Archive for January 2012

There’s just something inherently cool about flying quadrotors. But I have to say this is the first time I’ve seen this many of the crafts flying in unison. Using a veritable army of flying nano-quadrotors from KMel Robotics, Alex Kushleyev, Daniel Mellinger and Vijay Kumar of the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab sent a team of tightly-coordinated to the skies in their lab.

Fresh from Ryan Industries comes a craft beer that goes well with apocalyptic retro first person shooters. It is appropriately called Brow Sweat and is made by home craft brewer Calum.

One thing that Kung Fu Panda taught me is that portly warriors can still kick butt- skadoosh! The U.S. Army feels differently though and wants all of its obese soldiers to slim down, with very good reason.

When the police encounter a locked door and can’t kick it open, they just shoot the doorknob and push their way inside. At least that’s what happens in the movies, anyway. For us ordinary, non-law-enforcement citizens, getting a locked door open is pretty boring because we just use a key (or risk getting arrested.)

The Japanese do come up with some strange technology. The Chocolate Q-Pot Phone, which was designed by Tadaaki Wakamatsu and NTT DoCoMo, is going to be released in Japan as a special Valentine’s Day smartphone. Does that mean you’ll only use it on that particular day?

It’s no secret that I have not been a fan of Nintendo for a few years now. It started with the Wii. No, it was the Gamecube. The Mario and Zelda and Metroid games that I have seen over the last several years have even disappointed me.

Space junk is quickly becoming a big hazard in orbit around the Earth. There are untold numbers defunct satellites and other chunks of debris and trash floating around up there that pose a hazard to humans on the ISS and other satellites that are still being used.

The deranged systems engineer – oh wait. Wrong Isaac. This little figurine is of the baby Isaac from the rogue-like videogame The Binding of Isaac, made by Super Meat Boy creator Edmund McMillen and loosely based on a Bible story of the same name.

Indie developer Mojang just pulled off a major Yo Dawg moment. The creator of virtual sandbox game Minecraft finally caught the attention of the king of many real sandboxes, gathered 10,000 supporters in LEGO’s Kickstarter-like CUUSOO project site.

There are quite a few compact digital cameras on the market right now, and since manufacturers keep releasing new ones, it’s not always easy to decide which you should get. If you’re looking for a compact camera, but want a long-range optical zoom, the new Panasonic Lumix ZS20 is supposed to be the slimmest point-and-shoot with a 20× zoom lens.

While it’s certainly no longer the case, there was a time when solving the Rubik’s Cube was one of the greatest accomplishments of the geek world. Now, there are people (and robots) who can solve it in a matter of seconds.

While most computers these days have at least some sort of memory card reader built in, you may still occasionally find yourself in possession of a card your machine can’t read. That’s why there’s still a market for those add-on multi-card readers.

I’m all for green alternatives. Not green as in “envy” or green as in “cold hard cash,” but green as in “environmentally friendly.” The suits below are from Virus’ Stay Warm line and they’re as green as green can get: making use of recycled coffee beans to add an extra layer of warmth on the suits.

When the firm I work for takes on new projects, we engineers are the ones who get stressed out the most. Maybe it’s psychological, but a whole lot of aches just suddenly manifest themselves: headaches, stomach aches, neck aches, back aches – even handaches (if these even exist.)

You never know what a geek is going to get up to with some old hardware on their hands and a little bit of time. Rodrigo Alonso had some donated, chopped up computer parts that were left over from obsolete machine, along with some whole computer mice and keyboards.

Learning to play the guitar can be very challenging. It may have just six strings, but there are hundreds of positions and fingering combinations as well as different strumming patterns that you have to remember. That’s probably why I don’t play guitar.