Posted by Lem on February 29th, 2008
It's going to take us a day or two to translate, and perhaps longer than that to figure out the full implications, but it appears that HPI will be rolling out a long list of new parts and other items for its popular G-ROBOT humanoid robot kits. The G-ROBOTS line was designed in conjunction with Futaba, and is essentially identical to the Futaba RBT-1 robot sold in the US. At...
Posted by flickr on February 28th, 2008
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Santa Monica, CA
Posted by Lem on February 28th, 2008
Stopped in THEIR TRACKS! Originally uploaded by natrat.
Posted by Lem on February 28th, 2008
Nameless Originally uploaded by iamsored. It might not have a name yet, but nevertheless, we think this little robot is incredibly cute, and definitely a robot of the female persuasion.
Posted by Lem on February 26th, 2008
Robot soccer is rapidly becoming both more realistic, and more exciting, as we found out during the recent 9th KondoCup Robot Soccer competition here. While the robot builders have certainly improved their designs over the past year, they have also improved their control of the robots, and their winning strategies. About a year ago, when Kondo, famous for pioneering the whole field of hobby humanoid robots, kicked off regular robot...
Posted by Lem on February 26th, 2008
The Sugiura Family, creators of ROBO-ONE champion robots that include Dynamizer, Mega Dynamizer, Retro, and Kappa, were profiled in a special article that appeared in this morning's Yomiuri newspaper. The feature article, which goes into quite a bit of detail, emphasizes the motivation and passion behind the family's preoccupation with robotics. Their vision, their dream, goes far beyond just winning competitions like ROBO-ONE. In the interview, Sugiura-san says, "In the...
Posted by rajbot on February 26th, 2008
On Sunday, the government of Pakistan ordered ISPs to block access to YouTube in the country, for containing content that was offensive to Islam. This occurred soon after videos exposing vote-rigging in the recent Pakistani election appeared on YouTube.
In response to this order, Pakistan Telecom began advertising a hijacked route for YouTube, which caused all internet traffic to YouTube from around the world to be blocked for several hours. Here is a full writeup of how this happened.
I found this great Slashdot comment that explains how to use BGPlay to see an animation of Pakistan Telecom re-routed YouTube for the world.
Here is how the net looked during the hijack. The red dot on the left is YouTube, and the red dot on the right is Pakistan Telecom:
After YouTube announced new routes, traffic returned to normal for those outside Pakistan:
The animation is pretty neat! Also, Wikipedia has a good summary of the Border Gateway Protocol, which is the protocol that routers use to talk to each other.
Posted by Lem on February 24th, 2008
We spent a wonderful afternoon yesterday visiting with the Sugiura Family and getting briefed on Mega Dynamizer, a super-sized ROBO-ONE champion robot. Based in part on the outstanding Dynamizer humanoid robot, Mega Dynamizer is taller (50 cm), heavier (5.0 kg), and even more awesome - if that is possible. Mega Dynamizer features 23 degrees of freedom and takes full advantage of the Dynamixel RX-64 servos and CM-2 Plus control board...
Posted by rajbot on February 24th, 2008
I was inspired by peliom’s web-2.0 Japanese flashcards, so I made some Hindi flashcards this weekend. Or rather, I made an open-source framework for javascript-powered flashcards called TikiCards, and pre-populated it with vocabulary words from the awesome Door Into Hindi lessons that I’ve been working on. I’ll work on adding more words and more languages soon. The code is checked in here.
Unfortunately, Firefox on the Mac doesn’t ship with a Devanagari fonts, and it doesn’t use the OS X system font, so all the characters show up as question marks. And unlike peliom’s Japanese flashcards that work great on the iPhone, the Devanagari characters show up as square boxes on the iPhone. So if you want to use these for Hindi, use Safari on a Mac or FF on unix.
Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.
Posted by Lem on February 23rd, 2008
With the U.N. International Women's Day coming up on March 8th, the Japan Times ran a special series in this Sunday edition highlighting "... the astonishing progress being made against considerable odds by women in Japan working in a wide variety of scientific fields, long thought to be the sole preserve of men." They selected six women who represent "Japan's brightest stars in the fields of science, technology and medicine,...
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