Probably only a mockup, but such a wonderfully weird idea that I wanted to share. From Momentum: Iron Saddle Who hasn’t suffered from ‘cold butt’ while riding in winter, at least in the northern parts of the continent?… A battery, a 12 volt iron (without steam option) and voila! Toasty Buns! And of course if […]
Marcus wrote in to tell us about his latest ping pong ball electronics project, the Gravitron. In half of a ping pong ball, he’s crammed 12 LEDs, an accelerometer, and an ATmega168 for a brain. If you pick it up and tilt it, it will light the highest LED. It’s sort of poetic. If you’re […]
PIxastic is a Javascript library that provides low level image processing capabilities to your web applications. Jacob Seidelin has been working on this as part of an all-Javascript image editor, and he decided to release the library under the MIT license earlier this month: Pixastic works by utilizing the HTML5 Canvas element which provides access […]
Travis Deyle wrote in about Snackbot, an in-progress human-robot interaction project at Carnegie Mellon: Back in May 2008 it was announced that CMU professors Sara Kiesler and Jodi Forlizzi (from the HCI Institute) and Paul Rybski (from the Robotics Institute) were awarded $500k in Microsoft’s Human-Robot Interaction funding to develop a social, snack-selling robot to […]
You can make your own USB microscope using an old webcam and a cheap toy microscope. All it takes is a soldering iron, some hot glue, and an hour of your time. Instructables user moris_zen has the details, which basically involves a little focusing trial and error before gluing things together: While you view the […]
Landon Fuller put together a secret message passing system that exploits a feature of DNS servers. It’s based on a hack first conceived by Dan Kaminsky, which allows you to set a single bit of data by caching a wildcard zone on a cache server: In each DNS query, 7 bits are reserved for a […]
Stanford released their iPhone programming course—syllabus, lecture notes, assignments, and all—online. It’s what you’d find in any serious software engineering and object oriented design program, but it’s been designed around the iPhone target platform, with Objective C as the instruction language. There are lectures and assignments on a number of topics, including the MVC pattern […]
