Christmas may have come and gone, but by lights are still up and I’m still in the holiday spirit like many of you are. That’s why I wanted to take a minute and talk about the heroes at home Wish Registry established by Sears. Your donation helps Sears provide military families with gift cards that will help them over the holidays.
One hero is hoping to be able to get a video camera for his family so he can watch the first moments of his little boy from afar. That’s just one of the hero stories and there’s a lot more of them. Even though the contribution is not tax-deductible, just the thought of a new father stationed far away from home getting to see his new baby boy walking for the first time makes me want to give. Giving is pretty easily done through the site. You just enter the amount you want to donate, confirm it, and check out. Many other wishes often include children’s shoes and pajamas. Imagine your donation helping to provide a child with some much-needed new shoes.
Another way to give is with badges to show your support. They offer a few choices of badges to display on popular sites like MySpace and Facebook. If you have a profile or your own blog, you can show additional support by just adding a badge.
If you haven’t yet experienced the joy of giving to those in need this holiday season, this is a great way to do it.
Ben Spark – I’ve been a reader for a while, but I wanted to throw Ben in today’s bookmarks because he’s provided an iPod Shuffle I’m gonna give away next week.
Flash analog countdown clock at FlashDen – I had to grab one of these for a client’s site and it was really easy to put in action, although I had to edit the FLA file to change the background, but still good for $8.
Darth Vader’s Twitter – This is a must-read. Not everything is hilarious, but most is.
Achieving Your Childhood Dreams – This is a seriously motivational speech that I haven’t finished, but keep heading back to. I need to watch it start to finish this weekend.
Google Code – By no means new, this is a great resource for coders of all flavors.
Robosapien Hacks and Mods – It’s not updated very often, but it’s a good source of info and how-tos for the Robosapien hacker.
Meggy Jr. – This is a handheld game development kit and my awesome wife bought me one! Watch for a post about my epic success or failure with it soon.
That’s it for this week. As always, drop me an email to suggest future bookmarks.
Back in July, I upgraded my single parallel port tattoo to add on Fire Wire ports and a bar code. Underneath the bar code was my name in binary code and for those who don’t know binary, I wanted the bar code to scan properly to display my name, just in case. Below is the picture I posted online of my new ink.
When I told Jordan at Americana Tattoo that I had put off the bar code for years because it seemed everyone was doing one, I added that I finally decided to do it because I found a way to make mine unique. He told me how a surprising number of people ask for a bar code and just give him any random bar code to copy. Apparently, there’s a lot of people out there who, if thrown on a checkout line scanner at the supermarket, would likely come up as a $0.99 bottle of filtered water. Hearing that made mine seem so much better, but I never got around to scanning it until Friday, when a friend told me he scanned the picture of my tattoo with his T-Mobile G1 and it worked. Of course, I immediately headed to Jared’s office to borrow his G1 and try it myself. I took my video camera:
In case you’re wondering what got me thinking (and talking) about my tattoos again, take a look at some of the recent blog posts that I noticed popping up that were talking about it. I love that it inspires people to write about it.
There was another link in Spanish that I can’t find at the moment.
With all this tattoo action buzzing, it also got me thinking about what’s next. I know I want more ports, but I also want to move forward with the beginnings of what will be a whole cyborg theme. The ports are just a start. What’s the best geeky tattoo you’ve seen? Any suggestions on what I should do next?
Over the years, lasers have become more and more popular not only in science, but also for techie projects, music videos, and just playing around. So far, I’ve already reviewed the green laser that TechLasers sent me and the one I received from WarnLaser and later gave away to one lucky reader. This week, I got my hands on a couple more lasers from WarnLaser, but they weren’t sent to me. These lasers were sent to Team Ningu, who are going to use them as part of a low-cost, hobbyist-level LIDAR for terrain mapping, obstacle avoidance, and autonomous navigation in the RoboMagellan contest. The guys in Team Ningu are super smart and should do some awesome things with it. If you remember, I posted about how Radio Head used lasers for their music video. They used lasers for 3D environment mapping, and that’s what Team Ningu plans to do on a much smaller budget. In the meantime, they loaned me the lasers for my geek-a-riffic Christmas laser review.
How do lasers help with mapping?
There’s a few ways to answer this, but I’d like to focus on the application at hand. The lasers send out beams that hit obstacles and everything else surrounding the device doing the mapping. The image below used a larger number of lasers in a device that rotated very quickly to generate a detailed 3D map of its surroundings.
Team Ningu has a budget with less zeroes on it, so they’re doing something different. Instead of an expensive device, they’re be using diffraction to split a single beam into multiple beams. The beams are then picked up by video and locations stored. All of these points recorded end up forming a 3D map of the surroundings, effectively allowing the vehicle to avoid any obstacles in the way…. as long as it works. But these guys should have no problem with it.
What else can these lasers do?
I wanted to do something a little different with these lasers than I’ve done in previous reviews, so I was excited to find that WarnLaser included balloons to pop. That’s not all they included. the WarnLaser package included two lasers, a couple laser stencils (a “No Smoking” sign, and a “Call Me” graphic”), balloons for popping, and a jersey (who knows). I popped balloons using both the green laser and the red one. The green one popped the balloon so fast that I wasn’t ready and was visibly startled by it (feel free to laugh) and the red didn’t take long, either. I tried the different laser stencils with and without the diffraction grating and I tried the diffraction with and without the stencils.
I had a lot of fun with these lasers and I can’t wait to do a follow-up post with Team Ningu showing their vehicle in action when it’s a little further along.
It’s Friday, so it’s time, again, for me to share some of the links I’ve collected in the last week along with links other people have given me.
TwitPwr – “When you use the TwitPwr short url service, we track the number of clicks that you drive via the Twitter API, and give your account a Power Rating.”
Oxite – “Oxite is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management sample that can run anything from blogs to big web sites. We know this because it runs MIX Online” This was introduced to me as “Google’s new open source blogging platform”
Unique Blog Designs – They didn’t design my blog, but they’ve got an impressive client list and are pretty casual in person. I put them in this weeks BF because I keep thinking about how I need to schedule a lunch with them soon.
WordPress – This blog runs on it and they just released 2.7 and it looks GOOD.
Urbanvox – This is a pretty good looking blog self-promoted to me by @urbanvox on Twitter.
JustFuckingGoogleIt.com – Google really should be the first stop for getting questions answered online. If you didn’t Google it first, someone may send you to this site to remind you. Sent via Twitter by @dcoston
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