Doug’s new project is awesome. Every day there are scores, or even hundreds, of fascinating and important conference sessions, lectures or other presentations that are lost. They simply evaporate because no one captures or records them. Some of these presentations are given by the greatest and most inspiring minds of our time, and many could be important to people in the far reaches of the planet, if only they could hear them. Link.
Ever wish you could dispatch a robot to grab you a beer? That day might soon be here, thanks to an as-yet-unannounced decision by iRobot. In early July the company will post instructions for controlling its Roomba vacuum cleaner via the built-in serial port, so programmers can modify it however they want – from equipping it with a camera to, yes, adding an arm and training it to retrieve brewskis. iRobot hopes the move will foster the development of Roomba accessories – like the ecosystem of add-ons that has sprung up around the iPod – thus driving sales. Link.
Oldie but goodie…In our other crystal radios we wound the coil by hand. In this project we use a much smaller coil with a ferrite rod inside, from our catalog. The ferrite rod allows the coil to be smaller, and it can be moved in and out of the coil for coarse tuning. Link.
Game sound emulators for ColecoVision, Atari, Sega Master System, GameBoy, NES, and even IntelliVoice. And you can plug them into your sound software as VSTs (Windows-only), or, better yet, into your own custom sound patches in Pd (free – Mac/Windows/Linux) or Max/MSP (commercial – Mac/Windows). [via] Link.
This is both a tutorial and an informational page about the Apple Podcast ChapterTool utility and Podcast Chapters in general. This article is a part of the iTunes tips entry. The tutorial section will show you how to add chapters, chapter images and chapter links to your podcasts. It is relatively technical, so hopefully a GUI based chapter tutorial program will come out soon, but in the meantime this is the best and only way to accomplish this task. Link.
Although it is simple, it can reveal the craters of the Moon and the satellites of Jupiter. It is also very useful for demonstrating lens aberrations. You really need to build this telescope as a necessary step towards understanding the solutions employed in the second and improved telescope model. In the section “From Lenses to Optical Instruments”, you saw how a telescope works; here I simply remind you that the objective lens produces an image of the object observed, and this image is magnified by the eyepiece. Link.
The BomBot is a modified 4×4 remote controlled truck that has been equipped with a pan and tilt camera and a charge dispenser. The robot can reach speeds of 30 to 35 miles an hour. This compact and versatile system, which costs roughly $6,700, is being deployed in rigorous environmental conditions where more expensive robots with a greater logistical burden are currently used. In just 90 days, the first prototypes of the system were delivered to users in the field.Link.
