Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Two feet tall, responds to voice commands, built in camera, user programmable, reverse chicken legs… Wow, I’ll take one of these over a RoboSapien any day. It does need some end effectors so it can grip things but other than that its darn cool. Look for this in stores soon for around $300US. Not a steal but far less costly than the KHR-1 type robots out there, those still cost over a thousand bucks.
[via Robot Gossip]
I love this site, mostly because it give you ideas. Yeah, those can be dangerous can’t they? You just can’t let your toaster toast toast, it has to tell time, read the news for you and suggest what tie to wear to work. Ok, that’s a bit extreme but its not beyond what you can find on this information packed site
The guys could build them pretty good back they couldn’t they? 30 years and it can still send back science data.
Voyager 1, already the most distant human-made object in the cosmos, reaches 100 astronomical units from the sun on Tuesday, August 15 at 5:13 p.m. Eastern time (2:13 p.m. Pacific time). That means the spacecraft, which launched nearly three decades ago, will be 100 times more distant from the sun than Earth is.
My friend Greg reminded me of this stuff. Pykrete is a mixture of ice and wood chips that is darn tough, won’t melt quickly, and can be formed using molds. Neat! Now I wish it was 100 degrees cooler out so I could make some of my own.
When I fist read the description on how this worked I was totally amazed. The clocks never need winding by hand because the mechanism is powered by a difference in temperature. A variance of a degree between 15-30 C is enough to cause a liquid (ethyl chloride) in a sealed container to expand or contract and in turn wind a spring with a ratchet. The clocks are exquisitely made and are fairly rare. If you find on, even a non working one you can expect to pay over $2,000 US for it. I find the concept of a temperature driven clock fascinating. I can’t help but wonder if the dynamic properties of ethyl chloride could be used in other projects.
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.