programming on technabob...

Ah, software problems. We’ve all experienced them in varying degrees – sometimes it’s just a stupid online video that won’t load, and sometimes the operating system itself gives up. Now imagine a future where programs can still be compromised, or attacked, but will no longer crash or hang. A group of MIT researchers, led by…

Sure, you might have just gone off and bought yourself a brand new 27-Inch iMac this week, but if that system seems like overkill for your needs, you could can always go to the opposite extreme. This computer kit not only doesn’t run any programs that you’d ever care to use, it doesn’t let you…

We can file this under art, or under why?/why not?: Invented by Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus, the Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus “downloads and parses a part of the text of a recent best-selling book” and then, for some strange reason, peruses the archives of the United States Patent and Trademark Office for drawings that…

Man, these are smartphones indeed. The wise – and probably bored – folks at the University of Berlin made a one-of-a-kind iPhone app which they called iDriver, which allows them to control a Honda Civic via Wi-Fi. But it’s not like our German friends just coded the app and then began playing real-life Hot Wheels;…

Ah, the ol’ CD drive. It can read CDs. It can write on CDs. Idiots use it as a coaster and then call tech support if it stops working. And it can put babies to sleep.

YouTube user macjonesnz MacGyvered a baby rocker using his baby’s car seat, a piece of string, his PC’s CD…

Are you an unemployed web developer? Why not show off your resume credentials with these funny web technology bumper stickers.

John Freeborn’s CODE Stickers are perfect for building geek cred with the guy in your rear-view mirror. For just $5 bucks, you’ll get a set of 5 vinyl stickers, including .NET, PHP, CSS, AJAX and…

This tiny little 1cm x 3cm circuit board may not look like much, but the WiiChuck is the easiest way ever to unlock the world of Wii Nunchuck hacking.

Just plug the WiiChuck into to bottom of your Wii Nunchuck controller, and you’ll have access to all of the wonderful data the controller can generate.…

The Mario AI Competition “is about learning, or otherwise developing, the best controller (agent) for a version of Super Mario Bros.” Programmers have to come up with AI that can solve a “heavily modified version” of the game Infinite Mario Bros. by Markus Persson. That’s all well and nerdy, but if you think this is…

The man in the picture below is UC San Diego Computer Science Ph.D. student Stephen Checkoway. In his hands is a printout that proves that his team’s “return-oriented programming” exploit was successfully able to steal votes from a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine. Checkoway was probably like, “Yay! Our democracy is in danger!” Just…

After the arguably unnecessary rejection of the Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken – whose last name would be much cooler if it ended with an exclamation point: McCracken! (and started with Zak) – decided to pit the iconic Commodore 64 with the future Hall of Famer, the iPhone 3GS, just for…

Asimov concocted the Three Laws of Robotics in 1942 and built many of his stories around these rules. While Asimov benefited greatly from those rules as an artistic concept, giving him ideas to explore, in the future our lives may really depend on robot ethics.  Fortunately, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech named Ronald…

Always thought you could improve on the gameplay of Tetris? Fancy yourself the creator of the next Super Mario Brothers? Thanks to this open source gaming system – if you’ve got the programming chops, you’ve got the chance to make the next great 8-bit video game.

The Fuzebox is a complete 8-bit gaming platform in…