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BoxBots: High-Tech Folk Art

We love the high-tech folk art here at the Labs — it is “street tech,” after all. And, we love the robots made from junk. These two interests get all origami on us in BoxBots, a wacky menagerie of cardboard robot models crafted by artist Jonathan Keller while he was bored and living in Antarctica.

Other people have gotten in on the act and started submitting their own BoxBots to the site. I love the idea of re-visioning trash, squinting to see if there’s a robot lurking in there. You’ll never look at your garbage the same way: “C3PO, is that you?”

[Via Make]

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Xbox 360 Firmware Hacked

A European hacker named TheSpecialist, along with a team of fellow propellerheads, has successfully modified the firmware on the Xbox 360 console so that copied game discs can be booted directly from the DVD drive. The group has no plans to release the firmware (“The team advocates hacking, not piracy”), but their investigations are public, so a release of the hack is likely soon.

Here’s what Microsloth had to say on news on the hack.

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Drooling Over Dremel

We don’t know about you, but we’re pretty psyched here at Street Tech Labs about getting our hands on the new Dremel Stylus tool (US$70). The latest in the Dremel line, this cordless multipurpose rotary tool has a handle for better grip and fmore control when doing precision work. It’s smaller than the last Dremel release (the rather beefy 10.8V cordless), which can be a little unwieldy on some jobs. The Stylus offers a nice happy medium, with a respectable 7.2V Li-on battery and up to 25,000 RPM. The handle grip allows you to hold the Stylus like a pencil, for greater control in situations where you need it, but you can also flip the tool around and hold it like a typical Dremel (for using things like a cut-off wheel where you’d want the wheel to be perpendicular to your cut).

We’ll try to get ahold of an evaluation unit for an in-depth review. Stay tuned…

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The Bucky Boob Tube

Is there a carbon nanotube TV in your future? Maybe. As you may recall, a company called Applied Nanotube showed off a rather low-res (we’re talkin’ 280 x 200) proof-of-concept nanotube TV last year. Now the company has announced a letter of intent deal with a Taiwanese TV maker to create commercial sets based on Applied’s tech.

Carbon nanotube TV tech is similar in concept to CRT (cathode ray), with the carbon tubes shooting electrons at the screen, but here, the sets can be LCD-thin and the energy consumption is significantly less. Nanotube tech also does not experience the image ghosting found on larger LCD and plasma displays.

A spokesbot for the company said that trials of the sets could begin as early as later this year and that commercial production could be underway in two.

Full story on CNet.

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Windows on Mac: We Have a “Winner”

In January, we told you about a guy who had started to take up a collection to pay the first person who could get Windows XP running on an Intel Mac. It may have taken longer than some people thought, and the proceedure is gnarly enough that old deep geeks need apply, but it IS doable. The question now, of course, is WHY?

BTW: When we brought you the story in January, the pot was up to US$7000. The two hackers who performed the installation, who call themselves “Narf2006” and “Blanka,” took $13,854 back to their cubicles. Colin Nederkoorn, who initated the contest, is continuing to take donations to support ongoing efforts in his Windows on Mac open source project.

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New Ransomware Sighting

EWeek is reporting a new trojan horse ransomware attack. Called Cryzip, the malicious software likely arrives via an email attachment, though exact details are not yet known. Once in your (Windows) machine, Cryzip scoops up all of the Word, Excel, PDF, and JPG docs on your system, encrypts a copy in Zip format, deletes the originals, and provides details on how to pay the US$300 ransom to get your stuff back. So far, reports of the attack have not been widespread. If you need another reason to always back data onto a second, removable medium, this’d be one (and we’re not going to bother to remind you about not opening up even remotely suspicious attachments).

Thanks, Alberto!

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DRM Sucks (Battery Life)

As if we needed another reason to loath DRM, testing done at CNet shows that playback of audio files incorporating the dubious copy protection scheme can shorten battery life on portable players by as much as 25%! And just when battery life was getting to a level that didn’t feel like a total joke.

An excerpt:

“Those who belong to subscription services such as Napster or Rhapsody have it worse. Music rented from these services arrive in the WMA DRM 10 format, and it takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself. Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them. Take, for instance, the critically acclaimed Creative Zen Vision:M, with a rated battery life of up to 14 hours for audio and 4 hours for video. CNET tested it at nearly 16 hours, with MP3s–impressive indeed. Upon playing back only WMA subscription tracks, the Vision:M scored at just more than 12 hours. That’s a loss of almost 4 hours, and you haven’t even turned the backlight on yet.

“We found similar discrepancies with other PlaysForSure players. The Archos Gmini 402 Camcorder maxed out at 11 hours, but with DRM tracks, it played for less than 9 hours. The iRiver U10, with an astounding life of about 32 hours, came in at about 27 hours playing subscription tracks. Even the iPod, playing back only FairPlay AAC tracks, underperformed MP3s by about 8 percent. What I’m saying is that while battery life may not be a critical issue today, as it was when one of the original hard drive players–the Creative Nomad Jukebox–lasted a pathetic 4 hours running on four AA nickel-metal-hydride rechargeables (and much worse on alkalines), the industry needs to include battery specs for DRM audio tracks or the tracks we’re buying or subscribing. Yet, here’s another reason why we should still be ripping our music in MP3: better battery life, the most obvious reason being universal device compatibility.”

Read their complete findings here.

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Gareth Guestblogs on Nxtbot.com

I have been asked to be the first guestblogger on Nxtbot, a blog that the LEGO Company has set up to talk about their forthcoming Mindstorms NXT system and consumer/hobby robotics in general. I’ll be tryng to get some dialog going on various issues surrounding personal robotics today, so please drop by and chime in, if so inspired. Here’s an excerpt from one of my first postings:

“MIT’s Rodney Brooks has an adage (to paraphrase): A bunch of working “dumb” bots (i.e. robots w/little computing power that sense and react directly to their environment) is better than one broken “smart” bot (i.e. a robot that maps its world, plans optimal routes through it, etc).

“I propose a corollary: A robot that is actually on the market is better than a bunch of bots that are endlessly demo’d at trade shows. Look at the Hondo P3 and the Sony SDR-4/Qrio vs. the Wow Wee Robosapien and the iRobot Roomba. While Hondo and Sony keep parading around these perpetual demobots but never bring them to market (and Sony just turned the development lights out on Qrio), the Robosapien and the Roomba are proven market successes and are now several product generations in pedigree.

“NEC’s answer to the Honda and Sony demobots is the PaPeRo (”Partner-Type Personal Robot”). While it’s an undisputedly cute little rug-rover, and has enjoyed plenty of ink and electrons since it was first rolled out in 2001, it remains in the prototype stage and there is still no release date. If you ask me, I think there should be a “put up or shut up” statute for such prototypes. If you show off a prototype and it garners a bunch of media attention, and then you don’t bring it to market in, let’s say three years, you gotta retire it; show us a NEW concept robot. Hey, maybe that’s what Sony did on their own. The SDR-4/Qrio couldn’t cut the mustard, so they did the only honorable thing, they took it off the world stage and stopped teasing us with it. So, what’s it going to be NEC? The shelves of my local Target or the wayside on the road to Robotopia?

“And, in case you didn’t notice, the robots above that are actually on the market are of the “dumb bot” variety while the ones in perpetual prototypical stage are “smart bots.” Coincidence? We think not. Discuss.”

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Pigging Out on Poo

While we’re on the subject of crap, we might as well mention the electric pig (a.k.a. the “electric mole”), a German-made robot that’s apparently in high-demand in Europe. It’s being used as part of the more cost-effective, environmentally-friendly practice of solar-drying sewage. The effluent is spread out inside of large greenhouse-like sheds for the sun to dry it out. The “pigs” go to work, stirring the “mud” to hasten the drying process. Once dried, the resulting material is virtually bacteria-free and can be more safely spread on farm-fields.

[Via Robots.Net]

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GPS: Global POO-sitioning System

If you’re a pet curmudgeon like me, there’s nothing that makes you angrier than seeing a big steaming pile o’ dog poo in public (except maybe seeing the dog doing it and the owner walking away without picking it up).

Italian interface and service designer Aram Saroyan Armstrong has come up with a…ah… shitty idea for dealing with the menace of public pet crap. It’s a “mobile poop awareness and avoidance system” he’s dubiously dubbed “Pooptopia.” He explains how it would work on his site:

“On her way home from the market, Signora Pelle wheels her cart into a fresh pile of dog poo. Infuriated by the indignity of the situation, she takes out her mobile to document the uncharted poo and fires off pre-formatted SMS to local city officials stating “No shit is good shit. Enough with irresponsible dog owners!” with photo and GPS coordinates attached. The picture is then uploaded to the Pooptopia website where other angry Poogilantes gather to vent and crook fingers at the filthy pictures and lament over falling real estate value of their neighborhood on Pooptopia’s message boards. From the comfort of her apartment, Signora Pelle pecks on her keyboard, “Let’s show them we mean business!” She organizes a flashmob of Poogilantes and descend into the heart of their Pooptopian neighborhood to poolog en masse. Nearby at a city substation, a small squad of sanitation workers wheel out on specially modified Segways and head off to the new, large blip on their Poodar PDA screen.”

Okay, so maybe this guy has an unhealthy interest in pet excrement (and a penchant for corny coinages with “poo” in them), but it’s all a means for him to evangelize the potential for location-based Net-connected services and his ideas for making “service design” more entertaining.

[Via We Make Money Not Art]