The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
Mark F. posted an interesting piece on Boing Boing, skeptical of the RCA “Airnergy WiFi Hotspot Power Harvester,” a device that can allegedly charge its internal battery via Wi-Fi radio signals. They definitely get endless demerits for a groaningly-bad product name. How can you say “Airnergy” without choking on your own bile? Mark quotes from […]
I can think of a million things I’m going to log with this… Data Logger for iPhone enables you to store and graph any data of your choosing along with a timestamp and geolocation. You might use Data Logger to store electricity meter readings, to create maps of pollution or temperature sensor readings around your […]
Thanks to everyone who entered the Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest! We had a great time checking out all of the entries with lasers, grappling hooks, and other spy-stealth goodies, all designed by Alex Rider fans ages 8-18. It was a hard decision, but the winners are in! Grand Prize Winner: The Listening Cup by […]
Theo Watson writes: The long awaited update to the original Fat Tag – The Deluxe Edition co-created with NYC graffiti legend Katsu is now available in the App Store. Features include: Multiple default backgrounds Additional background selection from camera, photo library Scale, rotate, angle, opacity options for realistically overlaying tag onto camera image. Multiple pen/brush […]
The periodicity of properties of the chemical elements has been represented many, many different ways since Mendeleev. The modern standardized periodic table is only one of a potentially infinite number of graphical representations of the empirical trends. If you understand the logic of the periodic table, looking through these “alternative” representations can be a lot of fun. There are hundreds of them! [via Boing Boing]
The solar dog prototype charger from Erik Schiegg is a solar panel attached to a dog sweater. I’m not sure how efficient it is, but I could see this being handy.
A team from MIT has claimed the $40,000 grand prize in Darpa’s recent NAME social networking challenge. The prize went to the first team to successfully report the locations of 10 large red balloons positioned at random locations around the continental United States. MIT’s strategy involved the construction of an incentivized social network in which pieces of the reward were distributed along the entire “chain” connecting the network to a person reporting the location of a balloon: the actual reporter was awarded $2000, the person who invited the reporter was awarded $1000, the person who invited that person was awarded $500, and so on up the chain. I wonder if bail bondsmen could adopt a similar strategy to locate fugitives? [via The Computational Legal Studies Blog]
