Here’s a Steampunk phone prototype by designer Arthur Schmitt. You make calls using binary punchcards. Punchcards! There are also some dials and a metal grill-type earpiece. The backside of the device seems to contain some sort of rolling counter that likely either keeps track of call duration or gives you the time. → Read More
While I personally am a fan of micro-dirigibles as opposed to the (IMHO) wasteful helicopter-type UAVs, this is certainly an awesome version of the latter. Its multi-rotor setup enables some serious agility, as you can see in the videos. If you’re filming, you might need some serious image stabilization, although it’s easily good enough for recon or aerial photography. There are several cool mounts for popular camera form factors, and I’m sure with a little customization you could have it drop water balloons on the kids across the street. They start at around $15,000, so they’re not really hobby machines, and add-ons like GPS-aware hovering and a video-enabled controller make it more robust (good). I’m reminded, however, of the Manhacks from Half-Life 2 (bad). Keep your crowbars handy. More pics below. → Read More
Yeah, I know, it sounds a bit dry; how could a chart of microprocessor stats be awesome? Well, just look at it! It’s glorious! And huge! It’s so very complete and monolithic that I just have to stand in awe of it. There’s just so much… information! It’s organized by date, by core, by what have you, and having it visualized is a revelation. I like the color scheme, too. There’s lots of them and they are interesting to look at; click below to see ‘em, or go to where they come from. → Read More
This is really cool. This guy wrote an app that essentially saves the signal strength at a given location and then collates the data points into a little map, giving an approximate location of the access point and the places where one finds the best average signal. This seems really practical to me; if it’s not too hard to do, IT departments around the globe might take it up and use it to plan office layouts or diagnose signal problems. I imagine there are already some tools to do this and I’ll look like a fool for drooling over this, but whatever, it’s awesome. The program is written in Python with OpenGL and you can get the source at the site. Can you imagine this being built right into a wireless-aware phone with GPS, generating a constantly updated heatmap of wherever you are, and adding it to an online repository? [via a sharply critical Reddit] → Read More
Wow, this is really, really goddamn cool. I love how the “skeleton” created by all the photographs is visible, a ghostly meta-world based entirely on aggregate data and an insane amount of processing power. You can switch between day and night, rotate smoothly, zoom, it’s color-corrected, it looks fantastic. I’ll let the guys in the video explain just what is going on, but man do I want this on my rig. Deep respect to Microsoft Research and UW for putting this together. Check out the higher-res version at their site. [via Reddit and I started something] → Read More
Oh, look at me! I’m DeepNote! I’m the best Guitar Hero player in the world! Jealous? I score perfectly in every game. Watch me beat Cult of Personality on expert mode! I kid, I kid. DeepNote is cool. It’s a robotic whatsit that uses diodes as eyeballs and can tell what color’s coming when in Guitar Hero. Watching this video just goes to show you how long it takes your own human eyes to process something visually and then translate it into dextrous hand movements. Robots are much faster. via NWFB → Read More
Blood! Hardware! Heavy metal! Add some sand paper to your old dead hard drive and turn it on to make an excellent grinder/sander for your next hard-core steampunk project. via Make → Read More
If you walk into a bar and see this robotic arm situated at one end of an air hockey table drinking a Miller High Life with a cigarette hanging from its lip yelling “Who’s got next?!", don’t, under any circumstances, play against it for money. It’ll beat you pretty badly. Politely offer to play a gentleman’s game and if the arm refuses, just walk away. The robot was developed by a company called NuVation and recently won a People’s Choice Award at the Freescale Technology Forum 2008 Americas conference. You might not actually see this apparatus in your local hangout anytime soon, as it requires a pretty elaborate air hockey table setup (sensors, a computer, and so forth) but maybe you could build one of your own as a weekend project, eh? via Crave → Read More
What do you do with an old floppy drive and a disk? Why you make it into a musical instrument, forcing the motor or the drive to play the Imperial March from Star Wars. I’m not sure how this was done, but I love it very much. → Read More
If you’re one of the dozens of Americans thinking about finally upgrading to a digital TV when the Big Switch comes in February of next year, you might want to consider a conversion kit. They’re cheap, and the government is giving a $40 coupon to those looking to switch over. And if you’re wondering if your current TV is compatible, it is. In fact, this enterprising UK man upgraded a 51-year-old set that’s been in his family since it was first purchased in 1957. It’s likely the oldest set ever to be converted. While we think you’d be happier with a widescreen flat panel set, there’s something charming about these old console-style sets, but they’re no good for Halo 3. → Read More
Jacob Seidelin is fast becoming the Ben Heckendorn of Javascript games. You may remember that in early April, Seidelin programmed all of Super Mario Bros. into 14 Kb of Javascript code. This month, he’s tackled Super Mario Kart in about 11 Kb of code. It’s not the full game, however. “So far, it’s just racing. No weapons or any of that fancy stuff. At the moment, you can choose from 3 different drivers (Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach) and 2 different maps (Mushroom Cup Round 1 and 2). There is no lap count, no timer and no finish. You can just race around forever and try to beat the others (it’s not hard, especially if cut a few corners). The AI is rather crude, but seems to work ok for the time being. There is (simple) collision detection against the boundaries of the map and the colored “blocking” blocks, but not against the karts, so you can’t crash into the other drivers. Drive safely, anyway!” But hey, it’s Javascript. Very cool, nonetheless. Check out Seidelin’s blog post here, which links to the game. via Ajaxian → Read More
I prefer to work in complete silence. “How can you work in complete silence all day?” my friends and family ask. “Be quiet and stop bothering me,” I tell them. That being said, I’d prop a couple of these little guys up on my desk for good measure. Says MAKE, “Flickr pool member Fungus Amungus made these chic speakers using Munny figures as enclosures. Not sure what level of hifi those little guys can deliver, but considering the cuteness factor – I might not even care much.” I agree. Here’s a bunch of cool speakers from Jason Siu as well. via MAKE → Read More
Brooklyn defense contractor Atair Aerospace has two of its futuristic (and working) designs on display at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of a superhero exhibit that’ll be running until September 1st of this year. “The Met exhibit includes Atair’s EXO-Wing™, the world’s smallest human-piloted jet airplane. Exoskeletons for increasing human capabilities were once the subject of fictional comic book writers; now it has become real technology to enable human flight. This futuristic aircraft is constructed from advanced aerospace composite materials. The twin micro-turbine-powered EXO-Wing™ is so small and lightweight that a human wears it like a backpack. The Met is also displaying Atair’s AeroSuit™, an engineered bat-like flexible wing suit constructed with advanced composite textiles. This high-technology garment allows a skydiver to glide to a target miles away from the drop point. The arms and legs of this garment include inflating webbed panels that form the elements of a wing which dramatically improves the aerodynamics of a skydiver, providing a safe and extraordinary flight experience. Both innovations are made from a new generation of composite textiles pioneered by Atair which are engineered to perform under extreme conditions.” Cool, hey? Atair also has a bunch of other cool stuff like the Onyx precision-guided parachute system, the Long Endurance Autonomous Powered Paraglider (LEAPP) UAV, the Circinus GPS-Integrated Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), the Heli-Chute, and 3DZ Composite Parachute Technology. via PRWeb → Read More
Arkados is a company that makes a pretty nifty set of chips that are often used in home automation products by third party companies, among other things. If you have any kind of integrated sound system or automated control deck than you might be using Arkados’s technology without even knowing it. To take advantage of this, Arkados has released a reference design for making interactive software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s a cool idea, being able to turn on the fan in your living room from across town with just a piece of hardware you’re already carrying with you. Right now it’s just for the audio systems the company helps with, meaning you can control your entire music library from room to room with your iPhone as a remote. If you entertain often or just like each room to have its own ambience, it’s a great idea. In the future, when it’s more fleshed out, it’ll be like the Jetsons. → Read More
We had a foosball table in one of the houses I lived in during college. We all chipped in $40, times six of us, and boom — a nice $200 never ending source of entertainment. The problem was that the minute we bought the table, we found out we had a bunch of new friends; new friends who happened to love foosball and loved not chipping in for beer even more. I wish we’d had the foresight to build a table like this, because we probably would have been able to charge people to play, which would have covered the cost of the table, beer, and then some. → Read More
