Category: News

Taikonaut B-day in Space

After a little extra burn to correct their orbit, The two Chinese astronauts (‘taikonauts’) are adapting well to their five day mission. During a televised conference, one of the astronauts was shown clapping after his daughter had sang ‘happy birthday’ to him. This is quite a mission for China, so far Russia and the US have been the only countries to successfully launch a manned space mission. With China building on space hardware technology from Russia and ambition to make a name for itself as a modern country, they might make it to the moon before we get a chance to return ourselves.

A good day in space for China’s taikonauts
Chinese astronauts celebrate birthday, record

The Old Bomb-in-the-Mouth Trick…

D’oh!

I saw this on the news and even before they said where it had happened I knew it was here in Arizona. Yeah, we have ‘special’ people here don’t we… I figure I’d blog this because a robot was used to ‘disarm’ the subject.
In searching for more info on the story, I ran across the following bits on info. Wikipedia has a nice entry on the subject of
bomb disposal, if your in the market for the latest in bomb disposal robots, the teleMAX looks very nice. Small and good at what it does. Two things I look for when I’m shopping for a robot. And finaly, there is even some vintage bomb disposal humor from WWII (I wish the scans were larger, some of the text is hard to read).

Soldier tried fake mouth-bomb in heist

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