Monday, July 13, 2009

swerple - the photo-uploading bike!

Sunday, I went on this amazing SF Bike Coalition ride, a tour of 5 local ice cream shops - by bike! That was entertaining enough. 100+ bicycles riding down the street behind a lead bike with strapped-on sound system... landing like a flock of pigeons at various ice cream shops around the city.

One of the many bicycles I "met" that afternoon was the Swerple. Swerple is one of the bikes from the Purple Pedals Project.
Yahoo created a small fleet of purple bicycles equipped with a camera, GPS receiver, cell phone and (solar) power for this gear and deployed the bikes around the world to chronicle their journeys. The cameras take a photo every 60 seconds and post them automatically with geo tags to Flickr. (Commute by Bike blog)
Check out Swerple's Photostream on Flicker. You can even check out its current location using the "maplication" on the Purple Pedal's blog. (You can also track the other 5 bikes -Purple Reigns, Yodelicious, Purple Shutter, Shoot n' Roll, and Billyburg.)

This bike really amazed me. Yahoo made 20 of these bikes back in September 2008. You can read the first blog post or watch the video below to learn more about it. Fascinating!


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Thursday, March 20, 2008

boston dynamic's military robot dog!

Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that specializes in robotics and human simulation, has created one of the most fascinatingly creepy things I have ever seen - BigDog.

This robot has a strikingly animal-like walk, due to its many sensors that help it judge its position, force and load. In fact, this robot can't be knocked down, although engineers gave it a good kick during the demo video.

BigDog trots at about 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rough terrain, snow and ice, and carries a 340 lb load. And it is noisy... it sounds like a hive of buzzing bees. BUT - it can carry packs where humans can't or shouldn't go, and won't get spooked by gunfire. And it's come a long way since the 2006 model.


BigDog is being developed with the goal of creating robots that can go anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). (DARPA is also funding a project to develop a robot that climbs trees?!)

The thing sort of creeps me out, so I won't embed the video in my post, but I strongly suggest you watch the video on the Boston Dynamics site, or catch it on YouTube.

And, of course, as with anything new, somebody's got to make a parody.

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Monday, January 14, 2008

how fast is your internet?

There is a cool site that measures your uploading and downloading speed on any computer that you are using.

Speedtest.net is a free broadband speed test with servers located all over the world.

All you have to do is click on the "pyramid" nearest you!

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