Hardware Beyond the Hype
Street Tech pal Alberto pointed us to this amazing database list of “Office 2.0” applications (that’s 2.0 as in Web 2.0, not Office as in Microsloth). The list itself was built using Dabble DB an amazing Web-based database application. You can see a demo of Dabble DB is action here. Another Office 2.0 database site, maintained by Ismael Ghalimi has an updated list of Office 2.0 apps, with reviews, and other resources. Ismael also keeps a list of his Web-based office set-up.
Thanks, Alberto!
Longtime Street Tech contributor Mark Crane sent me a link to this amazing Instructable where a guy built a 3D displacement map scanner using little more than LEGO bricks, a Web cam, a Tupperware container, and milk! By photographing sequences of an object being progressively submerged in the milk, and then feeding them into a 3D program that supports displacement mapping, you can create a virtual 3D object from a real one. Ingenious.
Thanks, Craniac!
I got a chance to meet Bre Pettis at the Maker Faire and he picked up a Mousey parts bundle and shot some footage of me for his Make: Weekend Projects podcast. Here is the result.
Man, do I ever have a face for radio! At least I sound reasonably coherent, which is a bonus.
BTW: In building this project, Bre experienced the dreaded “max headroom” problem, i.e., not allowing enough room above the circuit wiring to be able to screw the top of the mouse back on when you’re done. He also used solid core wiring throughout. It’s best to use stranded 24-guage inside and only solid core for the eyestalk wires. And even with stranded, you still want to make sure that you keep your wire lengths as short as possible. When I built the Mousey I’m holding in the above photo, I wasn’t as mindful of wire-length as I should’ve been, and when I was done, I couldn’t get the top back on. I had to re-route some of the wires to the sides of the LM386 chip and the relay to free up enough room. A royal pain.
This is pretty audacious, interesting, funny, and probably proves the inherent subjectiveness of computer system performance comparisons. Dubbed: “The Most Outlandish Computer Comparison Ever!” Guess who wins?
The most interesting, and saddest part, is their conclusion:
“Is this to say that the Mac Plus is a better computer than the AMD? Of course not. The technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities. But the “User Experience” has not changed much in two decades. Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don’t even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.
“And that’s just plain crazy.”
We couldn’t agree more.
[Via /.]
To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee: “‘At’s not an Access Point, *this* is an Access Point.” Geektechnique has the skinny on their fat pipe sucker (ah, so to speak). Called the Slurpr, it has six mini-PCI cards in it (and 4GB of CompactFlash) and is designed to lock onto six WiFi signals and aggregate their bandwidth into one “FreeLoading Broadband Canal.” Sadly, I rarely see six open access points in my neck of the woods anymore and using someone else’s broadband connection is tantamount to a crime. Mark at Geektechnique plans on selling the Slurpr for €999.
[Via Boing Boing]
When I saw this video (bottom of page) I thought it must be a put-on, another Infinite Solutions. In it, it’s claimed that you can extend the range of the keyless entry for your car by holding the keyfob to your temple (turning your cranium into an antenna booster). Easy enough to test. So I grabbed my keys, stepped outside, and tried it on our car. I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work! Why would you need to do this? If you can’t find your car in a parking garage you can scan the garage while beaming your wireless key into your head to try and flash your lights. Oh, like THAT’S not going to freak out the Muggles.
The linked-to page on Daily DIY has a bunch of other cool car unlocking tricks, like using the air pressure of a tennis ball with a hole poked in it to unlock a car (haven’t tried this one). Tres McGuyver.
Tim O’Reilly posted this really charming YouTube vid, on O’Reilly Radar, of a Chinese man who builds amazing robots out of his village’s junk, from tiny walking bots to humanoids that pull rickshaws.
I thought to do a search on YouTube for “Mousey the Junkbot” and found this video. It does a good job of demonstrating the bot’s photovoric behavior. On the Colbert Report, or at the Maker Faire, or other situs where Mousey has been demo’d, the light is too defuse, so the sensor action isn’t really demonstrated. The set up in this vid, where there’s a single light source and gradations of darkness around it, is perfect; you can clearly see Mousey’s tendency to want to “eat light.”
More Mousey links on Street Tech.
I was hired by a web consultancy, Project 10X, to write a couple of articles on semantic web technologies for a semantic wiki, called Alice in Metaland. The first piece, The Newbie’s Guide to the Semantic Web, is self-explanatory. The second item, Games in Context, looks at how semantic tools can be used in development to create software that developers have more control over, is more flexible, extensible, and can require fewer programmers, among other benefits. In the piece, I interview Rob Bauman, from CaraCasa Games, a Vancouver company, creating a game called Treasure Hunt: The Game, using Visual Knowledge, a semantic development environment.
We’re big fans of the squid cable arrangement here at the Labs. Now the concept comes to the USB hub, with the USB Squid offering four USB cables split from one. US$20 from