November 2009
10 posts
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...
“If I wanted to throw a party where a bunch of people I hardly know drank on my...”
– Patches
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...
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.
“…fuck off and make something that’ll do useful work on a phone in a...”
– 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.
“The idea of a computer that does a lot less — leaving out even things you...”
– From John Gruber. This succinctly describes why I’m still looking at something like a netbook in addition to my laptop.
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...