Matt writes “This stuff looks pretty incredible. To me the finished product looks a bit like an adobe building. It should greatly increase affordable housing in areas where it would have previously been too expensive.” Grancrete is a spray-on structural cement and here’s an overview of the Grancrete rapid construction process…” Link. Anyone ever use/see this in action?
David writes – “I’ve found a great new use for the old carpet tile samples my Architecture firm gets. I taped together some matching samples to make a rug for my pad. I originally tried this with Interface carpet tiles and carpet tape. The Interface carpet tiles are good for this, because they have a nice, firm, rubber back to them, however, this makes the rug hard to overturn when you’re done taping the tiles together.” Link.
This article describes a servo motor controller that is able to control up to 16 hobby servo motors and its based on the AT90S4414 microcontroller (a member of Atmel’s AVR Family). This servo controller is ideal in cases of building small robotic arms (3 to 5 axes) or small walker mobile robots (quadrapods or hexapods). The servo controller receives position commands through a serial connection which can be provided by using one I/O pin of another microcontroller, or a PCs serial port! Link.
O’Reilly Media has a full slate of in-booth tech talks at Mac World January 9th to the 13th and plenty of Mac and digital media titles to browse. Plus we have goodies, too! If you buy two or more titles at the booth, you get your choice of a canvas book bag or an O’Reilly T-shirt (while supplies last). And even if you’re not in a buying mood, you can enter a drawing with the opportunity to win a 30GB iPod Fifth Generation (video model). MAKE (part of O’Reilly) will be speaking each day about all the things everyone wants to do with their iPods like convert video, install linux, etc. Ok, not everyone… Link.
Wow, great news – now I can keep track of the stuff I want to do in the virtual world – “Web-based event-management service Eventful has opened a public portal to the strange goings-on inside virtual world Second Life. The Second Life Event calendar, formerly hidden from non-residents, is now indexed regularly by Eventful, which listed over 1600 searchable virtual happenings last month alone and expects to index about 400 events daily. Virtual-world residents can travel directly to event locations via Eventful by clicking an embedded link in each entry containing exact coordinates. Event-listings, which are updated regularly, can be subscribed to in iCal and RSS format.” [via] Link.
This scanner can actually play music, nice hack – “That’s right. The HP ScanJet 4c’s SCL (Scanner Control Language) command set includes an unofficial PLAY TUNE command. I stumbled across this after reading an article on the ScanJet 4c in the feb. 1997 issue of HP Journal (see the sidebar Sing to Me). The PLAY TUNE command basically varies the stepping rate of the scanner motor to produce audible frequencies. All it needs is a series of note frequencies and durations previously written to its SCSI buffer. ” [via] Link.
Interesting game hack… apparently Counter-Strike removed the cross-hairs for the sniper rifle to make it a bit more realistic (that is, they remove the cross-hair when the scope is not in use). With this trick a sniper will be able to accurately shoot in short-distance battles, all using a Sharpie. Thanks Ghia! Link.
