Category: Computers

Chumby

Chumby

I was reading Hack-a-day this morning and saw that there is a new ultra cool hacker friendly device called a Chumby. The Chumby is a wifi enabled iPod’ish PDA like appliance that

Hardware:
266 MHz ARM controller (the MX21 by Freescale)
32 MB SDRAM running at 133 MHz bus speed
64 MB NAND FLASH ROM
320×240 3.5″ TFT LCD with PWM-controlled LED backlighting
Stereo 2W speakers
Headphone output
Ambient light sensor
Bend sensor (to pick up when you squeeze the chumby)
Two USB 2.0 ports, one on the main board and one on the outerware electronics
WiFi connectivity via a USB dongle plugged into the main board
Circuitry to detect the presence of wall adapter power and auto-fallback to backup battery power
Switching power supply network that can eat between 6V and 14V
Available microphone input on the chumbilical bus
Available SPI bus on the chumbilical bus
Serial debug port set to 115200 8N1

[via Christine.net, Scottjanousek ,hack a day]

Chumby 

Another Tiny PC


Need a small PC for somthing? Don’t care if it runs Windows or not? Here you go, this computer might be for you. I’m thinking this would make for one hell of a brain on a robot. With all the USB ports you could interface sensors and if you needed more storage you could pop in a multi gig compact flash card in the CF slot.

Fanless Design
VESA mounting support (as depicted at right)
Processor — 166MHz Pentium (MMX-capable x86) x 3IUs
Memory — soldered-on 128 MB SDRAM
Input/output ports IDE
10/100 Mbps Ethernet
3 x USB V1.1
Optional RS232 Expansion — CompactFlash slot
2.5-inch hard drive mounting
Ultra-low power
PXE diskless boot
"…MicroClient Jr. supports most any version of Linux not based on Gnome, KDE, or other heavy desktop frameworks. He suggests using FWM95, ICEWM, XFce, or Fluxbox instead…

Nice!  

Tiny, sub-$100 PC runs Puppy Linux

Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006

You would think that this was done on an old Mac computer but it wasn’t. Very impressive. I need one of their shirts.

Not strictly a work of Machinima; Paul Robertson’s Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 is a masterpiece animation based on the graphic look and feel of platform handhelds. A kind of machinima recursion; where animations inspired by games have inspired animations. Paul’s style did actually get him a job in the games industry, but he was obsessively animating these seductively disturbing game-inspired tales before making games. His work has been shown in many galleries in Australia, but until now hasn’t found a big exposure online. For me, his non-interactive animations are more about what games ought to be than what a lot of games are. The kind of indulgence which triggers all the soft spots of delicious wrongness in a way Reality just doesn’t appreciate.

selectparks – Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006

Network Attached Storage, a DIY Story

Network Atached Storage

If your like me you have way too many files on way too many hard drives. One way to help this is to have a network attached storage (NAS). Yeah, you could just stuff a bunch of hard drives in a beige box of death and load up XP. A few network shares later and you have a NAS. You could do that, sure, if you wanted to take the easy way out. But I can tell you want to live a little, be on the edge. Yeah… The Edge. It’s where the alpha nerds meet for a midnight snack of Jolt Cola and double stuffed pizza before going back to their tricked out 733t hax0r boxes. It’s where you want to be. Building your own NAS out of the cast offs from the junk bin of a local thrift store will get you closer to that edge.

So gather up your hard drives, your mother boards, your USB key drives (you want all the IDE channels open for drives man!) and grab a copy of FreeNAS (just about the coolest software for this sort of thing) and go to town. I’m working on consolidating my collection of hard drives (everything from 20GB to 120GB) into a big pile of storage that is at least running in RAID 1. RAID 5 is my goal but that’s only if the hardware gods smile upon me.

Like me, soon you will be on the Edge. 

NAS DIY

What is RAID? – Wikipedia 

FreeNAS – The Free NAS Server 

Defcon, The Game

DEFCON PC 

Funny how this comes only a few days after I forced my kids to watch the classic movie "Dr. Strangelove". Defcon is a game where both sides are going to lose, it’s just a question of who loses first (or the worst). It reminds me of the classic DOS game ‘Scorched Earth‘ (or the updated 3D version called ‘Scorched 3D‘) where your trying to kill the other tank with tactical nuclear weapons. Perfect relaxation on a Sunday afternoon if you ask me. The graphics are right out of ‘War Games‘!

Taking the role of our favorite Cold War nations, players duke it out on a retro style vector display. They begin with the careful placement of radar dishes and silos, then move on to feeling out each other’s defenses with subs, aircraft, and warships. Tensions rise, conventional warfare erupts, and it eventually escalates into a full scale nuclear exchange. Meanwhile, the computer calmly reports the death toll in terms of millions of lives lost. In a nuclear holocaust everyone loses, but through clever tactics, alliances, and well timed backstabbing, it may be possible to "lose the least."

Oh yeah, it’s a networked game so you can play with your friends. 

This is a game that needs to be played on the biggest screen TV you can find, in the dark, and after you’ve spent a day in a cold war movie marathon. ‘Multiple inbound targets are being tracked… Suggest counter measures immediately.’ 

Defcon PC Preview

(A toot of the civil defense siren to Keven for this one)