“A small wireless battery powered device – Turn it on near a friendly wireless network that contains iTunes shares and plug your headphones in. It picks a random iTunes share, picks a random tune and starts playing. Repeat until bored or the batteries are dead. The size of the system is amazing. The main board is about the size of my little finger. By default it’s running an ssh server, a web server and advertising itself to the network with bonjour.” Link.
Robotsrule writes “I have made a new video to show some of the capabilities of the new, upcoming version 3 of Robosapien Dance Machine, the free open source program that lets Windows PC users create complex scripts to control their robots, and control their robots using just their voice. This 1 minute 3 MB video demonstrates the support that version 3 of Robosapien Dance Machine will have, for all of WowWee’s robots; including the Robosapien V1, Robosapien V2, Robopet, and Roboraptor robots.” [via] Link.
Awhile back we made our own Flickr photo frame from an old Tablet PC we got on eBay, and now there’s a real version you can pick up, too. “The eStarling frame is a standalone Wi-Fi LCD photo frame that connects to a wireless network and automatically displays photos e-mailed to it in a slideshow format. Additionally you can specify an RSS photo feed from Flickr based on your own tagged keywords. You can even shoot photos on your mobile phone then e-mail them directly to your eStarling frame for display.” [via] Link. There are also a ton of other ways to make photo frames, too, if you’re in the DIY mood.
We’re getting ready to cover Macworld here in San Francisco, and as usual, bizarre flight and travel things tend to initially seem dismal, then work out – I saw two friends as I walked by Ritual Roasters in the Mission area that I haven’t seen since weirdos like us were running Generator 1.0 on online banks and Comcast cable boxes with Flash 3. Any way – one of them makes really fun things, here’s his photo set Link. Then, a few hours later, at the crosswalk, Stewart and Caterina from Flickr happen to be here, so we told them our plan to send live photos from the Macworld floor via EVDO, a WiFi network we’re making and the Kodak Flickr hack we did to auto-upload.
Chris writes: “I recently read this interesting article in Wired magazine about “Light-Graffiti Hackers“. The problem with light graffiti is that you need a power source to make them permanent, so you usually can’t put them everywhere you like. So, I built myself a Solar Powered Light-Graffiti Projector out of a cheap solar garden light.” Link.
Amazing video of an RCX robot using vision command (or a derrivative) to play pong on a real screen. Jmarco writes: “I have designed a Mindstorm Robot who plays Pong game. It have a Webcam, and it’s controled through Infrared with the laptop computer. There is not trick. It truely plays itself!” [via] Link.
Michael writes: “I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I remember reading about an expensive commercial product for it, and there’s a much cheaper product available that is similar, but it records only things of a smaller size and the description seems to imply the recordings can only be played back on these machines, not regular turntables. (It’s a kit, which is nice, but the Gieskes.nl recorder looks much cooler.) I’m interested in trying Gieskes.nl’s project, but I’m wondering if there are other people out there who have done this so I can supplement these instructions a bit. Do you know of anyone else who has information about doing this sort of thing?” Link.
