RFID Toys looks excellent! And it’s written by MAKE pal Amal Graafstra – “The book contains step by step guides to building various RFID based projects, and stresses the concepts involved as well as the steps themselves. RFID technologies covered include passive, low frequency 125KHz tags and readers, passive high frequency 13.56MHz, up to active, UHF 900Mhz tags and readers.” Thanks Matt! Link.
Wow, what a week for new books, here’s another I’m looking forward to (also from the folks who publish MAKE) “Only a Game takes readers on a fascinating exploration of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) based on the experience of gamers and authors Mark Wallace and Peter Ludlow. When Ludlow’s online persona — an investigative journalist named Urizenus Sklar — began reporting in his virtual newspaper on underage cyber-prostitutes, real-life crimes, strong-arm tactics and scams that had become rife in the popular MMOG “The Sims Online”, the game’s creators (Electronic Arts and Maxis Software) found an excuse to ban Ludlow from the game.” Link.
Adam Tow writes “The big news coming out of the 2006 Worldwide Newton Conference is that the NewtonOS is running on a Linux PDA! You heard that right, we’re one step closer to having a Newton running on non-Apple hardware. At the 2004 WWNC, Paul demoed Einstein, an emulator running on Mac OS X… At the 2006 Worldwide Newton Conference, we demonstrated that the soul of the Newton is not trapped within aging hardware. It’s ready to burst out and transfer its elegance and functionality into a new line of devices.” Wow, check out the picture of the Newton OS running on a Sharp Zaurus. [via] Link.
From the same peeps that publish MAKE. I’m really looking forward to this book – “What does it mean to grow up with videogames? Even though videogames and computer games play a large role in the daily lives of millions of people, little has been written about the impact this activity has had in shaping the lives of those who play them. In Transmissions from Imaginary Places, 20 people close to the gaming world offer entertaining and thought-provoking essays and anecdotes on games and gamers, and how this often-obsessive activity has changed the world.” [via] Link.
Dennis on the Amiga forums is building a mini Amiga. He writes – “I bought a Spartan-3 FGPA development board, learned Verilog (after finding out that VHDL was not my cup of tea) and started working on Minimig. Minimig stands for (very originally ) mini Amiga. My aim with Minimig is to built a complete OCS A500 (with some extra grunt and features like 4Mbyte ram and fast 68000 processor) on a circuit board about the size of a floppy drive. Loading of programs will be done by means of a MMC flash card, which holds the .ADF images of the floppies like a sort of hardware UAE!” [via] Link.
I’m really hoping this iRiver does well; it’s the first tiny MP3 player that you lets make your own games, applications and utilities using Macromedia Flash, then load them up on the device to use. Back in June of 2005 we posted about this. If it works out, I think we’ll see Sony and even Apple consider user-created content like Flash games as a potential new feature – or at least sell little Flash games via Sony Connect or iTunes. Here are a couple of videos of the device in action – Link and Link.
