Make pal David Weekly had a weekend Hackathon and cooked up a free and simple Wiki service- pbwiki. Make a free password protected Wiki as easy as making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Great for collaborative projects! What’s a Wiki? A way for groups of people to edit a web page- and more. Link.
Neat projects, using Macromedia Flash. InstantSOUP is a path into electronics using an approach of “learning by making”, introducing electronic prototyping in a playful, non-technical way. It was developed following the experience gained in teaching physical interaction design at Interaction-Ivrea. Link.
iRobot and Frontline Robotics are teaching robots how to work together. The goal of iRobot’s swarm project is to coordinate the actions of groups of hundreds of individual robots. A Swarm Operating System (SwarmOS) is under development to control as many as 10,000 robots or SwarmBots. Link.
I checked out the Biodiesel station at Laurelhurst oil in Seattle over the weekend- really neat stuff. Here are some photos of the pump. For more information, what vehicles it’ll run in and more- here’s Laurelhurst’s site with the same info as the flyer they had there. Link. Voulme 3 of MAKE will have a lot of interesting biodiesel info, stay tuned!
MAKE Flickr Group Photo Pool member pmidge posted a photo of a really cool looking LCD name plate for his door- a project i’m working on is to add an lcd-based nameplate to my office door. this is a prototype board i made to work out the hardware/firmware. the finished product should go well with the orange gorilla fur already on the door… :)Link.
Neat DIY Camera Bag with hard internal fiberglass shell- I feel like such a tourist (waiting to get mugged) with a camera bag, so I bought a messenger bag and hopefully I won’t stand out anymore. I also wanted it to fit in my backpack without getting crushed when I cinch my packs compression straps, so I made a hard shell insert. It’s faily common for backpacks to be cut and contents emptied without the person wearing the bag knowing. Link.
New book to get kids excited about space exploration– “Buzz Aldrin: Reaching for the Moon” (HarperCollins). The goal of the book, intended for 6- to 9-year-old readers that Aldrin calls “the third generation of space explorers,” is to re-ignite interest and excitement in the space program. Aldrin, 75, says he’s always considered it his mission to serve his country and the best way he can do that now is “by offering a vision into the future”. [via] Link.
