It’s basically a robot that will bring you a beer, or a few beers, depending on how many you need. The whole system is pretty ingenious, albeit slow. It combines a butler robot, which goes to the fridge and gets your drinks, with a specially designed robotic fridge, that will open and close its door automatically, and hand Butler Bot a few beers.

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The user has a simple remote control to tell Butler Bot what he wants. All in all, it’s pretty cool and kind of reminds me of the mad machines that Doc Brown had in Back to the Future.

[via Make:]

Amazingly enough, PC enthusiast Hackerman1 got his old 266 MHz Pentium II machine loaded up with Windows 7 Ultimate. The machine has a paltry 96MB of RAM, and a lowly 4MB graphic card, and it still managed to work. He tried dialing it down all the way to 64MB, but eventually ran out of memory. Sure, the Windows Experience Index is only 1.0 on this system, but isn’t that what you’ve come to expect from Windows anyhow?  At least with Windows 98 and Vista, that was the consensus.

Next up, Hackerman1 plans on dusting off his old 166MHz Pentium I machine and seeing if he can make the Windows 7 OS work on that one. However, I’m not easily impressed, so until he gets it running on an old IBM PCJr, I won’t be truly in awe.

[The Windows Club via Maximum PC]

Everything is back up and running, but there was a little nervewracking to say the least.

Regular posting should resume later tonight. Thanks for your patience.

Each number on the dial corresponds to a 7-year period of your life. By taking a standard clock mechanism and slowing it to 1/61320th of the speed of a standard timepiece, artist Betrand Planes’ Life Clock is able to tell time over an 84 year period before it makes one full rotation around the dial.

If you manage to live through a full 360-degree sweep of the year hand, you’re doing pretty darned well.

[via VVORK via Inspire me, now!]

So if I’m doing my math right, the disk will be completed in 2138, a little over 130 years from now. The good news is, that should be just in time for Vista SP2 to be released.

[via istartedsomething]

Not only are the load times terrible, the shear quantity of load screens that occur to complete even a simple task are ridiculous. What the hell was Sega thinking releasing a game in this condition?

[via MaxConsole]

The project has real snails delivering electronic messages via tiny RFID tags attached to their shells. The messages are delivered literally “at a snails pace.” to their destinations. At the Real Snail Mail website you can send your own message to be queued up for snail delivery. It sits in the queue until a snail comes close to an RFID hotspot. The reader checks the snail’s RFID to decide whether or not it already has a message to deliver. If not, the snail is assigned the next message from the queue. All the way at the other end of the snail pond, there’s another RFID hotspot which delivers messages if and when the snails ever get there.

The installation is on display until October 21st in London at Space Studios along with several other RFID art exhibits.

[via wemakemoneynotart]