Tag: Robots
FBI tries to fight zombie hordes, but not the good kind
Despite the rather alarming headline from the BBC, there is not some kind of 28 Days Later epidemic going on in the North American Midwest. What the FBI is actually doing is contacting more than one million PC owners who have had their computers hijacked by cyber criminals. These hijacked home computers, known as “zombies”, are then used to spread spam, steal IDs and attack websites. Also, they eat brains, which is why people are so dumb about security, meaning it’s hard to say how much success Operation Bot Roast is going to have. [GT]
FBI tries to fight zombie hordes
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Homestar planetarium cell phone strap
To heck with seeing eternity in a grain of sand — with the Strap-Ya HomeStar planetarium cell phone strap you can hold the entire cosmos in the palm of your hand. Just add battery, flick the switch, and peep at the teeny-tiny stars. Based on the Sega HomeStar from last year, while this isn’t made by Sega, it was designed by the same guy, so the galaxies should be compatible. $7. [GT]
Strap-Ya HomeStar planetarium cell phone strap [via TOKYOMANGO]
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Mamiya's 645AFD II digicam: 22 megapixels
While you can get, say, a thousand, crappy digital cameras for $10,000, you can also get a single Mamiya’s 645AFD II medium format camera, designed to function seamlessly in either the film or digital universes. It has a 80mm f/2.8 AF lens, equivalent to a 50mm conventional lens, can shoot 1.5 frames per second, and has a 14-bit sensor which generates 12-bit images. Dedicated “Quick Action” buttons let you pre-set functions you use all the time, and it’s pre-loaded with 36 custom functions. If you’re already set up with half a Mamiya and only need a digital back, you can pick up the Mamiya ZD digital back for only $7,000. [GT]
Mamiya’s 645AFD II | Mamiya ZD digital back [via CNet]
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Mark Miller building better robots
“Why is there a serious lack of humanoid research… in the US?” Mark Miller asks. Not content simply to complain, Miller’s doing something about it. His workshop is full of androids in varying stages of function, but his active baby is “Amy”, a four-foot tall bot that he develops on a mostly daily basis. He logs his development experiences whether positive or negative, and is self-taught. “I am not attempting to replace people in the workforce, or take away jobs,” Miller says, “but to add quality to their lives by allowing some of the everyday tasks to be done by a machine. We have very short life spans, and should have as much time as possible doing what we want to do.” [GT]
The android man (via Gadget Lab)
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Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic camera tells you if you're boring
We’ve all wandered off on tangents about our incredibly hilarious cat or intolerably handsome mate or unbelievably brilliant infant and usually manage to find our way back, but those with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome can easily stay socially lost. MIT grad student Rana El Kaliouby has developed a solution, an Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic which monitors the body language of those around you and relays you helpful hints like “stop talking about your collection of fat Elvis stamps”. The device correctly identified emotions 90% of the time when exposed to actors, and 64% of the time with everyday people, which is still probably more accurate than even healthy human beings. Damn, we’re self-absorbed. At least, I am. [GT]
Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic [via Popgadget]
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Xuuk eyebox2 knows where you're looking
Red-eye reduction works by detecting the retina and canceling out its effects. The eyebox2 takes that one step shorter — all it wants to know is whether you’re looking at it. While currently a dream-come-true gadget for marketers wondering if a given poster or billboard is even getting any attention, expect similar technology to turn up in everything from subpoenas to invitations to your nauseous cousin’s New Year’s Eve party — because unlike previous eye-tracking tech, this is cheap. Normally the rig goes for around £12,000, but this starts at about £500 — nearly affordable enough to start embedding in those stop signs your lawyer said you didn’t see. [GT]
eyebox2 (via Gizmowatch)
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Chinese S116 solar-powered mobile charges by… candlelight?
Sporting a microSD memory card slot, MP3 player and a 1.3 megapixel camera, the S116 mobile phone from Hi-Tech Wealth, Inc. has a solar panel on the back which supposedly provides 40 minutes of talk time per one hour of light exposure. Apparently it’s even sensitive enough to derive significant charge from light as weak as that provided by a church taper, and the battery lasts 2.5 times as long as the battery in a typical mobile. (I believe the latter, but the former sounds pretty unlikely.) Hi-Tech Wealth, Inc, plans to release six more phones on similar lines over the next year. [GT]
World’s 1st solar-powered mobile developed in China [via Inhabitat]
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Snap on some ultra-pixelated Stolen Jewels by Mike and Maaike
The “Stolen Jewels” collection from Mike and Maaike is literally a high-tech remix of stolen jewelry into an almost unrecognizably low-res form. First taking poor quality images of the jewelry from the web, the photos are pixelated and then printed on scored leather, so that it’s actually possible to pop out each individual “jewel”. Pieces are based on greats like the Hope Diamond Broach, the Golden Jubilee Diamond Broach, and the Great Chrysanthemum Necklace. [GT]
“Stolen Jewels” by Mike and Maaike [via Moco Loco]
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boynq Blox speakers let you slide the bass
Not only are the boynq Blox speakers sculptural and cool looking, the placement of the speakers actually has a practical function: you adjust the bass and treble by moving the speaker along the slide track. They’re powered by dual 5-watt amplifiers and have the usual 3.5mm minijack out. Also, instead of having some big ugly wall wart, they’re USB powered. £17.99. [GT]
boynq Blox speakers (via Stylehive)
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Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX) maps the ocean floor
Today the NASA-funded Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX) is at the bottom of the Zacaton geothermal sinkhole in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Tomorrow it could be searching for water at the bottom of the icy crust on Europa, the moon of Jupiter. The DEPTHX has 100 sensors, 36 computers and 16 thrusters with which it can navigate and map for up to eight hours without human intervention. Plus, it looks like the kind of thing an alien species might be astounded to find in its watery backyard. [GT]
Robot sub technology could aid planetary exploration
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