As part of her Social Defense Mechanisms: Tools for Reclaiming our Personal Space research, Limor Fried (creator of the Wave Bubble and the Minty MP3) developed the Media-Sensitive Glasses that automatically darken whenever a television is in view, so as to protect the wearer from television’s “hypnotic” effect. Link.
Gross web server. Experiments in Galvanism is the culmination of studio and gallery experiments in which a miniature computer is implanted into the dead body of a frog specimen. Akin to Damien Hirst’s bodies in formaldehyde, the frog is suspended in clear liquid contained in a glass cube, with a blue ethernet cable leading into its splayed abdomen. The computer stores a website that enables users to trigger physical movement in the corpse: the resulting movement can be seen in gallery, and through a live streaming webcamera. Link.
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.
