Hardware Beyond the Hype
Now that I have pearlLyrics automating my lyric look-ups in iTunes, I was hoping for the same sort of thing for album art. My wish is some geek’s command. iTunesCool (is that caveman speak?) is an AppleScript that fetches cover art from Amazon, based on iTunes database info (the Album field, I’d imagine). iTunesCool cool! Unfortunately not cool is the fact that the server for the program has been hosed by all of the attention, so check back later, or look for it elsewhere.
[Via iPodHacks]
I had a hard disk die recently, and yes, after preaching to the masses the maxim: “If you can’t afford to lose it, back it up!,” I had months worth of at-risk data.
Looking at going to a data recovery center is not an inexpensive proposition. So I’m intrigued by this piece on Hack-a-Day on how to remove the platters from a dead drive and install them in an identical working drive (bought on the cheap via eBay). It doesn’t look that hard. Don’t know that I’ll do it — the data is too precious to risk — but it is tempting — especially since I’m looking at hundreds of dollars to have somebody else do it.
I’ve come really close to picking up a ColdHeat soldering iron several times, seeing them at my local Radio Crap and on ThinkGeek. A review of the iron on NewTech has me thinking better of it. According to the reviewer, and most everyone else chiming in via comments, it is not a worthwhile product and no substitute for a good ol’ iron ore fire stick.
I love my Roomba, but one of the places where it could be improved is the battery. Mine has already given up the ghost and it’s only a couple of years old. I didn’t want to spend US$50 on a replacement battery, and I knew that lots of people had hacked their Roombas, so I figured they’d played with the batteries as well. I was right! RoombaReview.com hosts a little tutorial on how to take apart your Roomba’s battery and replace its innards with NiMH C-cells intended for R/C cars.
“Cute Cool Wild Smart” They forgot “Obscenely Expensive.” It’s true that this awesome-looking bot can do more than the WowWee Robosapien right out of the box (like talk to your LAN and send pictures to your desktop and respond to commands from your PC over its WiFi link). But these who-cares capabilities will cost you US$7000!
A Robosapien (Version 2, US$250) can do many of nuvo’s tricks as-is, and using the many online hacks and Robosapien hacks books, you can add most of nuvo’s bells and whistles yourself (at a fraction of the cost).
BTW: Check out the upcoming Robosapien V2 commercials here.
More images of the nuvo and Tech Specs after the jump.
Here’s one for you deep geeks in the hiz-ouse (you of fainter heads can turn away now).
Rick Bickle, of the Dallas Personal Robotics Group, has posted an awesomely simple circuit that turns a ubiquitous 555 Timer integrated circuit into a Pulse-Width Modulator that can be used to control DC motors.
Pulse-Width Modulation (or PWM) is a common way of controlling the speed of a motor (where pulses are sent to the motor at a given rate, turning the power on and off, which is used as a method of speed control). PWM is usually handled with a microcontroller chip and module, but this little circuit uses an el cheapo 8-pin 555 IC chip (which even Radio Shack still carries and they don’t carry much of anything anymore) and other common analog components. This would be a great way to control a BEAM or other type of robot where you were trying to reduce or eliminate reliance on computer control.
Here’s an amazingly easy hack for a Bluetooth phone headset so that you can listen to your iPod through it, and when a call comes through on the phone, you can pause the Pod, take the call, and then go back to your music. The guy who hacked this up used a cheapo Bluetooth headset and did little more than solder on a stereo mini-plug in place of the headset’s speaker.
Extra geek cred for using the Comic Life program for presenting the how-to piece (a growing little trend we’ve noticed).
[Via Engadget]
Don’t worry, Street Tech is not turning into yet another gamer fanboy site — there’s just a lot going on in the gaming space these days. ‘Tis the season n’ all that.
Brian over at Kotaku got his sweaty little controller-fingers on a 360 and has a series of pieces walking through set-up, use of Xbox Live, Xbox multimedia, interoperability, and some game play.
Update: Gizmodo has their own OOBE take on the 360.
Six students from the Royal College of Art in London are putting on a show that explores the statue-like forms people assume while playing with a Playstation Portable (or any other gaming handheld for that matter). From studying these gaming postures, the students designed cocoon-like “furniture” that conforms to the gaming postures. Visitors to the show are encourage to climb into the pieces.
You may already be familiar with the i-Fusion Portable Speaker System for the iPod. It’s a zippered travel case with built-in speakers that offers fairly impressive room-filling sound, a nice way for business travelers n’ such to carry and amplify their Pods. Sonic Impact now offers the i-Pax (US$80), a similar case and speaker system for the Shuffle. Not sure how this compares sound-wise, but if it’s comparable to the i-Fusion, it might be a nice mobile over-the-air solution.