here is a slick hack involving a bicycle wheel and a persistence of vision toy.
one thing that’s really cool about this one is there is a second led row that blinks out bitmaps backwards on one side of the wheel. this lets you print out text messages and have them be readable from both sides. it appears to work really well — i’m thinking that the author is probably not a republican
some of you are probably rubbing your eyes, but you read it correctly. unix on a motorcycle.
a fellow by the name of ben installed a freebsd powered pc into his kawasaki z1000. a webcam on his helmet connects to a video capture board in the pc, which he uses to record movies of trips to the burrito store. his future plans are to have the freebsd box control his ipod, track gps data, and potentially interconnect with the bike’s ecu.
a kick ass case mod, a unix media center, and a cool extension of the car pc theme. if i could last more than 10 seconds on a motorcycle in the best video game ever without ejecting over a parked car, i might consider trying this out myself. until then, i think i’ll stick to walking.
thanks for the link, xfred.
what a drag, your car got booted
some hackers at cmu decided to make the better pogo stick. instead of a coil spring, it stores energy in a fiber composite bow.
the bow spring stores 2-5 times as much energy per unit mass, and precludes the sliding friction that results when long coil springs buckle sideways.
there’s a page with photos and movies of people flying on these things. thank deep blue shift for the link.
sure you can do it with linux on a powerbook, with an xp machine, or with a little mini-itx setup, but i figured an ancient 7mhz machine wouldn’t be nearly fast enough to be suitable for an auto mp3 player.
i figured wrong.
here’s a nice retro hack that brings together an amiga 600 and an opel astra. for extra style points, there is a video of the project’s creator playing lotus 3 while driving down the street. those amiga fans can do just about anything.
using debian on a powerbook g3 233mhz (lombard), a kensington auto/ac/air adapter and crystalfontz lcd screen with usb->serial adapter you can a pretty slick (and inexpensive) in car mp3 play for your car. add a wifi card and manage all the music when you pull in to the driveway.
in berlin there are rental bikes that you can a bit of money for, get a code and use the bike to go about your way. of course, something like this is an interesting challenge for people who like to figure stuff out. the hack a bike project replaced the software on the locks allowing a backdoor code so anyone, who knows the code can get some free bike action.
