Webs’ Random Ideas

Dean Kamen, , has invented a wicked cool robot arm (video below). From a Wired Blog post.

Kamen’s arm, dubbed “Luke” (after Skywalker, I assume), is an incredibly sophisticated bit of engineering that’s lightyears ahead of the clamping “claws” that many amputees are forced to use today. The arm is fully articulated, giving the user the same degrees of movement as a natural arm, and is sensitive enough to pick up a piece of paper, a wineglass or even a grape without mishap.

Maybe Stephen Hawking could make use of this technology.

Found from Wired Blog Post linked above…

… I got your technology controlled, automated household right here! No seriously I do. People say they are still waiting for it, but with a some Linux skills or if you can befriend a geek, automation of daily house chores can be done.

This is some really friggin cool stuff. First we have a cat that posts videos and twitters every time it eats:

First, a proper “cat studio” is required. I picked up a laundry basket, some thin anti-slip mat and a couple of new food bowls for under $15 total. The laundry basked got a side removed by my trusty Dremel tool, and the anti-slip mat was cut to fit and hot-glued in place. After that was done, I had a spare light fixture with a clamp lying around to add to the mix for better lighting.

Motion is a great webcam application that fits my needs exactly. More specifically, when it detects motion, it records a video - think like a security camera, but way, way smarter. When Motion no longer senses any movement after a defined period of time, it encodes the captured video, and then it can run a script or set of commands afterwards. Bingo!

Wow, that actually sounds pretty do-able. I know you may be asking yourself, “What the hell good is that?” Well, think outside the box.

Imagine having a pet and going a vacation for a week to anywhere. Now you no longer have to worry about if your cat has enough food. Open any device with a network connection and has capabilities to display video. Bam! Now you know if you should tell your neighbor to grab the hidden key and add some more food or water.

Want to create a security camera system on the cheap with some amazing capabilities? Want to monitor a child and only be alerted when the child is restless, moves, or wakes up? Or are you just curious about what your pet might be up to while you’re away?

Okay, but what about other chores?

Well we have a link here where a blogger shows he can set up a system where plants notify the owner when they need more water.

The future is coming pretty fast. I would expect to see commercial one stop automation products to come out in the next year or two. And new homes will likely start having some of these features built in. When I build my own house down the road, these are items I’m going to be planning for.

So Thurs Feb 14th I had the privilege to listen to Ray Kurzweil speak. The talk was incredibly interesting and insightful. I really enjoyed it and at the end of the whole event our College President remarked that his coffee would have two creams (he was joking about how long the whole event was, not about how boring Kurzweil is).

For me, the whole event was incredibly boring as we had faculty awards and other things I had trouble staying awake for. Being that I really wanted to listen to Kurzweil speak I was worried that I would be asleep by the time he came up. This was my first time ever listening to Kurzweil and I knew very little about him going into the speech, but once he started speaking I was very much awake.

I don’t want to try to remember everything from the speech and dump it into this post, instead I wish to focus on a couple key items (at least in my view) and maybe discuss them a little.

Read the rest of this entry »

There is a discussion going on at ***Dave’s blog about morality and technology. Originally the topic was about a study asking respondents about their opinions on nanotechnology; the study was written in Science Daily. From the article:

In a sample of 1,015 adult Americans, only 29.5 percent of respondents agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable.

To me this seems like a completely silly response. But even more so, it seems like an udder nonsensical question. Now I don’t know what question was asked for sure, I can’t find the original study, but I am assuming the question was along the lines of, “Do you find nanotechnology to be morally acceptable?” Which to me, and ***Dave, seems akin to asking, “Do you find metallurgy morally acceptable?” How can you get a true result from such a question?

I also found this odd from the article:

The moral qualms people of faith express about nanotechnology is not a question of ignorance of the technology, says Scheufele, explaining that survey respondents are well-informed about nanotechnology and its potential benefits.

“They still oppose it,” he says. “They are rejecting it based on religious beliefs. The issue isn’t about informing these people. They are informed.”

I’m not sure I buy that conclusion at all. People in general do not seem to have a full grasp of technology, what it is, where it’s going, etc. If they did, stem cells wouldn’t be an issue of morality and neither would nanotechnology. Below is a clip of a comment I left on ***Dave’s blog about this very subject:

If we stick to dictionary definitions of morality we are dealing with ethical decisions of right or wrong essentially, goodness based on a code of conduct, and/or human ethical decisions. Basically to be moral or immoral you or something has to make a conscious decision based on some kind of code.

So in the extreme case of cannibalism, for example, most people in the industrialized world would come to the conclusion that eating another person is immoral. Our codes of conduct or (un)written rules condone such action. In more remote places of the world it is acceptable and likely considered moral by their code or (un)written rules.

In the case of technology that goes into building a PMFRD machine, each piece of technology is an inanimate object. It cannot make a decision based on (un)written rules. Now maybe the machine on a whole could make such decisions with the right amount of AI. But the machine on a whole is not considered technology, rather a machine or AI robot. And different pieces of technology went into creating this machine. And furthermore, the machine was still programmed to make such decisions based on some kind of code. It still had a creator that decided how to give the robot the ability to make decisions.

You may need to go to the link above for the discussion on ***Dave’s blog for context, but basically technology can’t really be good or evil, people are based on pre-defined standards.

So what do you think? Is technology moral or immoral? Are people good or evil? Do people kill people or do PMFRD machines kill people?

Now when you first look at the following picture I’m sure the first thought may not be “Dream Car”…

but then again it wasn’t $60K of your money and months of design, thought, sweat, and work to create it. I know what you might be thinking, what a waste of money, etc… but it was a father creating something from spare parts with his two sons. I hardly see the waste of time or pointlessness of that. From the article in the Daily Herald…

Zanis would like to see American car manufacturers work faster in developing an electric car. He doesn’t believe the focus should be on converting a gasoline-driven car, but rather building a frame for an electric car.

I couldn’t agree more. And what Zanis is doing will help tremendously. It will spur interest, design ideas, new concepts, and get people talking about these vehicles. It’s going to make GM wish they didn’t get rid of the electric car.

Website for the project.
found via TreeHugger…

I seriously think this is not a joke, which just makes it that much funnier! LOL it’s a padded envelope people!

Article: Steve Sleeve from Timbuk2

Don’t let this simple design fool you. We’ve overbuilt the hell out of this sleeve including ultrasonic seam welds, durable exterior softshell fabric (just like the stuff in mountaineering jackets), and low pile brushed fleece lining. The exterior fabric and interior fleece are made from recycle-ready poly, the brushed aluminum buttons can be tossed in your recycling bin with your soda cans, the sonic welds use nontoxic glue, and the string can be reused to tie your shoe in a pinch. Who could even THINK of putting a MacBook Air™ in anything less?

Wow! They are serious, this is just too funny!

Toyota has a new hybrid they’re showcasing at the Detroit Auto Show (and hopefully the Chicago one too as I am going to go to it ). It’s called the A-Bat Hybrid Compact Pickup Truck Concept and has some friggin cool features…

A rigid center console houses a portable power pack that offers both AC and DC for a wide variety of applications including powering tools, electrical gear while camping, a laptop computer, small appliances or assisting a vehicle jump start.

Inside the A-BAT has a retractable portable navigation unit with a seven-inch diagonal screen and Wi-Fi internet. Other advanced features include a port for portable device assistant synchronization and a hard drive for digital music.

That last part really sounds geeky and cool! And I was just talking with a friend yesterday about the lack of integration of MP3 capabilities in cars and car stereos. The other idea here that interests me about this is Toyota’s idea of integrating cool technology with Hybrids. It’s a smart way of getting people that wouldn’t care about Hybrids or the environment interested. I know of people that buy Prius’ because they are cool and geeky and not really for the eco-friendly technology or designs.

Which is what more auto manufacturers should be doing, showing the cool side of being eco-friendly…

Well the new operating system from Apple is looking pretty sweet. I like the features they are showcasing and they seem practical, easy to use, and customizable. To see for yourself, click here and choose what size of video you want to watch… The video is kinda long but does a great job of showing the best features.

My only gripe, when the freek are they going to get right click functionality. Not having that is just plain stupid! I would likely have more to say, but I don’t own a Mac so there isn’t much for me to test out and see for myself. But enjoy the video

I started a new experiment last weekend, it’s called FreeNAS. FreeNAS is a Unix based distro (another word for a distribution of an operating system, in this case Unix) that allows you to turn an ordinary computer into a NAS (Network Attached Storage). A NAS is essentially a collection of hard drives in a server that gives you a means to manage those drives. The sole function of a NAS is to manage a network file share, so you wouldn’t have a NAS do other tasks as well, such as being a print server or being used as a home computer, etc.

The questions comes around from time to time, “Why don’t you just throw those hard drives in your current XP system?” Well I could, but then I would be stuck using Windows XP Pro to manage the drives. This means I would have to buy a RAID card to RAID the drives, or put Windows Server 2003 on the system and still buy a RAID card. And then comes the configuring. That alone would take me weeks to figure out, or at least to implement the same functions FreeNAS gives.

For instance, from anywhere in the world I can SSH (a *nix terminal connection type, it gives me the ability to control the system), FTP, or via the web interface, control my system. And it only takes a couple clicks to set all of this up with FreeNAS. I couldn’t even begin to explain how to do this in Windows. And FreeNAS makes it so easy, anyone can do it! Just follow the user guide.

So my thinking is why have an overbloated OS (like Windows) manage my network file share, when I can have Unix do it for me? Now you may be thinking, “I know nothing about Linux, let alone Unix. Why the hell would I want to use FreeNAS?” Good question, but the nice thing about FreeNAS is that it is engineered so the user does not have to do a lot with the operating system. Once the OS is installed, which is insanely easy just follow the user guide (which does a thorough step by step), you can start configuring.

I highly recommend following the user guide while configuring, it will make life a lot easier. The cool thing with FreeNAS, is once it is installed, all configurations can be done via a web interface. Which is also very easy to use. Check out the screenshots…

Well I got my system up and going, and it works great. I have run into some issues with permissions for files, but I have been able to work through them rather easily. My plan for the future is to set up FreeNAS to shut itself down every night around 1:00AM. Then I will use wake on LAN to wake it up whenever I want to use it. I will post more as I figure that out.

So lately, Sun has been doing a few things right in terms of being Eco-friendly. They just launched a website called OpenEco. The purpose of the site is to bring together all kinds of organizations that are working on environmentally friendly areas so they can share their data.

For instance, suppose you are a business and installing a script to automatically shut down your computer systems has saved your company “x” amount of dollars. Well now you can share what you did and how much it saved you with others, so they to can see what other businesses are doing to make a difference. The site is free to register and is very easy to use.

Another notable is Sun’s Ray 2 computer. Go check it out! It’s a pretty slick machine for sure. And it only uses 4 watts of power compared to the average PC which uses around 80. That’s one heck of a reduction in energy usage.

However, it is important to note the Sun Ray 2 is a thin client, meaning it pulls content down from a server, so it really doesn’t do much work at all. It leaves all the calculating up to a server. But the idea is pretty ingenious. Sun has a flash system that explains the design very simply.

I like reporting on items like these because it shows improvements are being made and some companies are trying to change the glutinousness we Americans seem to embody.

Found via TreeHugger…