December 2007 – Street Tech

December 11, 2007

Review: LEGO MINDSTORMS Library

In last year’s Holiday Gadget Guide, I reviewed the wonderful then-new LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT system. It’s a year later and my admiration for this product has only grown. It has been enthusiastically embraced by robot hobbyists and professionals, educators, kids of all ages, R&D departments looking for quick n’ dirty prototyping components — 1,001 uses. It’s also been embraced by publishers, who’ve followed the product with a felled forest worth of books. Three of may favorites are from No Starch Press (disclosure: O’Reilly, the publisher I work for, distributes No Starch titles).

[Read on…]

December 11, 2007

I want an Arduino-powered Christmas, baby!

My Make: Books co-conspirator Brian Jepson has posted a quick n’ dirty way of building a 64-node LED matrix (green and red, natch) of holiday lights, driven by a Max 7219 chip and controlled by an Arduino cloneboard. Not too shabby. The resulting LED “net” will only cover a small tree. For a larger tree, you’d have to do a much more ambitious build and cascade Max chips, but it seems to be time-consuming than anything else. Being the geek that he is, Brian also got the thing talking to his mobile phone over Bluetooth, which he promises more info on soon.

December 4, 2007

Geekly Gift Wrap

I love wrapping presents. I treat it like improvisational art. I have my various pieces of wrapping paper (some commercial, some stuff like ad slicks, street maps, magazine pages, wall paper, craft paper), old Christmas cards, stickers, rubber stamps, bits of wire, ribbon and string. And tape. Lots of tape. Now picture a comic book blur of furious activity and out pops a present. Sometimes the results thoroughly suck. Sometimes it approaches art. Such is the way of improvisation. But I have fun, either way. And hopefully, the recipient can feel that and appreciates the effort.

[Read on…]

December 4, 2007

Give the “Flat Earth”… and a Heifer

One of the most satisfying gifts I’ve ever given was livestock to needy villages, via Heifer International. Everybody love it (except for my dad who called up demanding to know where the goat was that I’d given in his namesake… er I mean name). So I’m seriously thinking about giving the family two computers that they’ll never see either, two XO Laptops donated to needy children via the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project. For a donation of $399, you buy two XO laptops, one that goes to a child in need, one that comes to you to give to a child (or anybody) of your choice. I’d give my second one to the local homeless shelter.

[Read on…]

December 4, 2007

Review: Belkin Sling Bag

I’ve been a long-time cheerleader for Brenthaven bags**, so much so that, years ago, they put one of my breathless reviews on their hangtags. (At least I think they did. They asked permission. I never saw one.) Anyhoo… as our President likes to remind us: 9/11 changed everything. Traveling has become a hassle at best and air travel frequently veers into something out of a dystopian novel. Planes are getting crammed with more seats and more passengers, the aisles growing so narrow, soon you’ll have to grease your luggage to get it through. My beloved Brenthaven Expandable Topload and my old small suitcase just didn’t fly in a 21st century world. I’d replaced the suitcase a few trips back, and needed to get the right gadget bag to go with it. I found it in the Belkin Sling Bag ($49).

[Read on…]

December 4, 2007

Lovely Art Painted by Bugs

Hey, elephants and chimps (and children) can do a pretty good job of abstract painting, so why not bugs? Artist Steven R. Kutcher dips the creepy crawlers in (watercolor) paint, or has them traipse through it, and then he lets them scurry across the canvas (watercolor paper).

Kutcher influences the… ah… artists by manipulating light sources, as most insects move toward or from a light source. Kutcher paints the backgrounds beforehand and obviously chooses the color palette, so it’s really collaborative man/bug art. He carefully cleans the little critters off afterwards and says that there’s no apparent harm done. When not painting with arthropods, Kutcher is a bug consultant to the film industry.

Thanks, Patti!