human made

» The Hummingbird Bot

I want this open sourced. But that’s unlikely to happen.

Previous nano-UAVs of similar size used a tether system for power and/or control. What makes the nano-UAV even more attention-grabbing than prior UAVs is biomimicry — it looks like a hummingbird…AeroVironment tested 90 different wing designs before settling on the hummingbird design. Like a pencil balanced on its tip (or a human walking), the design is inherently unstable. It constantly wants to tumble out of control, and is only corrected by an automatic control system.

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“ If I wanted to throw a party where a bunch of people I hardly know drank on my dollar, I’D get married.

— Patches

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» Identity in the Browser

Aza Raskin has a nifty post up about his ideas regarding identity as a feature of the browser, rather than distributed across multiple accounts on multiple sites.

Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.

Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company.

The browser is your personal and trusted agent to the web. It’s the only actor on the Internet stage which both knows everything you do on the web, and never has to let that data leave the privacy of your desktop. Your browser knows you (or, at least, should).

I seriously recommend clicking on through and checking out some of the mockups.

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A demo for a game which plays with the notion of seeing the world in echolocation. It’s not unlike Unfinished Swan, which I blogged about last year.

I love game design that plays with something other than what one shoots at and what one shoots it with.

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I could watch people doing this sort of thing all day. Incredible.

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Solar Sailing

An interesting point in time: we are now talking as a species about the serious viability of traveling space by travelling on solar winds.

It’s the stuff of bad space operas—sailing through the stars on huge mylar sheets. And yet, with the successful flight of LightSail-1, it can become reality.

Just a fun image for you to carry in your head today.

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“ …fuck off and make something that’ll do useful work on a phone in a village, instead of something that’ll get you laid in fucking Hoxton. Make something that has meaning outside a major metropolis.

—

From Warren Ellis, decrying the current spate of AR development (and other mobile tools).

I get this; I live in a city, but it’s a small unimportant one, so a lot of the tools available on the iPhone I have are effectively useless.

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“ The idea of a computer that does a lot less — leaving out even things you consider essential, because you can still do those things on your other, primary computer — is liberating.

— From John Gruber. This succinctly describes why I’m still looking at something like a netbook in addition to my laptop.

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There’s no great point to this. It’s just very neat. I always appreciate someone’s willingness to spend a lot of time just because the end result is entertaining or cool.

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» Satellite Hacking

Brazilians have apparently discovered that our satellite infrastructure is great for illegal logging and long range trucking.

And the dumbest of them have the wherewithal to do it.

To use the satellite, pirates typically take an ordinary ham radio transmitter, which operates in the 144- to 148-MHZ range, and add a frequency doubler cobbled from coils and a varactor diode. That lets the radio stretch into the lower end of FLTSATCOM’s 292- to 317-MHz uplink range. All the gear can be bought near any truck stop for less than $500. Ads on specialized websites offer to perform the conversion for less than $100. Taught the ropes, even rough electricians can make Bolinha-ware.

“I saw it more than once in truck repair shops,” says amateur radio operator Adinei Brochi (PY2ADN) “Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil.”

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