Hardware Beyond the Hype
Is it just me, or does this look like a tremendous stinker waiting to happen?:
Wowwee Ltd. announces that they have joined forces with Arad Productions to bring Robosapien to the big screen. Production has already begun on a feature film, which will combine live-action and CGI, is targeted for release in 2009, and will be based on our favorite WowWee robot, Robosapien.
Check out this nifty LED light sequencer that uses the Atmel ATtiny13v microchip and a Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) to create a tiny, programmable LED Throwie (that, at about US$5 each, you wouldn’t actually want to get too throw-happy with too many of ’em). Could be useful for your next guerrilla marketing campaign/mistaken terrorist attack.
[Via Make]
In today’s “Geek to Live” column, Gina shows you how to use iTunes’ Smart Playlists and PDF support to create an organized, searchable library of all your PDF docs. Who knew?
The Consumerist, a Gawker Media site I recently put on my radar and am liking more and more, has two pieces where former sales reps from Verizon and Cingular offers tips and pitfalls to avoid when buying hardware and services from these two wireless providers.
From the Verizon piece:
Verizon reps get tons of money from new lines and certain accessories and text packages, take advantage of this. They won’t let a new customer walk out the door. “Play hardball, they will do anything to get the new lines. VZW makes $ off the service, not the phones. Tell them you don’t want to mail in the rebate. There does come a point of diminishing returns. For example, if you walked in and wanted a $39 plan and a free Treo 700, not gonna happen. But I have given away almost every non-PDA phone in the store for the right deal. Also tell them you will buy the accessories, and text package. Trust me here, these are 2 of the biggest metrics for the reps. Return the accessories the next day and call customer care to cancel your text package.”
Read the rest.
From the Cingular piece:
Get the rebate in the store, and at home. “Try to get the rep to give you the rebate in the store, they’ll be likely to do this if you agree to get accessories. You can get go on-line and print out the rebate form from www.cingular.com and send it in anyway.”
Read the rest.
Awesome.
I just watched The Colbert Report with Mark Frauenfelder as the guest and was stunned and delighted to discover that Mark had brought a Mousey the Junkbot to show off. It felt like a little piece of me was on the show too (sniff, sniff). And then Colbert ran Mousey off the table and it broke into many pieces. He seemed genuinely embarrassed. It was funny. Mark and Stephen battled each other with marshmallow cannons, too. It’ll run several times today (Wed), so you should definitely try to catch the segment.
Here’s a link to the video and some additional coverage on MAKE.
My copy of the latest Nuts & Volts arrived the other day and the cover project is on building a fancy-schmacy benchtop regulated power supply, featuring dual 0 – 20V regulators with simultaneous voltage and current metering on digital panel displays. I’ve been toying around with the idea of building my own, so I was excited to see the piece. But as with a lot with N&V articles, it quickly climbed over my head and left a lot for me to work out on my own. Not that I couldn’t figure it out with a little homework, it’s just a little too much air pressure on the learning curve to keep my attention.
It did, however, spark my interest in other homebrewed benchtop supplies, so I did a search and found this one. It’s a really nice single regulated supply with two modes, a low setting of up to 6v and high at up to 30v, with current adjustment on the low setting between 0 – 1 amps and 1 – 10 amps on the high. The meters are analog. The project is well documented with lots of photos, diagrams, and a PCB layout. This would probably be closer to my speed, although I’d probably be just as well suited building the much simpler, cheaper one we blogged about a few months back.
Our pal, and Street Tech Founding Saint, Mark Frauenfelder, will be on the Colbert Report tonight (Comedy Central), talking about MAKE Magazine. Congrats, Mark! We knew you when.
The NEC PaPeRo — the robot we love to hate because, well, it doesn’t exist except in the land of press relations and tech blog photo ops — is once again in the land of PR and photo ops! When last we left our intrepid proto-PerRo, it was sniffing our food and tasting our booze. Now it’s allegedly going to do our blogging for us. At the next meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing, NEC is going to show off its AI software that can home in on keywords in conversation, go on the Net to fetch content related to those words, and blog the results. Which, like the food and beverage testing, and a bunch of other things that PaPeRo has not done in the real world, this has nothing whatsoever to do with this robotics platform except its a cute casemod for the PC that NEC is testing these wares on. And it leads to idiots like me doing blog items on it showing pics of the lovable little Weeble interacting with cute Asian chicks in lo-rise. Everybody’s happy.
Here’s quick and easy Instructable on making a schweet little JumpDrive from a LEGO brick (actually, you have to make an uber-brick first, which is most of what’s involved in the how-to).
Years ago — we’re talking YEARS ago, like before the PC-ago — I became obsessed with mind mapping, a brainstorming and organizing technique, where you draw non-linear, associative diagrams of your subject. It’s sort of a cross between an organizational chart, a functional relationships diagram, and an acid trip doodle. I have notebooks, deeply embarrassing notebooks, filled with multi-colored Flair-penned efforts to find myself. But it was actually mind mapping that started my career in computers. I bought a copy of the Whole Earth Software Review, and in it, Stewart Brand reviewed a brainstorming tool for the Apple IIe. He raved about the program, and his description of how it could help offload and process your thoughts reminded me of mind mapping. I convinced the org I was working for that we needed a computer (for managing our mailing lists) and went out and bought an Apple IIe the next day. I’ve never looked back. (And strangely, I never got the program that Brand had recommended).
I’ve had nothing to do with mind mapping since the late ’70s/early ’80s, but I still find the idea interesting. There have been dozens of programs over the years for doing it, or similar graphical brainstorming. But this new one, called Mindomo is especially interesting ’cause it’s Web-based, it’s very easy to use, and it’s free (for limited amounts of use). I don’t know if mind mapping is something I will pick up again, but I am working on a complex project now that could use viewing from a different persecpective, so maybe a mind map would do the trick.