Oct 29
In what’s some fantastic news for both HTC and anyone who keeps their cellphone in their shirt pocket
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Oct 25
Holy crap. A 17-year-old girl in China’s Fujian Province has just received a new face from skin that was grown on her very own chest. Oh, the marvels of modern medicine. Advanced warning that while this story is ultimately uplifting, the images below are pretty gross.
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Oct 23
What do you get when you cross Star Trek jargon, a decent knowledge of Photoshop, and Florida? Well, judging by Howard Leventhal’s attempt to secure around $3 million in funding for a fake tricorder, the answer is one impressively delusional case of fraud.
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Oct 20
Every now and then there’s a writeup of some weird U.S. laws, and it’s always interesting to see what random stuff merited legislation at one time or another. But this infographic, put out by the online attorney directory Upcounsel, takes the curation to the next level and also talks about enforcement and shows which weird laws have been or are being repealed. In Ohio it’s illegal to get a fish drunk, in Arizona it’s illegal to cut down a cactus, and in Washington it’s illegal to harass Bigfoot. How would you even go about doing that? All will be revealed. [Upcounsel via Visual.ly]
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Oct 18
Kickstart This Oscilloscope Watch To See Your Hardware Beat To The Beat Of The Drums
Posted in: Today's Chili
Some day, archeologists will look back on our civilization and wonder why we had so many smartwatches. Case in point: the Oscilloscope Watch by Gabriel Anzziani is a wild little bit of gear that adds the power of a fully-functional oscilloscope to your wrist. Why? Because don’t worry about it, that’s why.
The watch contains a small XProtolab system a which includes an oscilloscope, waveform generator, logic analyzer, protocol sniffer, and frequency counter inside a tiny package. Anzziani’s DIY, 3D-printed version is obviously not much to look at right now but if he hits his $60,000 goal you can expect to see a much nice product down the line.
The watch will include two analog inputs that will be connected via a keychain fob or perhaps the watch band – that’s still to be decided – and it will have eight digital inputs. A 128×128 will bop out the waveforms (and watch faces) and you should be able to, at the very least, measure your Arduino projects on the fly. The first watches can be had for a $100 pledge and he expects to ship by April of next year.
Do you need an oscilloscope watch? No way, Jose. But it’s great to know there is someone out there thinking of the hardware hackers who, at some point in their lives, have wished they had a little oscilloscope on their wrist.
Oct 09
The internet is a wondrous place, but for every fantastic website out there, it seems like there are two weird ones. We asked you, dear readers, what some of the strangest sites you’ve ever seen were
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Oct 04
Welcome to our continuing series featuring videos of robots that will, when they become autonomous, hunt us down and force us to work in the graphene factories of Mars. Below we see Wild Cat, a fully untethered remote control quadrupedal robot made by Boston Dynamics, creators of the famous Big Dog. This quadruped can run up to 16 miles an hour and features a scary-sound internal gas engine that can power it across rough terrain. Wild Cat was funded by the DARPA’s M3 program aimed at introducing flexible, usable robots into natural environments AKA introducing robotic pack animals for ground troops and build flocking, heavily armed robots that can wipe out a battlefield without putting humans in jeopardy.
Next up we have ATLAS, another Boston Dynamics bot that can walk upright on rocks. Sadly ATLAS is tethered to a power source but he has perfect balance and can survive side and front hits from heavy weights – a plus if you’re built to be the shock troops of a new droid army. ATLAS can even balance on one foot while being smacked with wrecking balls, something the average human can’t do without suffering internal damage. I can’t wait for him to be able to throw cinder blocks!
Finally we present these charming self-assembling robots from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory which we covered earlier today. The robots exert an internal force to spin and then connect with each other using magnets, allowing them to fly into the air for a second and then fall down next to their brothers and sisters in exactly the right spot. This allows these completely featureless squares to form any shape they want and, like autonomous LEGOs, they can build complex devices out of a few simple shapes.
“There’s a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air,” said researcher Kyle Gilpin. “And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That’s something that’s totally unique to this system.”
They may look innocuous but imagine these things self-assembling into, say, a wall, a door, or even a plate of explosives. They could sneak through pipes into your home and create a robotic assassin to destroy you in the sleep, thereby freeing up your “Schlafplatz” for other humans who have been reduced to sleeping out of doors after the robots took over most habitable locations for the storage of fermenting human slurry. Stay frosty, humans!
Oct 01
While this watch may look goofy as all get-out, rest assured it holds an important spot in the history of timekeeping. It is one of the first “atomic” clocks that is accurate to a second every thousand years – provided the battery doesn’t die. Called the Cesium 133 it’s made by a small Hawaiian watch company called Bathys [Warning: Autoplaying audio]
The watch uses a small Symmetricon SA.45s CASC, an atomic clock on a chip. It provides the timekeeping system for the analog clock face. The creator, Dr. John Patterson, slapped the chip into a milled metal case, added a face and a strap, and is now working on figuring out how to manufacture these monsters. This isn’t even the watch’s final form. According to ABlogToWatch:
Further, the final version of the Cesium 133 watch will have some LED status lights and a more attractive case. The prototype is 60mm wide by 50mm tall, and 23mm thick. The final version will have a light-weight carbon fiber case, be smaller, and retain the classic Bathys moon phase dial.
I’ve looked at some of Bathys’ other pieces on this site and the style and quality have always been top notch, especially for a US-based brand. I’m interested to see how these monsters come out when Patterson is finally ready to ship.
Considering Woz runs around with a huge Nixie Tube watch sometimes I suspect this behemoth will end up on some techie wrists when it’s finally complete. Bathys will make 20 of these watches in 2014 and they’ll be priced at $12,000 each, arguably a steep price to pay in order to get absolute integrity in your time keeping. However, now you know you’ll never be late.
Sep 29
Aaron Fechter invented Whac-A-Mole. He also builds animatronic rock bands for franchises like Chuck E. Cheese’s and ShowBiz Pizza Place. What more could we ask him to contribute? Nothing. He has given great gifts to mankind. But Aaron Fechter demands more of himself. He is trying to develop an alternative fuel that is cleaner burning than propane. A heroic citizen of Earth! But he had a small accident the other day at his warehouse in Orlando. Okay it was an explosion. Okay yeah he blew his warehouse up.
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Sep 28
The longer you’ve been wrapped up in the internet, but more crazy stuff you’ve seen. Everybody’s got one or two really strange, totally bizarre website they like to trot out; they’re like trading cards for web nerds. Now’s the time, what’s the single strangest site you’ve got in your arsenal?
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