Here’s a new site that has a lot of information, hacks and downloads for Google Earth. It’s pretty amazing how quickly a community can rally around an application, release a site and publish a lot of good information. If you’re curious about adding your own data to Google earth like photos, check out our HOW TO as well. Link.
Aftermarket cell phone companies alter the electronics of a cell phone to enable you to activate (without ringing the phone) the microphone in the phone, so you can listen in remotely. A company in France is now offering a modified Nokia 3310. I guess it’s a hardware mod that hides auto-answer?[via] Link.
Fred Quimby of the Stella Atari 2600 VCS homebrew game development community has written a BASIC compiler for the Atari VCS. Yes, you read that correctly — it lets normal mortals write games for the Atari we all played to bits before we finally poured orange juice into the console by accident when we were XYZ years old [via] Link.
Zantor sent in this car “how to” site he found handy…There are amazingly well-arranged tutorials in here for fixing electrical problems, clearing up the beam pattern on your headlamps, changing the oil filter, tightening up the transmission, and more. I just did the one that fixes the false-positive beep in the seatbelt indicator. Plenty of photos and good instruction. Link.
“Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mechanical guitar-playing robot, named the Crazy J. The guitar player is composed of two mechanical systems that interact to play a range of 29 musical notes. A plucking mechanism with six independently controlled picks is mounted over the body of the guitar and a fingering mechanism with an array of 23 fingertips is mounted over the first four frets of the fingerboard.” [via] Link.
Great interview with Colin from iRobot! What sort of add-ons could you have for the Roomba? Angle: For the Roomba, there is a group that’s working very seriously and looking at the idea of using the Roomba as a physical avatar. I might log into a Web page and see what the robot sees, hear what the robot hears and be able to drive the robot from my Web page. Over time, there’ll be probably more of this type of interest. The rate at which it becomes economically interesting? I’ve no idea. We’re putting up the APIs and doing what we can to encourage people. Link.
