unassimilatible writes "The RoboSapien is a cool humanoid robot toy with pretty decent dexterity and 67 pre-programmed instructions. But the folks at The University of Freiberg have made the RoboSapien autonomous by installing a Pocket PC to its head. The Pocket PC is equipped with a camera and communicates via infrared to the robot, and the whole monstrosity can be programmed with Visual C++. The full API is available for download. I, for one, welcome..."

boredMDer writes "As seen in this /. story, the University of Texas in Dallas had issued a ban on students operating 2.4 GHz WiFi equipment. However, UTD has now lifted said ban, because of 'the discovery of an FCC ruling prohibiting such a move.'"

hjf asks: "Three years ago, when I got DSL, I set up a 486 box, with 8 megs and a floppy drive to run FloppyFW. It has been through a couple hardware upgrades: 16Mb RAM for running the 2.4 kernel and a 100MBit PCI NIC for the internal network. It has a little UPS which lasts for over 60 minutes. The only downtime it has is when there's a thunderstorm and I unplug it. Besides that, it has been running flawlessly since I set it up. Lately I have been kind of seduced with this product from 3Com, and other similar to it. I know it says it can handle 253 simultaneous users and all that. My home network has 4 users, but most of us run eMule and other P2P, and as many of you know, those P2P programs can beat the crap out of your router."

Julio writes "TechSpot has taken an in-depth look at LG's Flatron 2320A 23" LCD, you should know however that calling this a monitor would be an understatement, this is a multi-media workstation. The package consists of a 23" widescreen LCD color monitor, and a multi-media station that lets you connect its beautiful flat screen to your PC and a number of devices at the same time (X-Box, etc.). Feel yourself warned though, luxury does come at a cost."

CapnRob asks: "I just got married, and my wife and I are putting together a home network in the (small) apartment we're now living in. We'd like to set up a firewall/mail server/small-file-server, but all the machines we own right now are pretty big machines that pull a fair amount of power, and that we don't want to keep running 24/7. Since our mail and file server needs are pretty low, our ideal box would be something like a Linksys WRT45G with one of the open source firmwares ... if only you could add a small hard drive to it. We're both long-time FreeBSD users, so installing a *nix system is no big deal, but what I've found so far in this line needs more l337 soldering iron skillz than I've got. Any suggestions for tiny little cheap boxes that won't send our power bills into orbit?"

ptorrone writes "As part of a camera mod project to make a low-cost aerial photography device we started finding other uses for the camera hack. This first part of this series is tagging photos with GPS coordinates by automating a camera and GPS unit, it's a DIY Black Box for now with interesting applications and other uses. Ideally, this may encourage the next EXIF data schema to support GPS and other information."

manganese4 writes "The NSF has released a summary of research into the design of robots capable of reconfiguring themselves. A number of videos are provided. The research was conducted at the Dartmouth Robotics Lab. While they are not cockroaches it is still quite a good read."

quark007 writes "That's Cricket is reporting that the first match of the India-Australia cricket Test series in Bangalore next month will have hi-tech ticketing with the launch of 'Mobile-Ticketing,' a new service that enables cricket fans across the world to book the tickets online. But thats half the fun, since the tickets would be delivered directly to their mobile phones. the service is managed by Spice . The service delives the ticket as a special barcode which can then be scanned by a barcode reader. Sounds simple. Wired reported a similar story a while back." A system like this would have been great in my unsuccessful hunt for LotR Marathon tickets.

neutron_p writes "A cockroach-like robot named RHex is the starting point for a major project to understand animals' most distinguishing trait: how they move without falling over. Researchers from several universities will focus on RHex, a short, six-legged robot that scampers like a cockroach, as a working model of the principles they're seeking to uncover. By tweaking the robot and using it as a physical model, they hope to tease apart the complex neural and muscular networks in insects."

mteichrob writes "A Canadian inventor has designed a computer mouse steered by movements of the nose and eyelids. The invention, dubbed a "Nouse," is meant to help people with a disability use a computer. I think this could also be quite useful for the average office lackey like me! As good as my ergonomic mouse/keyboard combo is, less body movement is still a better replacement."

guigouz writes "Sun is carrying a feature story about its new ZFS File System - ZFS, the dynamic new file system in Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS), will make you forget everything you thought you knew about file systems. ZFS will be available on all Solaris 10 OS-supported platforms, and all existing applications will run with it. Moreover, ZFS complements Sun's storage management portfolio, including the Sun StorEdge QFS software, which is ideal for sharing business data."

hamlet2600 writes "The New York Time is running an article all about how animal like robots [Soul Sucking registration required] are beginning to become more imporant in furthering research. For years reseachers have been trying to make humanoid robots, Honda's ASIMO, MIT's M2 are some notable ones. It seems that more and more researchers are turning to the animal kingdom for "simpler" means of locomotion."

MBRFan writes "MBReview has posted the latest revision of their 'Motherboards - The Designing Process' article. This article covers the design process for modern motherboards, and also goes over some of the most common components that can be found. Definite read for information lovers, though beware, it'll take a while to read!"

depechemodem writes "This story at ExtremeiPod talks about a new piece of software from Adam Curry called iPodder (now at Sourceforge) which uses RSS feeds with MP3 enclosures to stream audio to iTunes. The best part is that those streams can be saved as clips automatically on to your iPod or other MP3 player for later listening making this the first portable time-shifted Internet audio application. The code is alse being ported to Windows."

Grump writes "The New York Times reports: 'The purchase of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by a group led by Sony will not only give the company an enormous film library but also considerable power in its fight to set the format for the next generation of digital video discs.' The article goes on to suggest that Sony is gearing up for another Betamax-style failure."

Dodger73 writes "According to their press release at sony.net, Sony beings mass production of full color OLED displays at 3.8" size for their Clie PEG-VZ90 'Personal Entertainment Handheld.' The press release claims, that their 'Super Top Emission' technology reaches 150cd/m^2; at the familiar 1000:1 contrast ratio. Not quite the 19" display I'd like for my computer at home, but definitely a step in the right direction."

hoagaboom writes "I had particularly ugly neighbors and a lot of LCD panels laying around, so why not build a Virtual Window? I really wanted to do full motion video, but PCI bandwidth is standing in my way. So with multiple PCIE vid cards, any suggestions on how to split a full motion video stream in Linux?"

maxstreampr wrote in to plug their radio modem. It's the size of a credit card, one watt, and can transmit 40 miles line of sight or 3000 feet indoors. Something about using the AT command set to fire off a command 40 miles through the air amuses me.

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices has published an article about the 'PC Reviver', a small device that replaces hard drives in aging computers with a solid-state flash memory drive that boots an embedded Linux OS. The 'revived' computer can then be used as a thin-client network appliance for Citrix, Windows, Linux, and/or browser-based server-centric computing networks."

hajmola points out this Mac Observer article, which starts "At long last, after years of USB having a corner on the flash drive market, Kanguru has announced its Fire Flash FireWire flash drive line. With capacities ranging from 128MB to 1GB, the Fire Flash is the perfect way to carry your data with you, and since they uses FireWire, you won't be waiting around for the transfer to finish.""