Snoil is a snake game rendered on a Ferrofluid display. There is a video of it in action plus some other interesting projects: artifical rain display, apeture based display, and a computational board game.
[via Waxy]
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Boot Camp… I Give Up
UPDATE: I’ve solved my issues click the “Continue reading” link.
I’m sure you saw the news of Apple releasing the Windows bootloader Boot Camp yesterday. My current desktop machine is a Core Duo Mac mini so I figured I’d give it a shot (so I could run four folding threads, naturally). I downloaded the Boot Camp package and upgraded the mini’s firmware. The first thing the Boot Camp install assistant does is burn a driver disc for use after the XP install is complete. Once this is done it shrinks the HFS+ partition and creates an empty partition for Windows. It then asks you to insert the XP install disk (must have SP2). The Windows install proceeded normally and Windows booted. This is where my trouble began: the drivers didn’t apply cleanly. I could have retried but for one serious problem. To get the initial boot device selection screen to appear you have to hold down the “alt” key while the machine is starting. The only USB keyboard I have is a Gyration wireless one. The boot menu only showed up at best 1 in 10 attempts. Apple does provide software to choose which OS you want to boot by default, but since the Windows drivers didn’t install there was no guarantee I could flip the switch back to OS X once I was in XP. I decided the flaky “alt” key detection was probably my wireless keyboard not being fully initialized, so I made a late night run to the Megalomart to buy the cheapest wired USB keyboard they had. I plugged it in and tried to bring up the boot menu; it didn’t work a single time. So, my experiment is over for now since I don’t want to get trapped in XP. Hopefully they fix this public beta so that is has an actual boot menu, with a countdown, like every other bootloader. UNEASYsilence has a video of how this install should go.
NOVA’s The Great Robot Race
If you didn’t catch NOVA’s coverage of the DARPA Grand Challenge on Tuesday, titled The Great Robot Race, it is now available online in chapter form on the official site. Autoblog has an excellent synopsis. If you want all of the video in one piece, you can find it on Mininova. I’m sure the episode will be replaying on PBS throughout the week.
SCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ!
This story as appeared many different places [via Music thing], but I wanted to make sure you guys didn’t miss out on the fun. sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! by Sven K? is an amazing piece of video remixing software. It’s built using C++, Python and PureData. It takes music videos, chops them up by beats and indexes the samples by sound signature in a database. You then beatbox into a microphone to describe the music you want to hear. The software builds the music you want out of the sample database. Sven has put together an excellent video that describes the program and has example performances. It’s a must watch. Get it either directly from his site or watch it on YouTube.
XP Booting On Intel Macs – Game Over
The WinXPonMac contest has officially announced “narf2006” and “blanka” as the winners. The solution should be released soon. With this new development the only reason not to run XP on a Mac is that XP sucks… which is a pretty good reason.
[via TUAW]
Swimming Snake Robot
Snake robots are already freaking creepy; so who had bright idea to make sea serpents?! You can find a few details on the ACM-R5 at TechEBlog. It can swim 30 minutes on a charge. So, the impending revolution will either be short lived or our destruction will be incredibly swift.
[thanks William]
Hack Media: Podcasts
This is coming in a day later than usual; I got my new dual-core Mac mini on Monday and built a new iTunes Library on my NFS server. I then crashed it twice which turned into literal fscking nightmare. So I finally got it back up last night and started listening to my backlog of podcasts (which has grown enormously now that I can subscribe to them so easily). Highlights from the shows after the jump.
A big Thank you to everyone who has stopped by my Facebook profile to wish me a Happy Birthday today. I’m 25, my NFS server is running rock-solid, so is my new mini, and I got an official job offer in the mail, so today has been treating me really well. Happy birthday to my twin sister Adele, even though the international date line means I already missed it.
