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Over the weekend the Discovery Channel had some footage from last year’s SKATEBOT competition. The University of Calgary’s SKATEBOT event pits autonomous LEGO robots against each other in the ice rink. Contestants all have the same LEGO parts in addition to 2 razor blades, the real ingenuity is how the students choose to move the bots around. Some chop their way, others push, one called the dragonfly mimicked the motions of their human skater counterparts. I couldn’t find an updated page for this year’s event, but if the 2004 page is correct– the next one should be in March of 2005.

Each week there seems to be more and more great applications using the Flickr API. I’ve used a lot of photo sharing sites in the past, but Flickr is where it’s at– being able to tinker, mashup what and how photos are viewed is as important as the photos themselves. The latest cool app spotted via Waxy.org is the Flickr / TiVo HME experiment. With this, you can view pictures by tags, groups, sets, users and photos recently posted. If any of you out there use this, point it at our group pool! Make:TV!

The Einstein@Home project is now open for general participation! Much like the SETI@Home and folding@Home efforts- this project uses the idle time of your computer to work on a distributed computing project. Einstein@Home searches data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors to detect waves that ripple the fabric of time and space which may confirm predictions by the General theory of Relativity. You can read more about the project, gravity waves and other distributed computing projects here. If you’d like to join the Make Magazine team, visit our team page. Here’s a screenshot of the screensaver from the Einstein@Home application as well the 3 computers I’m running BOINC projects on (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).

I have a Tablet PC for robot and “wearable” type projects. I’m working on an article for Make Issue 03 that will pull a lot of cool things together like mapping, cosmic rays on airplanes and USB Geiger counters. Here are a couple pictures of some testing from the Maker Flickr group pool. If you haven’t joined the group yet– join in and post up!

Weekends are about coffee in my home. The Philips Senseo is a coffee maker that makes one cup of coffee at a time, insert single serving Fight Club reference here. I saw one at the store a few days ago and remembered reading about analogies to its “protected” coffee pods that keep you locked in to Philips pod system like DRM on many music players do. I never really thought about buying a Senseo, but today on the del.icio.us bookmarks a guide showed up on making your own coffee pods as well as a universal version. So, now I am thinking of getting one and writing this up for a future issue. Has anyone made their own pods out there? Is the Senseo that good?

I’m really getting in to “fan made films” lately. Most are Sci-Fi and starting to become fairly high quality. While I was at the Seattle ComicCon I was surprised to see DVDs of all the ones I’ve viewed in the past for sale on tables with lots of other DVDs you can’t “buy” anywhere. Waxy.org posted a link to this one, a Thundercats fan film which is a fun watch. Other ones I’ve downloaded and used to test video playback on phones, devices, etc… have been Grayson, Duality, Fanimatrix, Hidden Frontier, and Starship Exeter. If you have any other cool ones post’em up!