NYC Resistor

A couple of weeks ago Bre posted about digital pinhole photography, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Last night I spent about 30 minutes playing around at NYCR, following Bre’s instructions, and here’s the first image I was happy with:

pinhole image of Club-Mate bottle, by yarnivore

Today I spent an hour or so in the garden fooling around, and I’m already thrilled.

black-eyed Susans and echinacea, by yarnivore

There are tons of resources all over the web (just for starters, here’s a Digital Pinhole Photography discussion group on Flickr), but I encourage you to make a lens and start shooting before you read a lot — it’s easy to get started, and you don’t want to waste valuable daylight shooting hours inside on the web.

Thanks, Bre!

We came, we saw, we definitely didn’t conquer. The picture above shows Tom Igoe (who won 3rd place! congrats!) triumphantly turning off the tellyvision with his finished device. I have to say, an award should have gone to Matt Joyce for looking the coolest with his bad-ass bandanna, and an award to me for the most amount of trash talking! Check out the great video below of the event.

Great, great job Bre Pettis and Brady Forrest for putting on an amazing show last night at Ignite! And congratulations to the winners (AND losers!).

photo by luis.net - video by ieee.

It’s contagious. Matt’s Fail jacket. Picture and make-up by Bre Pettis.

Ok, well, erm, sorry for all the Fail Whale’s yesterday… We had a little too much fun at NYCR last night.

Moving back to the world of blinking LED’s and robots… isn’t this little guy, cute? He, I mean, it, was developed by the University of the West of England and are called Emotibots. They are currently on display at London’s Science Museum. The scary, yet sad, looking robot above and below is called the Heart Bot. If you hug it, it will relax and hug you back and it’s pulse changes. If you grab it and shake, or yell, Heart Bot gets scared and sad, just like my cat! More on these little cute robots… here.

Floating Fail Whale by Nick Bilton

To the continueing fail whale saga. I contribute this. The Yes Video.

Jack Bauer apparel for the modern Cyber Terrorist.

Don’t get caught wearing this in Boston, or on line for your next flight. But the latest in hacker apparel makes sinister use of the ageless dark art of LED matrices. Anyways I am bringing my jacket to defcon to announce to the world, that the gauntlet has been thrown down… who will be first to legitimately drop a Pants Status: Pwned.

In terms of Technical Details, the Jacket uses a MAX 6952 LED array driver and is being written to via SPI.. and a boarduino.

Trossen Robotics has just announced that they are shipping RoboBuilder kits. They are the pieces and parts that make ‘Humanoid Robots’. Price ranges are dramatically different, but it looks like a fun intro for people that are just getting farmiliar with robotics and electronics, or for someone excited to hack a humanoid…. but, be warned, ‘be nice to the robots, they’ll be in charge one day’.