Category: Geek

Is it just me or has there recently been a spike of real-world Mech building? Here’s a Babelfish translation of a Japanese page for the LandWalker, a small 2,000-plus pound walker. Check out the 6-barrel Nerf cannon.

Should we start a betting pool for when some geek psycho, perhaps pissed about the cancellation of “Enterprise” or the ending of the Star Wars saga, is going to load up one of these babies with real ammo and go on a rampage?

And they don’t call it Babelfish for nothin’:

The current adults, small time, the robot which has yearned… We would like to ride in the robot which once upon a time, you can operate by your! It made actualize Real bodily sensation robot ‘LAND WALKER’ As for exclusive use BBS this The wallpaper it doesn’t need?

Whuh?

The New York Post reports that the first two days of Star Wars Episode III – Return of the Sith will cost employers $628,880,000 in lost productivity. If you check the article, the Post’s math is based on 4.8 million people simultaneously calling in sick on the first two days of the movie’s debut. The article does not detail the productivity lost at work when these same people stage mock lightsaber duels with cardboard tubes stolen from the mail room and distract their coworkers with Wookie noises and lame Yoda imitations.

As we commented earlier, the new TiVo Desktop 2.1 blocks the use of Dr. DivX, TMPGEnc, and some other video encoding/conversion programs. If you’re comfortable using a hexeditor, such as Hexworks, this is easily fixable — for now, anyway. All you have to do is find the DLL file:

C:Program FilesCommon FilesTiVo SharedDirectShowTiVoDirectShowFilter.dll

Open it in your hexeditor, search for the program name (e.g. “divx” or “tmpgenc”) and add a letter to the name (e.g. “divxx”). Save and quit the program. By changing the name of the filtered video conversion program, you disable TiVo Desktop’s ability to find and disable it.

[Via Zatz Not Funny]

According to createdigitalmusic.com, the DIY graphics tools that ship with Mac OS X 10.4 (aka “Tiger”) let you load graphics and QuickTime movies, then process them using output from your Mac. Output like sound, MIDI, etc. can control movies and pictures…and you can save the whole thing as an application. The best part: all the necessary tools are included on the Tiger DVD.

Think “snail mail” is slower, MUCH slower, than DSL? Think again. A group of IT geeks in Israel pitted an actual snail, pulling a wee chariot with wheels made out off two DVDs carrying 4.7GB of data each, against an ADSL connection. The snail won (at 37,000 Kbps vs. 1500 Kbps). And for those of you alpha geeks in the audience who remember the earlier experiment with pigeons carrying memory cards (so-called “Wi-Fly Networking”), SNAP (SNAil Protocol) beat it as well (with Wi-Fly managing only 2270 Kbps).

Benjamin Heckendorn (a.k.a. Ben Heck), author of Hacking Video Game Consoles, is now selling his custom-built Atari 2600 portable, dubbed the Phoenix 2600. You send him your 4-switch 2600 and he cuts it down and crams it into the portable case he’s designed. Check out that faux woodgrain! Retro chic don’t come cheap. This bloated baby’ll cost you US$310 and your precious Atari antique.

Maybe it’s just because I live, almost literally, in the shadow of what’s come to be known as the Sniper Home Depot here in Arlington, but I don’t find anything that looks (and is used) like a sniper rifle to be very funny. And, I wouldn’t want to be the guy standing on a rooftop around the Metro area aiming this thing into anybody’s window. That said, the “BlueSniper” project found on Tom’s Networking does say a lot about the venerabilities of Bluetooth wireless security, and how, with a few hundred bucks, you can build a device that sniffs out other people’s insecure Bluetooth hardware. Just don’t make it look like a freakin’ gun!

Someone by the name of Kjetil Eide has built a custom case for his PC in the shape of Bender, the robot from the cartoon Futurama. Unfortunately, the site seems to be in Norwegian and BableFish can’t translate it, so I all I can say is that the pictures are worth checking out.

Think of it as ’70s van art, only on your PC case. Alienware has the first-ever license to create official Star Wars PCs. Gee, I wonder why nobody else has shelled out the likely-significant bread to make such branded boxes? Until they come out with one in the shape of the Deathstar, which can vaporize anyone who sits at my desk without Lord Branwyn’s permission, spraypaint me uninterested. FWIW, here are the tech specs:

AMD Athlon™ 64 3200+ Processor with HyperTransport Technology
Alienware® PCI Express Motherboard
1024 MB Dual-Channel DDR PC-3200 at 400 MHz
80 GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA Hard Drive 8 MB Cache
Dual NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6600 GT PCI Express 128 MB DDR3
16X DVD±R/W Recorder Drive
AlienIce™ Video Cooling System

Alienware is running a contest to give systems away.

This is hysterical. Three MIT grad students wrote a computer program designed to generate scientific papers (complete with charts and graphs). They submitted two of the papers to the upcoming “World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics” (WMSCI), and one of the papers was accepted! Amazingly, as of now, the students have not been disinvited from presenting at the conference and are raising money through donations to go. They plan on presenting a computer-generated talk.

Download a PDF of the paper.

Create your own paper using their SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator.

Update: According to their website, they now HAVE been disinvited to the conference. I tell ya, those Systematic Cybernetic Informatic fellas: No sense of humor.