Autonomous Riding Bicycle

The above text is from a research report. There is a lot more at this link.

The Pentagon’s defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions. The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later. A similar scheme aimed at manipulating wasps failed when they flew off to feed and mate.

The new scheme is a brainwave of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is tasked with maintaining the technological superiority of the US military. It has asked for “innovative” bids on the insect project from interested parties

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This seems awfully strange, even for the Pentagon. On the other hand—what if it actually works? What’s next? Birds? Soldiers? Borg Storm Troopers? There’s an interesting thought.

Link

To explore capsaicin’s effect, Phillip Koeffler of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, US, and colleagues exposed human prostate cancer cells in a laboratory dish to the natural compound. They found that capsaicin dramatically slowed the proliferation of the cells in the dish.

And this effect increased as the dose of the chilli compound was raised. Three per cent of prostate cancer cells committed “suicide” – programmed cell death – at low concentrations, rising to up to 75% of tumour cells dying at a higher dose.

Koeffler says this is the first experimental evidence supporting the notion that capsaicin stops the growth of prostate cancer cells.

Roomba pool! – Poomba?
First ever human vs autonomous / hacked pool playing Roomba at the Gawker/Lifehacker party at South by Southwest – the human controls the Roomba and tries to get the pool balls in before the programmed robot.

CeBIT Trade Show
A visitor holds a Nokia N92, a mobile TV, during a Nokia conference in Barcelona’s Palau de Congressos November 2, 2005. Visions of a nation of soccer fans glued to broadcasts via mobile phones of this summer’s World Cup are unlikely to come true, industry players said at this year’s CeBIT trade fair.

With the Eurotech WWPC (Wrist-Worn Personal Computer) the “user-centric ubiquitous computing” concept, where information can be shared and services can be accessed anywhere, has been realised. With the WWPC Eurotech has integrated all the power and capabilities that you have come to accept from a full size PC inside an extremely versatile device, small enough to be worn on the wrist. The WWPC can be quickly configured to access any remote host system through a wired or wireless interface, and features fully integrated GPS, Bluetooth, Fast Infrared and WLAN.

The robot is modeled after a Nishiki koi carp as a form of tribute to Hiroshima Castle (whose nickname Ri-jo means Koi Castle). The 80-cm (31-inch), 12-kg (26-pound) fish has a white body with bright red spots. Though the tail movement is very smooth and lifelike, the remote-controlled koi is capable of moves that a genuine koi is unable to perform, such as swimming in reverse and rotating in place.

Link

From Homebrew CPU : “In the summer of 1980 I celebrated my freshly minted B.S. in Journalism by blowing most of the cash I collected in graduation gifts on a TRS-80 Model 1 computer. Sitting on the floor of my apartment I fired it up, typed in the sample BASIC program and then ‘RUN’.

WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

‘BILL’, I responded.

HI BILL

Wow! I was blown away. This was just a machine, but I could interact with it using language that we both understood. As a Liberal Arts graduate with next to no technical background, I found this completely astonishing. Over the next year, I continued to play with my TRS-80 Model 1 while working as a journalist on a small-town Kansas newspaper. I decided that I really wanted to learn more about how computers worked, so I went back to college and picked up a M.S. in Computer Science.

Now, more than 20 years later, I find myself with an urge to touch that magic again by building my own computer from scratch. By ‘scratch’, I mean designing my own instruction set, wire-wrapping a CPU out of a pile of 74 series TTL devices and writing (or porting) my own assembler, compiler, linker, text editor and operating system.”

Link to more

If you have been looking to linux for your desktop as a possible substitute for Windows give PCLinuxOS .92 a try. It is the only desktop distribution I have tried that just plain worked out of the box, even installed the printer on its’ own. If you are not linux savvy at all you may not want to use it as a networked machine though. While it is not hard to do it does require some tweaking—but Windows can drive you nuts trying to network it too.

I was greatly surprised by the ease with which I was able to install PCLinuxOS on an HP Pavillion ze4900 laptop and how well the NDIS Wrapper is implememented. (If that sounds like a foreign language to you, don’t try it. That way lies frustration and madness. ) Inserting a Windows driver into the linux kernel to operate the Broadcom wifi chips was very easy and quick. So smooth, in fact, that I thought it had failed with no error message until I saw the blue wifi light on!

An outstanding feature of this OS is the great forum and Wiki, the latter written by users, not linux geeks, and it is full of easy to read and understand information and very complete.

Here’s a download link.

Link

Customers can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Opteron and Xeon servers with up to 64 logical CPUs. The same processor count now applies for IBM’s Power chips too. The small club of Itanium processor users already had the luxury of running Red Hat across 64-processor boxes.

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Nine-inch DVD player fits the bill

The Mustek PL8A90 is a nine-inch portable DVD player (250x170x28 mm). It is a tablet design as opposed to the shell design like many available. Actually you do need to open the device to put a DVD inside but that’s about it.

The device can work either plugged at the power cord or you can simply put its battery on.