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Robot Sunday: Self-assembling, flying drones

Posted in Play on 19 June 2010 | Comments?
Tags: robotics, robots, robotsunday

Here’s another scary step towards a robot uprising. A group of researchers are developing robots that dock together and take off by themselves. Called the Distributed Flight Array, the group of robots roams around independently and assembles randomly to form a flying vehicle. The modules communicate with each other to control the platform’s flight.

Google SSL search plugin

Posted in Play on 16 June 2010 | Comments?
Tags: firefox, google, search, xml

I added Google SSL to my search plugins in Firefox. The XML file is below: <opensearchdescription xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/" xmlns:os="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"> <shortname>Google SSL</shortname> <description>Google SSL</description> <inputencoding>UTF-8</inputencoding> <image width="16" height="16">data:image/png;base64,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</image> <url type="text/html" method="GET" template="https://www.google.com/search"> <param name="hl" value="en"/> <param name="source" value="hp"/> <param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/> <param name="btnG" value="Google+Search"/> </url> <moz :SearchForm>https://www.google.com/</moz> </opensearchdescription> I’ll host it later for a one-click install. Update: [...]

Robot Sunday: World robot population

Posted in Play on 18 April 2010 | Comments?
Tags: robots, robotsunday

The numbers are in (with caveats, of course): there are 8.6 million robots in the world. Credit: Quasimondo on Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0

Taking Sugar on a Stick for a spin

Posted in Play on 31 March 2010 | Comments?
Tags: eee, fedora, linux, opensource, sugar

So I wanted to try out Sugar on a Stick, and there’s this Eee PC laying around. Grabbed the ISO image, and checked its integrity. Got Fedora’s liveusb-creator as well. Used Peng’s USB flash disk to “burn” the live ISO. Set the Eee PC to boot from the USB flash disk. Et voila! Sugar on [...]

Robot Sunday: Is the future

Posted in Play on 14 March 2010 | Comments?
Tags: robots, robotsunday

(Well, there’s “robot” in it. *shrugs*) (In totally unrelated news, today is Pi Day. Yay!)