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Robotics

Remotely Pat Your Pet With Kinect and a Wiimote 53

MrSeb writes "Taylor Valtrop, an enterprising roboticist with a penchant for kitties, has crafted the mother of all Kinect (and Wiimote!) hacks: The teleoperation of a robot to groom a cat. Using a Nao, a $15,000 robot; a treadmill (for moving the robot forward); a head-mounted display (to see what the robot sees); Kinect (for tracking his movements); and two Wiimotes (to move the robot's hands), Valtrop is able to pat a cat with surprising accuracy and gentleness (except for where he accidentally hits the cat in the face)."

Comment Model a Hackerspace (Score 1) 268

Get a 3D printer, vinyl cutter, poster printer, and other fabrication tools so that the computers can be applied to a wider domain. Grab some arduinos and electronics to interface computers with sensors and motors. Consider getting some easily hackable gadgets like kinects, wii-motes, webcams. A couple DSLRs w/ fluorescent light kits & green screen?

I'd include ubuntu, OS X, and windows in your network if you can; if you're creating a budget of some sort, don't forget creative software costs (Visual Studio, Adobe Suite, Autodesk).

Make sure you will be able to grant administrator access without compromising the lab (you can use something like windows steady state, but I'd also keep backup images at a clean state). A local storage server with redundancy is a good idea to keep system images and other work safe.

Go for the skylights and vegetation; there are a lot of shade loving vines and plants that thrive with only a little light.

Comment Arduino-based geiger counter shield (Score 1) 371

Check out this project from Tokyo Hackerspace:
http://tokyohackerspace.org/en/project/tokyo-hackerspace-netrad-geiger-shield

"This is the project page for the Tokyo Hackerspace/RDTN Geiger project. This is an Arduino-based geiger counter shield that makes it easy to upload data to the internet and also interchange tubes. Since it's open source and Arduino-based, its also easy to hack this to other interesting applications."

Moon

NASA To Trigger Massive Explosion On the Moon In Search of Ice 376

Hugh Pickens writes "NASA is preparing to launch the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, which will fly a Centaur rocket booster into the moon, triggering a six-mile-high explosion that scientists hope will confirm whether water is frozen in the perpetual darkness of craters near the moon's south pole. If the spacecraft launches on schedule at 12:51 p.m. Wednesday, it will hit the moon in the early morning hours of October 8 after an 86-day Lunar Gravity-Assist, Lunar Return Orbit that will allow the spacecraft time to complete its two-month commissioning phase and conduct nearly a month of science data collection of polar crater measurements before colliding with the moon just 10 minutes behind the Centaur." (Continues, below.)
Microsoft

Microsoft Adding jQuery To Visual Studio 67

Tim Anderson writes "Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP of the .NET developer division, announced that the open source jQuery Javascript library will be integrated into Visual Studio, the main Windows development tool. Further, Microsoft will treat jQuery as a supported product within technical support contracts, and will use jQuery to build new controls for ASP.NET, its web platform."
Puzzle Games (Games)

Submission + - Old islamic tile patterns show modern math insight

arbitraryaardvark writes: "Reuters reports Medieval Muslims made mega math marvel.
Tile patterns on middle eastern mosques display a kind of quasicrystalline effect that was unknown in the west until rediscovered by Penrose in the 1970s.
"Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry."
It isn't known if the mosque designers understood the math behind the patterns.
page 2 of story."
Television

Submission + - Award winning Ad in Australia taken off air

bol_kernal writes: "An Award winning advertisement on Australian TV for the new Hyundia 4WD has been pulled from being broadcast after they received 80 complaints from concerned parents. The ad consists of a small child (aged around 2yrs) cruising down the road, window down, arm out the window, in his new Hyundai 4WD, sees a girl of the same age standing on the side of the road, pulls over picks her up and they go to the beach together. All in all it's cute, funny and very well done. This ad has won advertising awards and doesn't air until later in the evening (8:30pm or later) but it has been pulled due to concern from parents about the copycat risk. More details can be found here. What I want to know is where has the responsibility of parents gone? Is the world becoming so serious that fantasy is no longer allowed?"

First Company Logo Visible From Space 436

Albert Sandberg writes, "KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) has created the first logo that is visible from space. The construction was made by 65,000 1x1-foot tiles and covers about 2 acres. The logo was built and assembled over about a month and is located in the Nevada desert near Area 51. The article also has a short video showing the construction in time-lapse. Now the aliens know where to get their slimy food :-)"

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