I just found out about this thing called redfly, it's a terminal for smart phones and works over usb or blue tooth.(250$) Its the form factor of a netbook, 8 hour battery life, 8" 800X600 lcd, 2 usb 2.0 host ports, vga out, optional expansion cable with additional usb host port, and rca composite in with pip. Sadly there are no internal speakers, its currently limited to windows mobile, and it doesn't support video which is kind of a buzz kill. But they already have it working on android and supposedly are close to an official release, which is a lot closer to real than any of the android phones I'm looking at. Here is a list of currently supported phones.

The reason this thing is so cool in my mind is 2 fold, it lets me add a nettop equivalent to my life without adding another os to maintain, and if I seriously consider the option of buying this at the same point that I buy an android based phone being limited to a software based keyboard on the phone is less of a deal breaker, especially if I gain other features buy doing so. I cant wait to see if the android release can do video, I'm getting the impression the lack of video support may have more to do with the phone than the terminal. However it may also be a blue tooth bandwidth issue, in which case usb should be capable of handling it... There is a self evident work around if the phone has a rca video output connection. The thought of shoehorning in a set of speakers and hardware to support them along with some solid state storage have crossed my mind. Who knows maybe I'll end up running android on a iphone with this thing in my bag. I'm still waiting, there are ~15-22 new android phones that should be in stores before christmas, phone shopping is still a pain in the ass.

Edit: after reading some comets on engadget the really cool self evident thing that everyone seems to be missing is that this is a terminal for a smart phone, the specs on current smart phones are starting to rival what you can find in netbooks.  So in terms of functionality this is a netbook with an always on internet connection that cost you nothing monthly because it is only an accessory for your smart phone.  2 or 3 years down the line and maybe for whatever reason its time for a new smart phone, well your netbook equivalent benefits from that to, cool huh.

This wins at art.
copy-paste go.


Flypaper robotic clock - detail

At the base of the roller, a scraper removes any captured insects.
They fall into the microbial fuel cell beneath, where bacteria digest the fly and cause chemical changes that the cell can extract power from.
The energy is used to power the LCD clock and keep the roller revolving.
(Image: Auger-Loizeau)


Coffee table robot

This is a coffee table that doubles as a mouse trap.
Crumbs are placed on the table to encourage mice to climb up the hole in the far-right table leg.
When the mouse stands on the trapdoor in the centre, sensors open the door and it falls into the microbial fuel cell.
The digested mouse generates the energy to power the trap door, sensor and an LED graphic display on the front of the table.
(Image: Auger-Loizeau)

Source NewScientist Carnivorous robots eager to eat your pests

Cold showers suck, and nothing makes me smoke more than writing essays.  2 more weeks and I'm done, 2 more weeks if I don't blow it...

3qi, standard LCD + epaper FTW.  So basically you get the best of both worlds, a normal lcd when plugged in, and epaper when you need your batteries to last all day.  Well now I have a reason to wait till this time next year to buy a netbook, hopefully they will add a touch screen and make a netbook with a swivel screen for tablet mode.  Now lets ditch the cold cathode back light and replace it with ~5 DPI a grid of electroluminescent  "pixels" and only light up part of the screen for a real hybrid mode.

So my phone may be on the fritz, it just listed a call I missed 10 days ago as new, so something is messed up with it, don't text me because they may not show up for a week if its behaving similarly in that regard.  Otherwise its working normally, just don't count on me calling you back if I don't within 15 minutes.  I think it may be the sim card that's going(the sim is much older than the phone), luckily I cloned it a few months ago so I'll swap it out if it continues to misbehave.

How much are you paying for your motorcycle insurance and to who?

Well I just slept for about 17 hours and I feel like I could go back to sleep for another 17. But my head feels a lot better. 

http://boston.craigslist.org/bmw/mcy/1141602145.html I don't even have the FZ on the road yet, but I'm tempted just to have something new to tinker on, and be a perfectionist about, rather than something to ride any time soon.  I'm getting back in to the mechanical part om my electromechanical interest because of the robot, I have been doing way to much programing in propiatary(for lack of a better word) special use languidges recently...

I'm not dead yet, ps orbital death ray coming to california in 2016!

... I'm going to convince my instructor that this should be a lab.
This is what I get to play with in lab,

Electronic compass or gyro?   The compass is most assuredly easier to wire up and write code for, but its also much more susceptible to EM interference., and this is going to be mounted in a robot with a bunch of tiny electromagnetically noisy motors(which I'm not allowed to fix), on a field with 3 other robots with the same motors.  Now having never used a gyro before and having read the data sheet I have no idea how I would translate the output in to useful information, but if I manage to figure it out a 2 axis gyro would be really handy for navigating the ramp thing.  Also is it in bad taste to install active sensor jamers on my robot, there not disallowed in the rules.

If you have a 360 don't update yet, looks like they may have fucked up again, I have an awesome new doorstop now...

Fuck LoudTwitter, if I wanted to play with twitter I'd get an account and use their service, this is LJ not twitter.  I don't want your damn tweets cluttering up my friends page, its not what its for, nor do I want inane tweets bumping real post off the first page.  Systems I don't sign up for and can't opt out of, which are then thrown in my face, are not cool, EVER.  If you use LoudTwitter more than twice daily firstly fuck you(yes all 4 of you), secondly you better post this link via your spam bot before anyone else get all pissy and ranty at you.  Whatever I will never be seeing any tweets on my LJ again.

If any one needs help blocking the evil little bastards feel free to ask.  If any one knows of a solution that solves the bumping post problem let me know.  Really the problem is not any one person that tweets, its that I have to sort  your collective shit pile of tweets to get to the real post.  LJ was not designed to be a front end for twitter, sure it works, but it does not scale well when you try to use it in such a way.  Let the LJ staff incorporate twitter in to the site in a way that does not interfere with MY usage of the sites primary function.  That or I may just filter the lot of you never to be read again, which would suck because I like reading your real post, just not the tweets.

I could write a program that would IM everyone on my buddy list, and send out an email to everyone in my contacts, and text everyone in my phone book, and post to my LJ, every time I sign in to xbox live just in case any one wanted to play with me, but every one would block my addresses in under a week, and there is already a system for that, so I wont.  THERE IS ALREADY A SYSTEM FOR TWEETS AND LJ IS NOT IT.

If after all that ranting you still want to use twitter on LJ go here and at least set up a twitter filter, then twitter about it so people can opt out, or better yet let people opt in rather than assuming everyone else has some burning desire to know what you are doing every half hour.

I cant wait to see what happens if conficker turns out to be a massive bot net, I wonder who is going to get ddosed.  The thing has to wait till 6am when it will be the 1st in the last time zone before its fully started up.  So it may not do much till after 6am.

Well I guess this means I'm going to Dallas.

I got my bike started today, put the front fairing on, mounted the blinkers, and one mirror.  I still need to get a new mirror cut for the other side, get new bolts for the windshield, and figure out if I have a bad battery or a bad alternator.

So I want to set up an isolated playground network for a hand full of stupid reasons.  I have the hardware to do it,  but I would much rather run the entire network in virtual machines if possible.  What sort of hardware would I need to run 10 to 15 images at once, whats the best software to manage that many images at once? 

Ok metric notation is not hard, in fact I'm rather fond of it because I only ever have to work with numbers between 1 and 999 when I'm working with it, if the number is larger than 999 it gets a k before the whatever I'm measuring and starts at 1 again, if I have less than 1.0 it gets a m and goes down from 999.  I never have to count out how many 0s I have and it clutters up my equations so much less than 1.21X10^9W besides back to the future just wouldn't be the same without 1.21GW.  So why the hell cant my physics text book seem to figure it out, I keep reading 5600kHz or 0.07mW, the people that wrote the thing are supposed to be smart right?  Now this wouldn't be so bad but they just keep messing up and mixing with other systems in the same problem, and I cant help but think that their examples would be much clearer if they would quit it with the mix and match shit.  Can we as a country pleas embraces the standard and go metric already?

Yeah it really does bug me that much.

When I start using more than 2 editors and 3 simulators to do my homework I swear I'm going to quit.