Street Tech pal J. Wolfgang Goerlich has a little piece on GoRobotics about some students at Virginia Military Institute who came up with a novel way of destroying ticks. A robotic rover (made from a hacked R/C monster truck toy) drives around dragging a “skirt” behind it that’s been treated with a pesticide. The ticks hop onto the skirt and are exposed to the deadly chemical, killing them without having to expose the entire area to the harmful chems. As Mr. Spock might say: “Fascinating.”
Wired also has a piece on the project.
Back in the early ’90s, when I was doing a zine called “
Yeah, yeah, I know, enough with the wacky USB devices, already! We can’t help it. We have an unhealthy fascination with this product category: coffee warmers, hands and feet warmers, ah…personal massagers, night lights — all things that are perfectly happy in an AC socket or battery-charged — somehow take on a shiny allure when powered by your computer’s USB port. The feeling that you’re getting the power for free — I guess that’s the attraction. 
In the early ’90s, I had a column in Mondo 2000 magazine (called “Street Tech,” BTW) covering DIY high-tech. I profiled a guy — I forget his name — who was doing “electronic graffiti” in NYC. He was building simple LED flasher circuits into little RadioCrap project boxes, and attaching them to lamp posts, street signs, the sides of buildings, etc. He would even set up timed events between a string of these boxes (e.g. a series of boxes on Stop signs would flash in sequence down the road). I thought it was tres street tech/cyberpunk for its time. 
If ever there was a blog item worthy of our “Sign of the Apocalypse” shingle, it may be this one. 
One of the cool things about putting 
Here’s a