Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
More ePaper goodness! I can’t wait until this stuff is available on the store shelves. Once again, ePaper is a medium that will retain it’s image even after the power is removed. It could be used to electronic newspapers or books (in fact Sony already sells one)
I like my rice cooker. I’m sure not many people can say the same thing or even know that such devices exist. Rice cookers are truly wonderful things, you put rice in and add water and a little while after you turn it on you have perfect rice. No more messy boiling water and burned pans. Heck, other people must think its a good idea, it made Sony famous!
Commonly used in Japan, this type of fuzzy-logic rice cooker can be set ahead of time. I’ve purchased several for friends and family and have settled on the Zojirushi brand. I’ve used a Zojiriushi for several years, and it has held up well and completely changed my cooking habits.
Now this looks cool. Voice activated (“take shot”) and easy to wear this could be very handy for all sorts or … things.
It uses an iSight and an Apple Powerbook housed in a backpack to do all the work. Funny, I don’t see anyone doing the same thing with a Dell or an IBM laptop…
The automatic collision avoidance is pretty cool and it’s done with 1D cameras. Normal cameras are 2D – they see up/down and left/right. The 1 D cameras are just a row of CCD elements like in a scanner that see just left and right. A computer samples the cameras about 20 times a second and looks for high contrast marks that are moving. As they move faster it can be assumed that they are getting closer and so the plane avoids them by turning away.
It only weighs 30 grams for a 80-centimeter wingspan and can flow inside a building for about 4 minutes. With its two 1-gram cameras, a gyroscope, and a small microcontroller onboard, it can detect walls and automatically avoid collisions. The team is now working on even smaller versions of these flying robots which will be used for search-and-rescue, reconnaissance, and inspection applications.
If your into making weird noises and also like to mess with a soldering iron maybe you should give circuit bending a try. That’s where you poke and prod around the electronics of a device (like a Speak-n-spell) and cause the output sounds to be changed in weird ways.
I think I did this by accident when I was a very small child, my father had and electronic piano that would pick up radio stations if you touched some components on the back. Me and my friends thought that is was pretty cool at the time, but then again we were about six.
…examples of game cartridges and portable systems that have been circuit bent to create a nice glitch aesthetic & sound…Jumpstart has been bending the Gauntlet game on Sega Master System II here.
This will certainly be showing up in modded cases soon. I’ve seen a few people use this technique on small robots to save weight or just to look cool.
Before nylon cable ties, bundles of cables were held together by waxed nylon cord. It’s still a nice way to to do harnesses in tight spaces