Robots Blog

We’ve been subscribing to KenFlix for 23 days and loving it! Here’s what we watched:

• Juno - better than I expected.
• Saawariya - the first ten minutes were so bad we turned it off.
• Once - we saw it in the theater and liked it. still good, but this movie is best watched once.
• Sopranos - Season 5 disc 4. They all blur together. I can’t watch any more of these for a while.
• No Country For Old Men - Good, but far too violent to watch with Jess and the parents.
• Someone to Eat Cheese With - Much better than I was expecting.
• Planet Earth on Bluray - We got this to test Bob’s sweet new home theater system. The encoding quality was disappointing. The places where you can usually hide quantization noise (foliage, high-freq areas) were encoded very poorly. It was sad to see panning shots across the forest exhibit so many compression artifacts. These guys need to use an encoder tuned to such scenes. Note: don’t ask a video codec engineer to review encoding quality of Bluray discs unless you want to get an earful..
• Be Kind Rewind - Slowish, neat plot but could have been much better.
• Congorama - Whoa. Unexpectedly, my favorite KenFlix so far!
• War - dunno. Only Bob watched it.
• Wave Twisters - Great, but Bob hadn’t seen it, and the DVD wouldn’t play. Oh well.
• Futurama: Beast with a Billion Backs - Disappointing. We had such high hopes!
• Eastern Promises - Very intense. Good, but good thing Jess didn’t see this one.
• Stray Dog - Japanese noir. Kurosawa is always good.
  

14 in 23 days.. I don’t think we’ll be able to keep this rate up once Bob starts work. We’ll probably drop down to about one a week. We’re a long way from the 165 per month theoretical maximum!

Bob & Jess, anything to add? Did I forget any?

Of course the action, and the robots, at RoboGames are fantastic, but for us the most important factor is always the people. This year at RoboGames 2008 we had the opportunity to interview several unique robot builders and get some insight into their background and motivation. Early on during the event, we met Mark Galt and got the chance to hear how he originally got involved with robotics, and his...

Giant robot panda piloted by...a panda Originally uploaded by Dave_N1. "Giant robot panda piloted by...a panda"

Robot in Agoncillo Originally uploaded by Sebastian Böhm. This must be the robot version of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It might be fun to create a flickr group just for "things that unintentionally look robotic" if it doesn't already exist.

sam choi Originally uploaded by will not erase. It's going to be quite a while before the latest robot movie hits screens here. We've read the newspaper and online reviews, but what we really want to know from our readers is if Wall-E is worth waiting for. Did you see it? If it's definitely a 'two thumbs up' flick, then we'll be very careful to avoid reading any spoilers or...

robok en proceso Originally uploaded by yampi84. Robot experimentation and creation doesn't have to be expensive or time consuming. It's amazing how much you can do, and learn, with tools and materials as simple as an Exacto knife and some paper.

Our friend Paxshikai is an i-SOBOT wizard without peer, and keeps coming up with new, surprising, and totally inventive, tricks and hacks for his favorite robot. This time, bring back memories of William Tell and his son, Paxshiai has equipped his i-SOBOT with a crossbow and has it popping balloons off the head of a brave volunteer.

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-bob and raj

Shag and I were collaboratively hacking on a new radio station for the archive, and we needed a collaborative text editor. SubEthaEdit is great, but Mac-only. Shag found Gobby, which is a like an open-source SubEtha that works great on Linux.

If you haven’t used a collaborative editor before, multiple authors can work on the same files, and everyone sees each others edits in real time, differentiated by background color. Gobby has syntax highlighting, integrated chat, over-the-wire encryption, and is a pretty solid text editor too. We love it! Here are some ideas we had for future patches:

• indent-region
• sound cue upon message receipt
• auto-indent
• birds-eye view of the file to watch changes go in
• function dropdown
  

As soon as we get indent-region and function dropdowns patched in, I’ll switch my main unix editor from KDevelop to Gobby.

Beaker is one of my favorite muppets. Just watch this video, and you’ll agree!