Building String Thing: Laser Pointers and Vibrating Rods: What’s great about the String Thing is two-fold: first, it’s an ingenious design, and second, Ben rigorously documents how he did it, including some false starts. The steel rods are a “stroke” of genius: using magnets, the rods “vibrate” as you play them for physical feedback, while a sophisticated combination of laser pointers and webcams calculate your finger position. [via] Link.
Following the release of the Google Maps API, we spent an hour or so and put together this map depicting Star Wars Imperial ATAT attack on Palo Alto. Yay for remixing. Link.
John writes “I was reminded of this site by your mention of Google Earth and GPS. It shows a technique of making drawings by carefully tracing out a path while recording the GPS position. Other drawings are made as a side-effect of another activity, such as skydiving”. Link.
If you want to podcast your mp3s but you don’t want to figure out blogging, RSS, MIME enclosures, just use this single (free) PHP script to turn your folder of mp3s into a bonafide podcast. Thanks Canton! Link.
Todd Young from Rosum Corporation showed off their new location technology which uses commercial broadcast television signals to provide reliable location outdoors, indoors, and even in dense urban areas. Rosum TV-positioning can serve as an augmentation or replacement for GPS. Link. They sell these devices and it could be used for any indoor location device.
Very funny, read the whole thing- Computer equipment, as you may know, produces heat. Sometimes the heat is so excessive that computing performance is hampered by what’s known scientifically as supreme erraticus behavicus as brought about by supreme heaticus… Link.
iPod Linux is faster on a Mini, that’s weird. These newer minis have a PP5022 at their core rather than the PP5020 seen in other new iPods. This allows for much better power consumption and slightly faster processing. At 75Mhz they’ve been kicking out BogoMIPS of around 37, compared to 32 for the PP5020 and 16 for the PP5002. Thanks Michael! Link.
