Posts From Network

Feed-icon-10x10 feed Opml-icon-10x10 opml

Text-to-speech in PHP

It's been a while since I've played with the open source Festival TTS software, and I'm pretty impressed with the quality of the speech output. Some of the voices that are available sound so much better than the old diphone-based voices that evoke...


Learn Robotics The Orb Swarm Way

The Orb Swarm is slowly taking its place in history: The Institute for Personal Robots in Education has included an image of the Orb Swarm in the beginning of Chapter 12 of their fine textbook, Introduction To Computer Science Via Robots. The cha...


Cross-browser rounded vector corners

As a web developer, I've been patiently waiting for the designer community to finally decide that rounded corners and drop shadows are out of style. I've been waiting since about 1999 so, uh, you know, any day now guys. I'll just be waiting here...


Skinned Toys

. . . that reveal the robots underneath. I know this has been seen elsewhere, but here it is with a whole lot of other things, not the just Barney toy. . . Thanks to Matt Kirkland for putting these up and conducting the experiments that went wi...


Beagle Board - ultra tiny, 2-Watt Linux system

Hackszine pal Patti Schiendelman tipped me off to the Beagle Board, a spartan little embedded platform, perfect for all things hackable. It's based on the TI OMAP3 processor, which is packaged with 128MB of DDR RAM and 256MB of NAND Flash all on...


Olympic proxy - how to watch location restricted content

It sounds like I'm not the only one bummed out about the NBC/Microsoft/Silverlight version of the olympics. Hackszine reader No Dust writes: How do you view the Olympics on the Internet? NBCOLYMPICS.COM only shows popular games in the U.S., a...


Use iPhone version of Google Reader on your Mac

I'm fond of iPhone-specific versions of web sites; they usually have just the minimal set of features you need and are very easy to use. Adam Darowski just posted a great way to get the iPhone version of Google Reader running on a Mac as a deskto...


Free airport WiFi

Most solutions for getting around the captive portals used in $7 airport wireless services involve sniffing the network and spoofing authenticated MAC addresses. I stumbled across an old post from 2006 by Felix Geisendörfer who discovered that som...


iPhone screen capture

With the new 2.0 firmware, you can take a screen capture using an easy key combo. Just hold down the home button and press the power button briefly. If you hold it for several seconds, the phone will soft reset, but if you just press and release, ...


OrbSwarm Update: Our Babies Can Draw Circles!

The exhausted, late night, absinthe-laced parental pride could just be cut with a KNIFE around here people. . .The Orb Swarm Horde has done it again, working tirelessy into the night realize the Swarm’s dream of cute, shiny world domination....


Wii DVD player

Team Twiizers is at it again, releasing a Wii port of the MPlayer media player. If you've already added the homebrew channel, you just need to download an install a couple of files to get things working. You can read more details about the port...


Rat Neurons running robots

New Scientist reports that the University of Reading has made a robot using neuron’s from a rat brain. The robot’s biological brain is made up of cultured neurons which are placed onto a multi electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish w...


Korg Kaossilator 4-bar loop hack

I apologize if this is a bit of a niche hack, but I've had my eye on Korg's little pocket synthesizer and then David Battino showed off some impressive audio samples on the digital media blog that he was able to create with a hidden Kaossilator ...


Pentagon’s Unmanned Spokesdrone Completes First Press Conference Mission

I love the onion. Rarely topical to robots, but they hit now and again…


David Byrne Bot

We’ve always had our suspicions about David Byrne, but it just makes us love him more. David Byrne has teamed up with our pals Hanson Robotics to make Julio, a singing head and shoulders bot. Julio is haunting, yet oddly compelling. David ...


HOWTO - Protect GMail from session snatching

By default, Google Mail sets a session cookie that doesn't have the secure flag, meaning that if you log in to GMail, leave, and later return to the unencrypted "http://" URL (instead of "https://"), your browser will transmit your session i...