Hardware Beyond the Hype
Just in time for Halloween, it’s the latest Mimobots, hyper-cute little USB drives. Now these “designer drives” hold up to 2GB of data. They come is nifty packaging and even have drum and bass dance mixes pre-loaded onto them. Prices range from US$70 for 256MB to $190 for the 2GB model. Be the envy of every club kid and Japanese schoolgirl on your block.
[Via Protein Feed]
If you’re an avid gamer, you’ve probably asked yourself: Where are the fantasy first-person shooters? The guys behind Project Offset asked themselves the same question. And in the true spirit of DIY, they decided to take matters into their own hands and create the fantasy FPS that they’d like to play. The results, so far, are mind-boggling. This is not a mod, this is a ground-up game engine and epic fantasy world with graphics that put many other well-capitalized efforts to shame. This has all been accomplished by three volunteers working in a guy’s apartment! It’s hard to imagine that the sneak peak demos are real, in-game renderings, but they claim they are. There are still years of development left, and the team is looking for funding or being picked up by a commercial developer, but seeing what they have so far, we can’t imagine that’s not going to happen.
And you thought your life involved crazed levels of multitasking. This guy, Ravi Jain, is shooting a weekly video blog from the driver’s seat of his car during his daily commutes between Jamaica Plains and Allston, MA (a.k.a. “five hours of ‘studio time'”). He has guests on (who are bumming rides), and when his wife commutes with him, they do a “Regis and Kelly” type show (or at least that’s how Ravi fancies it), with some “marital banter to start the show” (oh joy!). He’s also thinking about doing things like a portable-grill cooking segment, if he gets snarled in traffic, and a game called “What’s in the Trunk?”
[Via Akihabara News]
Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch was given a first look at the alpha version of Riya (formerly Ojos), the next-gen photo sharing/storage service that uses facial and text recognition technologies to auto-tag photos. Mikey likes it. Read the piece and see screenshots here.
Hey, this new (to the US) electric scooter looks pretty sweet to me. Any ST scooter riders know anything about it? Here’s some of what what the Treehugger piece had to say on it:
Early reports are quite positive — apparently the claimed performance (speed and range) are accurate and that the build quality is excellent. The batteries use a silicone chemistry rather lead, nickel, or lithium.
The standard E-Max offers a 1500 Watt sealed brushless motor and a range up to 40 miles depending on rider/cargo weight and terrain. The e-Max has speeds up to 30 mph. It will 80% recharge in approximately 1.5 hours. The suggested retail price for this bike is $1,995.
Street Tech has joined the Stanford Folding@Home project. This is a distributed computing project (a la Seti@Home) where your unused computer processing cycles are put to work helping to simulate protein folding.
As proteins are assembled (or “folded”), misfolding can lead to all sorts of diseases. By running computer models which simulate gazillions of folds, researchers can study, and hopefully come to a better understanding of, how proteins fold (and misfold). This could lead to prevention and treatment of fold-related diseases (such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow ALS, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s).
So, to help out in the effort, we’ve created Team StreetTech. To join, all you have to do is download one of the Folding@Home programs (for Mac, Win, Linux) and enter the Team StreetTech number in the set-up (Team #47060). You can run F@H as a screensaver (Mac) or as a stand-alone client or text console.
C’mon, Street Techies: Show your TechTeam spirit and do something useful with all those wasted CPU cycles you spent so much money on.
[This picture shows the first Team StreetTech folding sim. Here I’m helping out on protein number p1155_L939_K12. Is it just me, or does that sickly greenish molecule look like trouble?]
PSPGBA is a Game Boy Advanced emulator for the PlayStation Portable. The just-relaesed Version 1.1 adds a speed boost, a 240×160 screen mode, and some other features and fixes. You can download it here (altho the server appears to be hosed at the moment).
[Via PSPupdates]
Here’s a hack for getting Apple’s new media control software, Front Row, working on earlier Macs and Minis. TUAW is hosting a reader video of a guy in Switzerland who got Front Row working on a Mini using his Bluetooth phone as a remote. His geekly snicker, when he gets the whole thing working, is hysterical.
An artist, Seth Weiner, has created a robotic vehicle piloted by a goldfish. The fish goes about its aquatic business in a bowl mounted on a two-wheeled cart. A camera above the bowl tracks the fish’s location and uses that information to send signals to a motor controller and two servos driving the bicycle wheels. Signal processing is done off-bot, via a PC and wireless connection. Called the Terranaut, this fish about town, is part of the NYC show “EXIT BIENNIAL 2 : Traffic.” at Exit Art
[Via we-make-money-not-art]