I recall seeing the plans for a simple walking, balancing robot constructed out of TinkerToys, and while surfing around aimlessly I ran accross it again. I thought I’d go ahead and archive the paper which described it just for fun. It seems like the kind of toy you should just go ahead and [...]
A couple of days ago I was talking about small robotic flyers, I should have known that somebody at the Seattle Robotics Society would already have done something like this. Check out BXFlyer Four Rotor Helicopter for a description of a four rotor robotic flyer similar to the commercially available DragonFlyer.
Addendum: I found a [...]
The title is a bit of a fraud. This is not so much an article on how to build your own weblog as a short bit about what I think is important in building a weblogging system, what is not important and how to drive most directly toward a system that is simple, flexible [...]
Allright, I admit it. I watch lots of crap “reality” television shows. None do I find more disturbing than The Swan.
I received an interesting phone call from my friend Phil last week. I hadn’t heard much from Phil, but he called me in the middle of a ferry ride to San Francisco to tell me that he was reading a book called Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and that he was sure that I’d [...]
This morning I was catching up on Baseball tonight to see what went on with baseball yesterday. I mostly wanted to see what happened yesterday when Reggie Jackson’s number 9 was retired over in Oakland before the Athletics-Royals matchup, but in skipping through it, I caught an editorial by Rob Dibble on the state [...]
For some reason I found myself looking for plans for cheap 3D scanners at 1:15AM this morning, and came up with the Lair of the Chrome Cow. Surprisingly, I remember this site being mentioned on an old slashdot posting, but I guess I didn’t look. It’s got some nifty ideas.
I’ll have to think [...]
I’m always interested in bizarre remote control applications, so I was pleased to find this informative paper on the development of the Black Widow Micro Air Vehicle, an RC vehicle with a 6″ wingspan, a range of 1.8 kilometers and a live video transmitter. Nifty and informative.
A recent Slashdot article was a rather dull one about fun things you could do with a large Fresnel lenses. I had seen stuff like this before, but in scanning over the responses as I often do, I found a reference to a patent for a spiral Fresnel reflector. You can review [...]
It’s rare that a sequel film surpasses a good original film, but I must say: Shrek 2 must be judged as one of those rare films. It builds on everything that was good about the original: the look, the story, and the vocal talent and delivers a new movie which is familar but [...]
I’ve upgraded this blog to use the latest release of Wordpress. It’s unfortunate that the software mingles functionality and appearance in the way that it does, it makes upgrading more painful than it should be. In particular I had to make some changes to the index.php to rearrange the appearance of the menu [...]
Sweet Manatee of Santa Fe. Apparently if you post an article about a TV show on your blog, you become their official voice on the Web. Read the comments below the main posting.
If you really do want to get on the show, a simple Google search will turn find [...]
It’s fascinating the degree to which Microsoft/SCO backed front companies are trying to create FUD around the use and authorship of the Linux operating system. In a Slashdot article today, they link to an article by Andy Tanenabaum about Ken Brown’s claims that Linux Torvards is not the author of Linux. Brown’s [...]
I thought that this article, Modal Web Server Example Part 1, had some interesting ideas. I think that many existing web applications are hampered by the fact they are implemented in rather crufty and adhoc languages. The author of this seems a bit more disciplined.
Some interesting ideas, and an [...]
Today someone on our local message board posted a link to MSNBC - Can Star Wars: Episode III be saved?, a story that suggested that if one could fire George Lucas, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman and put in more Christopher Lee, you could hire some real writers and salvage the entire script.
Not a bad notion.
