Nice community site for Makers – Get those technical questions answered. Wide range of experts on line including NASA engineers, Scientists, Pilots, Mechanical – electrical – computer engineers,Business men, Linguists, Teachers and just plain smart people from all over the world. Something technical or scientific always bugged you? Ask away, even if we don’t get to the bottom of it we will enjoy the discussion on the way. Link.
MAKE pal Jason Striegel from blogcadre.com writes “Here’s a telerobotic Mac Mini based on the Pioneer 3at platform. I guess they intend to expand this into a fully autonomous unit that uses lidar and the iSight camera for guidance and obstacle avoidance. Right now they control it over a wireless connection and use ichat to provide a remote video feed”. Link.
Tom Bridge writes: In the aftermath of Katrina, with our T1 gone in our Jackson, MS office, we had to create a simple dialup router that could share one connection across many devices. This is how we did it. For less than $200. In an hour. Link
Jay Brewer writes My daughter is currently obsessed with Fireflies – and if you’ve ever seen them in person, you’ll become obsessed too….The Firefly lights have an “electronic brain” that makes Firefly Magic fireflies flash, flicker, and fade just like Mother Nature’s real fireflies and each is sealed in a waterproof case, insuring the microprocessor and electronics will last for many years. Link
Using a small Linux distro like Puppy Linux and open source emulator like QEMU,it is possible to run and stop Linux like normal windows programs. By creating virtual hard disks and using software like WinImage you can actually transfer data between Linux and Window. You can also create a virtual network between Windows and the guest OS for sharing and transferring files. And not to forget SAMBA in this context. Link.
Get a free copy of Linspire until the 6th: I downloaded it, burned the ISO, and it worked just fine off a Sony VAIO and lots of other old PCs around here. You do need to join their software service if you want to do more it seems, but overall it’s a great Linux distro to play with. So far, my favorite “live” CD to carry around is WHAX – post your favs in the comments. [via] Link.
Cool project from Michael J. Mahon – At the outset, when designing NadaNet, I envisioned that it could be used to support parallel computing on Apple II machines. To add more processors and save space, I decided that I would package several Apple //e main boards together, without keyboards or peripheral slot cards. (I didn’t disassemble the Apples myself, but found a box of Apple //e main boards being sold as an auction lot for about a dollar each!) I settled on a wooden cube about one foot on a side which I slotted to hold up to 8 main boards. For whimsical reasons, I called it an “AppleCrate”. [via] Link.
