With the processing power equivalent to more than 200 standard PCs, the HYDRA computer is the world’s most powerful chess computer according to IPCCC officials. Housed in a secure server room in Abu Dhabi, HYDRA is a 64-way cluster computer- 64 computers connected and operating as if they are a single machine. Each computer has an Intel Xeon 3.06 Ghz. Man 0.5, Machine 5.5 youch. [via] Link.
The Knitting Machine is Dave Cole’s performance art piece that uses construction equipment and 20-foot long knitting needles to construct large-scale objects. Starting yesterday June 30th and throughout the weekend, the artist will use a pair of John Deere excavators to hold the needles and a Genie to wrap the yarn, creating an oversize American flag at MASS MoCA. Link.
At Where 2.0 I was introduced to Mappr, it takes geotagged photos on Flickr and puts them on a map. I took some in San Francisco, tagged them and now you can view them on the map. We’re going to use this for a couple cool things on MAKE soon, stay tuned! Link.
PSP HTTPD is a new web server for the PSP. Its in the early stages at the moment but lets you access the memory stick and two internal flash devices on the PSP via your web browser. Please note that there are many security holes in this release so do not make your PSP IP address public! This release will also only work on Infrastructure mode (no DHCP). Link.
Will we soon take all of our pictures with a camera phone? Probably not. The image quality is still pretty low, which means that we tend to use camera phones for casual, candid, lifestyle scenes. We save the stuff we want to keep forever for our “real” camera. Even so, there are things you can do to improve the quality of your camera-phone photos. Link.
Well, we’re about to see a lot UMD pirating. It’s now possible to copy a UMD and run it off a Memory Stick– copy the Lumines iSO to your Memory Stick’s root directly using iSOBuster or a similar application. When doing this, you should end up with a PSP_GAME directory there with all the game files in it, and also a UMD_DATA.BIN file in the MS root. Then simply install the Lumines Launcher by copying the files to your PSPGAME directory manually or via the previously-released KXpolit v1.50. Link.
A new Make Extra is up today: Mikey Sklar’s raving-mad recipe for building a blinking, glowing wearable with electroluminescent (EL) wire, a PIC microcontroller, and (optionally) a homemade PCB– all using exclusively open-source tools. The plans include full blinky control code that’s ready to compile and burn, or (of course) modify. Link.
