gift guides

Holiday Gift Guide: Retro Tech

Holiday Gift Guide: Retro Tech

What do you do when all of the megabytes, megahertz, and megapixels over-complicate holiday shopping for the beloved nerds on your list? Let’s take a look back in time at some classic inventions that still stand up to the year 2010. The following rundown includes a number of fun gift items to accommodate most budgets, […]

Holiday Gift Guide 2010: Robots

Holiday Gift Guide 2010: Robots

Another holiday season, another excuse to get other people to buy you robots (or to treat yourself). From bot brains to pets and toys to robots that can help you around the house, there’s something here for everyone. Pleo (PleoWorld, ~$300) Pleo is a robotic dinosaur toy designed to emulate the appearance and behavior of […]

xkcd’s submarine ROV

xkcd’s submarine ROV

Renowned webcomic artist Randall Munroe built a submersible ROV starting with a commercially-available parts kit: The kit comes with a good set of underwater motors and a sensitive camera, and this summer I started modifying it to use an Arduino and joystick control, running the whole thing over Cat-5 cable (which significantly lightened the tether). […]