Daily Archives: 2/23/2005

Apple to buy TiVo?

Intriguing rumor that hit Wall Street today. It would be great if my favorite consumer appliance got acquired by someone who could prevent its long, slow descent into the tar pits.

Of course, they’d probably change the name to iTv or something, and it would be a sterile white instead of the comforting black. Actually, it could probably just be a Mac Mini…

Minimo on Pocket PC

I had heard about the open source browser Minimo, but they just recently released their first trial build.

You can download a sneak peak at this build here:
http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.002.zip. Keep in mind,
it is basically the second build that I made that actually rendered a
page successfully. When you check it out, remember I told you: Lots of
work to do; Lots of work to do.

I’ll have to check that out when I get home. Stay tuned for an update.

BowGo

Those crazy guys at CMU have invented a cool gadget: the BowGo. It’s basically a regular pogostick gone high tech: instead of using a heavy but relatively inefficient steel spring, it uses a fiber-reinforced composite spring that rides on low friction rollers. The net result is high bouncing. Check out their pictures and video.

A possible brain for the brainwagon robot?

Glancing around the surplus market yielded the following computer which seems like it would be entirely capable of driving my as yet unstarted robotics project.

Dell Optiplex GX1 PIII 450Mhz./ 128MB/ 6GB/ CD(Desktop)

I found out that tigersurplus has the same sort of systems for less money, but it’s about the same when you add in shipping. I think I’ll travel down south and have a gander at one of these this weekend.