Lawrence Rome, a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania has led the development of a backpack that can generate around 7 watts of electricity, without solar cells, and actually providing a more comfortable backpack in the process. Taking advantage of vertical motion, much like some wave generators, the backpack harnesses body movements while hiking. Link.
NerdTV is out and it’s great! NerdTV is a new weekly online TV show from PBS.org technology columnist Robert X. Cringely. NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks – a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology. Guests like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy or Apple computer inventor Steve Wozniak are household names if your household is nerdy enough, but as historical figures and geniuses in their own right, they have plenty to say to ALL of us. NerdTV is distributed under a Creative Commons license so viewers can legally share the shows with their friends and even edit their own versions. If not THE future of television, NerdTV represents A future of television for niche audiences that have deep interest in certain topics. Link.
I always carry a live CD of Ubuntu, works great – The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Preview Release of Ubuntu 5.10 – codenamed “Breezy Badger”. The Preview Release includes both Install CDs and bootable Live CDs for three architectures. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for your desktop or server, with a fast and easy install, regular releases, a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default, every other package you can imagine available from the network, a commitment to security updates for 18 months after each release and professional technical support from many companies around the world. Link.
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
Neat hack for the iPod nano – I went to pick up a dock for my new nano, but I just couldn’t justify spending $39 on it. So I made one from an old Altoid tin and the included adapter. [