Zombie Pumpkin has just hacked this post to remind you that Resistor’s Halloween Gigante Party Super-Especial is Friday October 31st, from 9 p.m. onwards. Come in costume, or one will be assigned to you. Possibly me.
$10 cover includes lots of delicious beer!
When we got the Lazor at NYCR, Adam discovered that Moleskin’s have PVC (not good) in the leather and lazering such a thing could be harmful to your health and might even harm small puppies! (Gasp!)
I wanted to Lazer the NYTimes “T” into my notebook so I had to take an alternate route. Very simply, I just cut out a “T” on the Epilog Lazor and then pressed it in a vice between a couple of pieces of wood for 20 mins or so. Looks pretty neat if I may say so myself. “Fire the lazzzzor!”
News Knitter Sweaters
Meet News Knitter. It’s described as: “… a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data.” The sweaters are all designed pulling in feeds from Google News and a few other local news sources and parsing them through Processing. Some really interesting images and approaches to data visualization end up in blue, black and red on these garments. The project was created by Mahir M. Yavuz, MFA and Ebru Kurbak, MSc, both PHd students at Kunstuniversität Linz (I have no idea what that word means or even how to say it, but I am assuming it’s a University).
I couldn’t find any details about whether it’s open source or if some of the Processing code is available? It would be nice to make a news t-shirt.
Sparkfun just launched the Arduino Pro Mini for $19… it’s tiny, and cheap, and been in the works for a long time. Here’s their description:
It’s blue! It’s thin (0.8mm)! It’s the Arduino Pro Mini! SparkFun’s minimal design approach to Arduino. This is a 3.3V Arduino running the 8MHz bootloader (select ‘LilyPad’ within the Arduino software). The Pro Mini is very much like the Wee, but we added a handful of features to become a fully certified Arduino board.
Allen Salkin of The New York Times wrote a great piece about the new Nerd Culture in this weeks Sunday paper. Great read and an audio slide show to go with it, narrated by our very own Nick Bilton (that’s me). Photo below of Bre Pettis, Phil Torrone and Limor at the Ignite NYC Soldering contest.
We came, we saw, we definitely didn’t conquer. The picture above shows Tom Igoe (who won 3rd place! congrats!) triumphantly turning off the tellyvision with his finished device. I have to say, an award should have gone to Matt Joyce for looking the coolest with his bad-ass bandanna, and an award to me for the most amount of trash talking! Check out the great video below of the event.
Great, great job Bre Pettis and Brady Forrest for putting on an amazing show last night at Ignite! And congratulations to the winners (AND losers!).
photo by luis.net – video by ieee.
Ok, well, erm, sorry for all the Fail Whale’s yesterday… We had a little too much fun at NYCR last night.
Moving back to the world of blinking LED’s and robots… isn’t this little guy, cute? He, I mean, it, was developed by the University of the West of England and are called Emotibots. They are currently on display at London’s Science Museum. The scary, yet sad, looking robot above and below is called the Heart Bot. If you hug it, it will relax and hug you back and it’s pulse changes. If you grab it and shake, or yell, Heart Bot gets scared and sad, just like my cat! More on these little cute robots… here.
Floating Fail Whale by Nick Bilton
Trossen Robotics has just announced that they are shipping RoboBuilder kits. They are the pieces and parts that make ‘Humanoid Robots’. Price ranges are dramatically different, but it looks like a fun intro for people that are just getting farmiliar with robotics and electronics, or for someone excited to hack a humanoid…. but, be warned, ‘be nice to the robots, they’ll be in charge one day’.
