theodp writes "An amazing surveillance tape of a burglary in progress at a New Jersey Apple Store shows five perps in masks smashing the plate-glass doors at 2:05 a.m., signaling to the security guard that they had a gun, and clearing off the display tables with the efficiency of a Indy 500 pit crew. The take: 23 MacBook Pros, 14 iPhones and 9 iPod touches in 31 seconds flat. Estimated value, based on average selling price: $46,345. No word yet on whether Microsoft's Laptop Hunters have alibis."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceGhost writes "According to the Houston Chronicle, the attorney for a Texas man charged in the death of a four-year-old 'has asked several local media outlets to provide the names of readers and listeners who commented about his client online,' stating that his client 'was struck by the conclusions people drew about his client and the specificity of some comments that made it appear they came from people with personal knowledge of the case.' Media outlets who have been subpoenaed include The Houston Chronicle, the Conroe Courier, KHOU (Houston area Channel 11, CBS affiliate) and KTRK (Houston area Channel 13, ABC affiliate)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week at CRAFT we kicked off Cozy up to Yarn month, part of which is this rad crochet-along to make this nauseatingly adorable panda amigurumi by Tamie Snow.

We also saw:

Crocheted horse hats

Radio Rug Uses Human Antenna

Ice Cream Gyoza

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Matt_dk writes "Apparently the International Space Station is going to get bigger. NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) are preparing to sign an agreement to add another laboratory to the ISS by using a modified multipurpose logistics module (Raffaello) during the final Space Shuttle mission. It will be attached in September 2010 during Endeavour's STS-133 mission. The idea had originally been rejected, but earlier this year ISS program manager Michael Suffredini said using an MPLM for an additional module was being reconsidered."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MarkWhittington writes "The Augustine Commission has not officially presented its findings to the White House, but already a push back is starting to occur over the possibility that the Ares 1 rocket will be canceled after three billion dollars and over four years of development. According to a story in the Orlando Sentinel contractors involved in the development of the Ares 1 have started a quiet but persistent public relations campaign to save the Ares 1, criticized in some quarters because of cost and technical problems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SphereOfInfluence writes "Dion Hinchcliffe over on ZDNet declared in a new post that the Web OS has finally arrived and that businesses and IT departments must adjust to the fact that everything's starting to move to the cloud. He cites John Hagel's so-called big business shifts of the 21st century and claims cloud computing, crowdsourcing, open APIs, Software-as-a-Service are the future of the workplace. He goes on to present a compelling visual model of the Web OS circa 2009 and examples to back up some of the statements."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amateur inventor's homemade submarine @ Chinadaily...

Tao Xiangli prepares his homemade submarine before operating it in a lake on the outskirts of Beijing September 3, 2009. Amateur inventor Tao, 34, made a fully functional submarine, which has a periscope, depth control tanks, electric motors, manometer, and two propellers, from old oil barrels and tools which he bought at a second-hand market. He took 2 years to invent and test the submarine which costs 30,000 yuan (US$4,385).

Related:

Farmer Wu Yulu drives his rickshaw pulled by his self-made walking robot near his home in a village at the outskirts of Beijing January 8, 2009. This robot is the latest and largest development of hobby inventor Wu, who started to build robots in 1986 with wire, metal, screws and nails found in rubbish sites.

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Vibrobots are an easy project to make with your maker classroom students and workshop participants. Relatively quickly, you can have people build their own small vehicle, construct a simple electric circuit and have the critter move around due to its' weighted motor. The materials are cheap or free, allowing you to encourage participants to take their creation home for further inspiration.

You may want to pair the vibrobot with the CD scrounging project. After scrapping the drives, you then have an excellent collection of parts perfectly suited for the vibrobot project.

Skills in this project:
Building electric circuits
Making a transportation vehicle
Working with the design process
Use of tools and supplies
Determining positive and negative voltage

Materials:
This project is so flexible that you can substitute for just about everything on this supply list. Really, look around at the junk you have and figure out a way to use up some of the debris on hand before spending your budget, unless you want to focus on fine craftsmanship.
You can get all the parts you need from scavenging computer CD drives
Battery holder, you can buy them or have participants make their own
Motors
Wire and other conductors
Rigid materials for the body
Springs are nice for feet
Zip ties
Hot melt glue
Nuts/bolts/washers

Tools:
Safety glasses
Wire strippers
Screwdriver
Pliers
Utility knife
Multimeter
Soldering iron
Hot melt glue gun

Time frame:
The vibrobots can be made in 5 minutes or less, but give an hour to make sure you get at the important ideas of how to fasten round objects to flat surfaces and electric circuits.

Mastery objective:
Students and participants will know how an electric circuit works and how to attach materials together so that they can construct a vehicle that moves by operating a simple electric motor circuit.

Process:
Gather your materials and don your safety glasses.
Prep the motors
If your motors have wires on them, strip the end of the wires.
If the motors do not have wires on them, then solder wires to the motors. When soldering to motors, you need to be very careful to move quickly with the heat. Use only as much heat as will melt the solder onto the wire and the tab. You do have to get the tab hot. If the tab is not hot, the solder will not hold properly.
The wires should be at least a few inches long, and the end away from the motor should be stripped of insulation.

Weight the motor
To add a weight to the shaft of the motor, all you need is a small piece of hot melt glue stick. An inch or so should work fine, but experiment with more or less. With less material, it should spin faster with less of a wobble. With more material, it should spin slower with more of a wobble.
Stick the shaft of the motor into the glue stick at one end. When you do this, press from the back, usually plastic end of the motor. If you don't hold the end of the motor, sometimes it will pop off, possibly ruining the motor, but also showing you what the inner workings of the motor look like.
You can use other materials to weight the motor, like plastic and wood. Really, anything that you can get to grip on the motor shaft will work in some way.

Build a body
For the body, you can use anything that is relatively light. A mint tin can work, as you may be able to tuck the battery pack inside, and secure legs below.
Another feature of the mint tin is that you can put screws, nuts and bolts and other jangly stuff inside. This will make noise as your vibrobot bounces around the table.
If you want real simple, take a piece of plastic from the CD drive,

Attach your motor
The easiest way to attach the motor is to tape the motor to the deck.
You could get a more secure arrangement by using zip ties to hold it down.
A more secure arrangement would be to fashion a pillow block and bolt the motor onto the deck. You can make a pillow block by drilling a hole in a scrap of wood and then cutting it with a saw to hold the motor. You can also use the bottom half of the pillow block and zip tying the motor to the block and the deck.
If you are going to have the motor shaft parallel with the ground, you will need clearance for the weight to spin.

Right or left?
To determine which direction you want the motor to spin, the easiest way is to connect the wires from the battery pack to the wires from the motor. The motor will spin, clockwise or anticlockwise. If you switch the wires, the motor will spin in the reverse direction. You can check the circuit with a multimeter on DC voltage. If you get a positive reading in one direction, you should get a negative reading in the other direction.

Enjoy your creation
vibrobots are not very smart beasts, so you should be able to run them on a table or floor. Watch that they don't fall over the edge, or build them for the durability that will help them survive the fall. Try it out, build one, and then build another to meet the shortcomings of the first.

Extensions:
Adding lights can sparkle up your vibrobot. LEDs are cheap and plentiful.
Using a motor reversing switch in your circuit will help aid navigation.
Remote controls aren't too hard to make, a length of CAT5 networking cable with a switch or two mounted on a board or mint tin at the top can make it start, stop, reverse direction and more.
A power switch on the body will help you turn the vehicle on and off easily.

More:

• Electronic Test Equipment from MAKE, Volume 10
• Multimeter Tutorial - Make: Video Podcast
• Multimeter Tutorial - Make: PDF Podcast
• Free classroom electricity posters
• How-To: CD drive scavenging for parts
• How-To: Free DIY battery holders
• How-To: Quick, cheap soldering stand

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The Digital Foundry blog has an article about measuring an important but often nebulous aspect of console gameplay: input lag. Using a video camera and a custom input monitor made by console modder Ben Heck, and after calibrating for display lag, they tested a variety of games to an accuracy of one video frame in order to determine the latency between pressing a button and seeing its effect on the screen. Quoting: "If a proven methodology can be put into place, games reviewers can better inform their readers, but more importantly developers can benefit in helping to eliminate unwanted lag from their code. ... It's fair to say that players today have become conditioned to what the truly hardcore PC gamers would consider to be almost unacceptably high levels of latency to the point where cloud gaming services such as OnLive and Gaikai rely heavily upon it. The average videogame runs at 30fps, and appears to have an average lag in the region of 133ms. On top of that is additional delay from the display itself, bringing the overall latency to around 166ms. Assuming that the most ultra-PC gaming set-up has a latency less than one third of that, this is good news for cloud gaming in that there's a good 80ms or so window for game video to be transmitted from client to server."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Puyol y Messi Androidificados

Mouser Heineken: Escultura robótica de asalto.

Baer, el padre de los videojuegos

¡Felicidades Makers zurdos!

Tipos, características y diferencias de las placas de Arduino

Lo que ellas quieren es un robot

Las aventuras de Súper y Portátil

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Dave sez, "In Singapore's Fort Canning Park is an old WWII bunker that was repurposed a decade or two ago as a tourist attraction. They installed a number of lifelike animatronic British generals so visitors could experience what it must have been like as they deliberated surrendering to the Japanese. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they've oiled their robots in a while..."

Under ordinary circumstances, I'd award these the prize for creepiest animatronic in Singapore, but I happen to have personally seen the animatronic reenactment of the castration of the eunuch admiral Chen Ho at the 1421 exhibit, which is a tough act to beat.

the creepiest animatronics (Thanks, Dave Prager!)

Hugh Pickens writes "Sue Shellenbarger has an interesting essay in the WSJ where she talks about the 2,000 incoming text messages her son racks up every month — more than 60 two-way communications via text message every day — and her surprise that 2,000 monthly text messages is about average for today's teenagers. 'I have seen my son suffer no apparent ill effects (except a sore thumb now and then), and he reaps a big benefit, of easy, continuing contact with many friends,' writes Shellenbarger. 'Also, the time he spends texting replaces the hours teens used to spend on the phone; both my kids dislike talking on the phone, and say they really don't need to do so to stay in touch with friends and family.' But does texting make today's kids stupid, as Mark Bauerlein writes in his book ' The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future? 'I don't think so. It may make them annoying, when they try to text and talk to you at the same time,' writes Shellenbarger, adding, 'I have found him more engaged and easier to communicate with from afar, because he is constantly available via text message and responds with a faithfulness and speed that any mother would find reassuring.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The kids are going back to school, the days are getting shorter, and the temperature is slowly falling. You know what that means? The summer is almost over! It also means the Maker Shed's summer clearance sale is going to end soon too! Scoop up some great deals while you can, especially a few of our $3 Mystery MAKE T-shirts!

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CajunArson writes "I recently dug up an old P4 that is in fine working order and did what any self-respecting Slashdotter would do: I slapped Linux on it to experiment with making an NFSv4 server. One other thing I did was to remove the old AGP video card to save on power, since this is a headless machine. Now, I removed the video card after the installation, and I'm doing just fine as long as the machine will boot to a state where networking works and I can SSH to it. My question: Is there a good solution to allow me to log into this box if it cannot get on the network? I'm looking for solutions other than slapping a video card back in. In my case, I will have physical access to the machine. A few caveats to make it interesting: This question is for plain old desktop/laptop systems, not network servers designed to run headless. Also, I am aware of the serial console, but even 'old' machines may only have USB, and I have not seen any good documentation on how and whether USB works as a substitute. Finally, if there is any way to access the BIOS settings without needing a video card, that would be an extra bonus, but I'm satisfied with just local OS access starting from the GRUB prompt."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a lot of sides to a bootstrap. The idea is to take a something that's highly integrated and break it into pieces. Connect the pieces with open formats, and then show people how to compete. Then each of the pieces becomes a market where users have choice. And when users have choice, competitors must work hard to please them.

It's how we got RSS going in the first place. Netscape got a few content companies to create feeds. They created an aggregator, which we competed with. Two aggregators, that meant more, for sure. And then we made our blogging software produce feeds and worked with lots of publishers. Now blogging software updates millions of feeds every day. But at one point there were just a half-dozen feeds and two aggregators.

There's lots of competition in the market for Twitter clients. There's a raging battle between a dozen teams all of whom are vying for your attention. Each of them wants to produce the product that attracts the most users. However at the center of the market there is no competition, so improvements come slowly. Our goal is to change that.

Now, two excellent examples of clients are Seesmic and Brizzly. There are many others but these are the two that I use, so I am most familiar with them. Here are screen shots of the two products. (Click on the thumbs to see larger versions.)





There are two ways they can support rssCloud, and help the bootstrap give more choice to users, and potentially free themselves to create more features without having to wait for Twitter.

1. Allow your users to subscribe to cloud-enabled feeds. Right now, most of those are the 1151 feeds of the people I subscribe to. But soon (knock wood) there will be many thousands more, content that you can't get from Twitter. So supporting cloud-enabled feeds now could buy you a head-start on your competition in October or November.

2. Publish each user's stream of 140-character messages as cloud-enabled feeds, in addition to pushing them through Twitter. Several reasons to do this. You provide them a backup, which may be a feature that's of value to them. And they might be able to share their content with 140-character networks formed by others, including Facebook, Yahoo, Google, who knows who. Open formats and protocols create lots of options. Maybe you want to start your own little network of users independent of Twitter. I can tell you -- I do! (And will.)

Brizzly and Seesmic may not want to do this now. After all it is a holiday weekend in the US. But you never know what the future holds, and it doesn't take much time to think about it.

MBCook writes "Greg Parker has an excellent technical article on his blog about the changes to the dynamic linker (dyld) for Objective-C that Snow Leopard uses to cut launch time in half and cut about 1/2 MB of memory per application. 'In theory, a shared library could be different every time your program is run. In practice, you get the same version of the shared libraries almost every time you run, and so does every other process on the system. The system takes advantage of this by building the dyld shared cache. The shared cache contains a copy of many system libraries, with most of dyld's linking and loading work done in advance. Every process can then share that shared cache, saving memory and launch time.' He also has a post on the new thread-local garbage collection that Snow Leopard uses for Objective-C."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

inject_hotmail.com writes "Internet and law genius Michael Geist writes about some shenanigans by the cell phone carriers and the Canadian government in his column in The Star. Canadian taxpayers funded a 'Cell Phone Cost Calculator' so that the average person could theoretically wade through the disjointed and incongruent package offerings. The calculator wound up being yanked a couple weeks before launch. Geist suggests that the major cell carriers lobbied the appropriate public officials to have the program nixed because it would bite into their profit if the general public could make sense out of pricing and fees. Geist continues, 'Sensing that [Tony] Clement (Industry Minister) was facing pressure to block the calculator, Canadian consumer groups wrote to the minister, urging him to stick with it.' Moving forward, Michael makes a novel suggestion, one that would show an immense level of understanding by the government: 'With public dollars having funded the mothballed project, the government should now consider releasing the calculator's source code and enable other groups to pick up where the OCA (Office of Consumer Affairs) left off.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "The San Diego Supercomputer Center has built a high-performance computer with solid-state drives, which the center says could help solve science problems faster than systems with traditional hard drives. The flash drives will provide faster data throughput, which should help the supercomputer analyze data an 'order of magnitude faster' than hard drive-based supercomputers, according to Allan Snavely, associate director at SDSC. SDSC intends to use the HPC system — called Dash — to develop new cures for diseases and to understand the development of Earth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've posted about tool lending libraries before... and here is a library without the books @ The Boston Globe...

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks - the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

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myvirtualid writes "Con Kolivas has done what he swore never to do: returned to the Linux kernel and written a new — and, according to him — waaay better scheduler for the desktop environment. In fact, BFS appears to outperform existing schedulers right up until one hits a 16-CPU machine, at which point he guesses performance would degrade somewhat. According to Kolivas, BFS 'was designed to be forward looking only, make the most of lower spec machines, and not scale to massive hardware. i.e. [sic] it is a desktop orientated scheduler, with extremely low latencies for excellent interactivity by design rather than 'calculated,' with rigid fairness, nice priority distribution and extreme scalability within normal load levels.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joshua writes "After repeated concerns from Japanese citizens over privacy rights violations involving Street View and a probe by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Google Japan has announced that it will help victims of Street View photo abuse take action against offending sites. Google Japan said it would send requests to the sites for removal of maliciously used Street View images. It will also potentially block the site from Google's search engine and consider legal action for those sites which ignore or refuse the request. Action to this extent against secondary-use abusers is reportedly a first in relationship to Google's Street View worldwide."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joshua Bearman of the LA Weekly re-posted a story about his trip to the famous Mt. Wilson Observatory in Los Angles, which came close to being destroyed by the fire. Many thanks to the firefighters who worked so hard and risked their lives to save it!

With the fire threat to Mt. Wilson seemingly abated, I have taken enough of a deep breath to go back and look at one of my favorite early LA Weekly stories, about an awesome trip I took up to the Mt. Wilson observatory and inside the massive, revolving dome of the 100-inch Hooker telescope, the largest in the world for the first half of the twentieth century. (And still a functioning, important facility.) Did you know that the Hooker's 9,000-pound optic was blown at a bottleworks in France, remains the largest such piece of glass, and was carried up the mountain by donkey in 1915? True! And it was there, as you surely know, that Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, and by extension, the Big Bang. But did you also know that a few years earlier, it was also Hubble who first discovered that there are galaxies at all? True! Before 1922, it was believed the Milky Way was the whole kit and kaboodle. Hubble sat up there above Altadena night after night and said "Eureka!" Even Einstein had to rethink things and came up for a visit.

Addendum: Here's The LA Times' Tim Rutten on Mt. Wilson Observatory's place in history. (Thanks, Xeni!)

stoolpigeon writes "Scientists on Florida's Gulf Coast are trying to find an underwater robot that has mysteriously vanished. The robot from the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota has been missing since Monday. The robot, which cost about $100,000, was equipped with a detector to find red tide, a toxic algae bloom. The detector was valued at another $30,000. Scientists aren't sure what happened to the robot, which is nicknamed Waldo."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've cover QR codes here many times... they're better versions of bar codes that allow some devices (like phones) to quick scan things like URLs. They're popular in Japan and we've been saying they're going to be very "here" soon. District 9 had codes all over every major city, that's just one example. In our maker world, the latest post card / marketing piece from Mouser (they sell electronics) features some QR codes, interesting - but we have a suggestion...

Mouser, since most makers will be using a phone to scan these in and to go to the URL make the destination page a little more phone friendly (image below) and also offer some type of discount or fun thing for trying this out (perhaps a resistor phone charm). Otherwise, good stuff - keep doing cool things like this Mouser!

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imamac writes "Apple Insider has an interesting perspective on the MS Exchange support built into Mac OS X 10.6 and how it essentially frees Apple from all things Microsoft: 'Windows Enthusiasts like to spin Apple's support for Exchange on the iPhone and in Snow Leopard as endorsement of Microsoft in the server space. From another angle, Apple is reducing its dependence upon Microsoft's client software, weakening Microsoft's ability to hold back and dumb down its Mac offerings at Apple's expense. More importantly, Apple is providing its users with additional options that benefit both Mac users and the open source community.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When introducing kids to programming, it's helpful to get them into the mindset of programming. Having this experience will help them to get the concept that they are in charge of what the code does. They should also see that there is a lot of programmed behavior in the devices and systems in our lives.

Supplies:
People
Paper
Pens/pencils
A space to work in, tiled floors can be handy for calibrating moves

Tools
None

Concepts
Programming
Communications systems
Iterative or Design process

Time frame
This takes at least 20 minutes to explain and do. After that, you could use it as a filler activity, where you use it to illustrate a concept in the language that you are learning.

Mastery Objective
Students or participants will know how to create a very simple programming language so that they can command another person to perform simple tasks and explain where programming is present in other parts of their lives.

Process
Have participants get together in groups of twos or threes. Big groups don't work as well.
Each group will need a piece of paper and a pen or pencil
Each group creates their own code of simple commands.
Their commands will be written on the piece of paper and then spoken to the programmed person.
The programmed person should not have to read the code, it should be transmitted to that person verbally, or on slips of paper in a sequence.
The programmed person will then carry out the written code as accurately as possible.
Students and participants should use the iterative process, where they try their program and refine it as they go. If they don't test out the program, it may not do what they want, their may be miscommunications or sloppy code that the programmed person does not follow well.
Have each of the groups or pairs demonstrate to the rest of the group what they have programmed.
Each group in turn has a person who calls out the code, and another person who executes the code.
Each person should think of several objects or systems that use programming techniques in their daily life.

Keep it simple
Make a code of at least five lines of code, one command on each line.
They should avoid words like: "and," "next" and "then," which will have the effect of making commands more complex. Implied in the system is that the next line of code or simple command is "next" or "then."

Don't make it impossible
Keep the commands realistic for your situation.
If you are limited on time, they should not repeat movements or events dozens or hundreds of time.
If you are limited on space, they shouldn't have commands like "run for twenty seconds" or "jump eight feet"
If you have regular human beings, they shouldn't have commands like "jump up three feet" or "lift the maple table top"

Extensions
You could have them create a common syntax for their code, making it more consistent.
Create objects of groups of participants, that could all be commanded by one person acting as the transmitter of the code.

If you try this out, please let us know how it goes in the comments. Send in some photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool and tag it with ProgramAPerson.

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