Hardware – Wetmachine

And Now for Your Dancing Pleasure: Flying Robots Play the James Bond Theme Song

Gary March 1, 2012 March 1, 2012General Exception, Hardware

Looks like the Robopocalypse will have a live soundtrack!

Courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor.

Will the Internets Become Sentient?

Gary May 1, 2009 February 25, 2013General Exception, Hardware

New Scientist has an article that speculates that the Internet could someday become (or perhaps already is) sentient. Although their speculation is that it won’t be in the “launch all the nukes and start building killer bots that look like Arnie” sort of way.

R/C Bugs!

Gary January 29, 2009 February 26, 2013General Exception, Hardware

Let’s say you want a radio-controlled flying insect (and really, who doesn’t?) Sure, you could go out and get a Wowee Dragonfly. But that’s made of plastic, and is really just a radio-controlled plane with flapping wings. Booooring! Instead, you could get yourself a rhinoceros beetle, stick electrodes in its brain and presto! Radio controlled flying insects real enough to frighten any annoying little sister.

Net Neutrality Takes Top Honors as “Most Censored Story” of 2007

Gary October 13, 2006 February 24, 2013General Exception, Hardware

A bit late to the party on this one, as I just caught a pointer to this story from Digg. The Project Censored group named net neutrality the “Top Censored Story of 2007” due to its being ignored entirely by mainstream media.

The robot overlords command you to dance!

Gary June 8, 2005 February 24, 2013General Exception, Hardware

Want to learn ballroom dancing? Don’t feel like having all that icky physical contact with a human being? Well, you’re in luck! Japanese researchers have invented a ballroom dancing robot partner for you. Once again, technology comes to the aide of misanthropes and shut-ins everywhere who want to avoid actual human contact.

The new limit of DRM lunacy: requiring fingerprints for DVDs

Gary May 19, 2005 February 24, 2013General Exception, Hardware

Wired has this story about researchers at UCLA coming up with what has to be the most assinine form of DRM yet: a DVD that will be encoded so it will only play for the person who specifically bought it. This is accomplished through some handwaving mumbo-jumbo involving that recent poster child of privacy invasion: the RFID chip.

Home made high-altitude UAV

Gary January 12, 2005 February 24, 2013General Exception, Hardware

One of the neat things about the ever-dropping price of technology is how people end up using off-the-shelf parts to create things that just a short time ago were the domain of government-funded organizations or large corporations.

Last year, one such project prompted governments into action as a man in New Zealand started to document his homemade cruise missle project.

A bit more on the benign side of things is this high-altitude unmanned glider project. Capable of being released from the edge of the atmosphere, such a glider could be used for all sorts of research, including a very cheap way of performing aerial surveys of remote areas.

Put on your thinking cap

Gary December 7, 2004 February 24, 2013General Exception, Hardware

Neurologists at the Wadsworth Center in Albany have designed a cap that allows people to manipulate a cursor on a screen by just thinking. Previously, this has been achieved only by invasive methods where small wire arrays were placed within the brain to monitor individual brain regions.

The focus of the research is on helping the disabled be able to control computers and by extensions, lights, robotic arms, etc. Personally, I can’t wait until they just release the cap for general use. Not having to push a mouse around would be a big relief to my wrist, but I wouldn’t want to have brain surgury just to be free from the threat of carpal tunnel syndrome.