Robert Heron host a weekly program on all sorts of high tech gadgets and computer stuff. A sample from the current show notes follows:

# Jim Louderback shows us how to roll your own NAS (that’s Network Attached Storage) box.
# If you’re looking for NAS kits check out the ADS NAS Drive Kit, the Server Elements NASLite, or just go to the NASLite Sourceforge page.
# Lance Ulanoff on robots: VEX Robotics Design System, and the DARPA Grand Challenge Preview.
# Ripping vinyl to MP3.
# The BitPim cell phone data tool… a nifty tool for getting data in and out of your cell phone.
# And, as always, your questions!

Pretty well rounded to me!

DigitalLifeTV

Cabaret Mechanical Theatre

Cabaret Mechanical Theatre

If your lucky enough to be near Minnesota between October 16 and January 0f 2006 you should make a point to stop by an visit the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre touring exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. These Automata are amazing and enlightening . If you can’t get up to the chilly north, you can browse their online shop and pick up a kit that will let you build hundreds of Automata of your very own. If your one that enjoys seeing how things work then this kit is for you.

[via Tech Drool]
Cabaret Mechanical Theatre – A Museum of Automata

Sonic Alarm

sonic bomb

What a riot! I built one of these about 17 years ago as a joke. My sonic grenade has a 1/8 phono jack ‘pin’ with a green LED in the end that would light up when the main switch was switched. The main switch was covered with one of those cool aircraft switch covers. When the pin was pulled five LEDs would count down and then blast the area with a mind numbing 120dB sonic blast of pain. Everyone loved it. If only I had know that people would buy stuff like this.
This one works about the same except the only way to shut it off is to replace the pin! Sounds like a one use wonder to me, if someone used it one me I know hat I’d be pretty keen on breaking it in to little silent pieces.

[via The Red Ferret Journal]
Sonic alarm

Like the Sony Librie But Better

Hanlin eBook Model V2

Sweet! A low powered high contrast electronic paper display (EPD) ebook reader without all that pesky DRM crap.
It will read the following formats:

PDF Viewer, WOLF Viewer(WOLF File Format:convert from txt,htm,DOC ,PDF,Excel,PPT,Images,mp3 ets),HTML Viewer,TXT Viewer

Looks quite similar to the one from Sony, except that the Hanlin is a little shy on buttons .I have wondered why the Librie has a keyboard if everything is pretty much read only on them. Annotations perhaps?
So, I wonder if I can get one of these on my next trip to Bangkok…

[via Boing Boing]
Hanlin eBook Model V2