NeKo Windows/Keyboard Hybrid
October 25, 2005
Open Labs’ NeKos are powerful keyboards that pack a full-blown Windows PC, tuned software, and control surfaces into a single musical instrument. They’ve got some heavy-hitting celebrity endorsements, and they’re rugged: one NeKo managed to continue functioning after being being beaten with a baseball bat and set on fire by DJ Richard Devine.
This month, Open Labs unveiled the next-generation NeKo keyboard: sexier looking, more features, and cheaper. Porsche car paint, faster processors (up to a dual core 64-bit AMD CPU), Pro Tools software, and even Borg-like ability to clone your hardware synths and automatically create multisamples. Priced for mortals, too: US$2,295 gets you all the basics, up to US$5,995 for the absolute top-of-the-line. More after the jump.
What The Flock?!
October 20, 2005
I retract everything I said about Flock and it’s awesomeness (or the lack there of). After its novelty wore off, its functions become completely unused and I reverted back to firefox without thinking about it and it just sat on my desktop until I uninstalled it.
I am posting this from the Flock blog editor as we speak. The whole idea behind flock is to incorporate the daily tasks you do online. Post on your blog(image two), flickr, grab your del.icio.us (image three), and put stuff on your shelf (image four).
Technorati Tags: Technology, Nerdcore
Solar Decathlon
October 18, 2005
Comcastic!
October 18, 2005
Branden Hall and Erik Natzke worked with the Barbarian Group and Number 9 to create Comcastic! Absolutely amazing use of flash; Natzke and Hall on a team = the best.
Golf?
October 17, 2005
You pretty much just ride a mesh buggy around, jump stuff, and mess around… and play some golf too.
Such a rad game.
“Each player navigates a polygon mesh around a height field texture mapped to look like a golf
hole.”
“q: What is that on top of the golfers head?
a: If you pressed 4 in the driving range, then its a gun. If you pressed 5, it’s a Utah teapot. And If you pressed 6 it’s Blue Shirt from Ken’s stage of Super Street Fighter 2X: Grand Master Challenge.”
SUSE 10.0!
October 5, 2005
SUSE 10.0 is finally released. I speak for everyone that uses Adobe/Macromedia stuff when I say, get us the hell off Windows and stop messing with project David and Wine… port everything over for us!
“SUSE Linux 10.0 includes a comprehensive selection of applications to facilitate a wide variety of computing tasks (office suite, e-mail, Internet, picture processing, multimedia and more), plus a subset of packages for advanced users, including key networking and development packages such as Samba, Apache Web server, KDevelop, Mono and more. SUSE Linux is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions and provides more than 4,000 of the latest open source software packages.”
MIT – The World as the Palette
October 5, 2005
I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by “picking up” and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special “ink” they just picked up from their immediate environment.
There are many paint/drawing programs on the market today that are designed especially for kids. These let kids do neat things, but kids usually end up playing only with the “preprogrammed” digital palette the software provides. The idea of I/O Brush is to let the kids build their own ink. They can take any colors, textures, and movements they want to experiment with from their own environment and paint with their personal and unique ink. Kids are not only exploring through construction of their personal art project, but they are also exploring through construction of their own tools (i.e., the palette/ink) to build their art project with.
Amphibious houses
October 4, 2005
The Dutch are gearing up for climate change with amphibious houses. If rivers rise above their banks, the houses rise upwards as well.
“37 “swimming” houses are already strung along a branch of the Maas. At first glance, they seem quite unremarkable. The cellar, in this case, is not built into the earth, but on a platform. The hollow foundation of each house works in the same way as the hull of a ship, buoying the structure up above water. To prevent the houses from floating away, they slide up two steel posts – and as the water level sinks, so they sink back down again.”
“The columns have been driven deep into solid ground,” explains Dick van Gooswilligen from the construction company. “They are even strong enough to withstand currents you would find on the open seas. As global warming causes the sea level to rise, this is the solution.”
Robots can ride bikes too!
September 30, 2005
“Cycling robot ‘Murata Seisaku-kun’ pedals on a two-centimeter (0.8 inch)-wide balance beam without staggers during its demonstration at the headquarters of Japan’s electronics euipment maker Murata Manufacturing Co. in Nagaokakyo in Kyoto Pref., western Japan, Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005.Electric Sheep
September 29, 2005
Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience.
