The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
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]
Cool project – Bunnie (designer of the Chumby) writes – Tor is an open-source project that is dear to me for many reasons. For those who are unfamiliar with it, in a nutshell, Tor can enhance your anonymity on the internet: it obscures who you are, and what sites you are visiting. This is important, […]
Take a look inside Google’s brand new unlocked mobile phone, Nexus One, and see how it matches up to the Apple iPhone 3GS. More details at Google Phone
The gadget orgy of CES, and the angry kerfuffle over the SparkFun Free Day, made me think of this viral video from an appearance of comedian Louis CK on Conan O’Brien. We take so much of our modern technology and modern services for granted. They seem to almost instantaneously become birthrights to us. Example: A […]
The recently announced AR.Drone from Parrot may be the coolest toy I’ve ever seen. The AR.Drone quadricopter is controlled by iPhone & iPod Touch via wifi and provides a live video stream from the unit’s ‘cockpit’. It uses a second onboard cam facing downward to measure speed and compensate for turbulence, and in case of […]
