It wasn’t so much a white Christmas as it was a white Louis Pasteur day.
But since it happened during my vacation, I’m going to say it counted. I had a very nice time with my family and was sad to leave. I am looking forward to visiting again soon. But for now, for obvious reasons, I am happy to be home.
I’ll be taking a vacation for about a week. So here’s where I wish my readers a Merry Christmas and/or Other Holiday Of Your Choice, whichever makes you most happy. You can have a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, a Merry Christmas and a happy Chinese New Year, a happy Hanukkah, a fun and festive Kwanzaa, a jolly Boxing Day, or a peaceful Louis Pasteur day. I don’t want to exclude anyone from my wishes, so whatever you’re doing the next week or two or three, do it well, and do it safe, and have a good one. In other words, happy holidays.
First, some grumbling. I think Linux distros ought to drop the mapping of Control-Alt-Delete to shutdown -h now . I, like most people in the world, have to use Windows at work, and thus am used to that key combination bringing up the task monitor or the login prompt. Thus when some doofus, such as yours truly, hits that combination out of habit, he doesn’t lose what he’d been working on flar the last quarter hour. And no, shutdown -c didn’t work.
End grumbling.
Now, a few people have tried this biometric celebrity lookalike game that gives you a fun little Flash collage thingy you can post on your blog. I tried it once with an unflattering photo– basically a mugshot– and got, well, this.
| http://www.myheritage.com |
Yeah, yuck it up. However, this leads me to wonder, considering all the information in all those databases about all of us, whether some sort of biometric correlation might ever take place. I, for example, vaguely resemble a few individuals that some folks might consider troublemakers. It’s possible that an intensive data mining operation might conclude that individuals with eyes just so, and foreheads shaped like so, and noses at just such an angle, are X percent more likely to disagree with this or that ideology. And then what? Well, we all know it is a fallacy to confuse correlation with cause, but logic has rarely put up much of a hindrance to persecution. Especially when it enjoys a veneer of science.
Speaking of technology, Pink Tentacle brings us the winners of the 2006 Robot Awards . Although the winners were basically a J-class humanoid and a supersized, elevator-using Roomba, there were some exciting, thought-provoking entries. For example, an honorable mention was granted to My Spoon , a robot designed to feed the disabled. You see? Robots are good for more than killing all humans.
Two more entries I found interesting were the Motoman Industrial Robot, with its humanlike range of motion, and the dozer driving robot . I think we’ll be seeing more telepresence robotics in the future. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a return to the moon first takes the form of teleoperated robots scouting, surveying, and building. Even after humans do move into the nice, safe (underground?) habitat, it would be wise to minimize contact with the extremely hostile lunar environment, and continue use of telepresence for routine maintenance and exploration.
Gaygamer brings us the tale of this adorable Chbi Robo costume . It reminds me of the robot costume I wore for Halloween when I was five, though my costume more resembled an old-school Fifties robot .
Santa is scheduled to visit in approximately ten days, and presumably his elves are working overtime to build enough toys for the "good" children of the world. You may not need elves if you have a RepRap or a Fab@Home unit.
Although both Clarise and Rover are both unfinished, I have a plan for a holiday robot. This will be some sort of animatronic Christmas tree that barks at intruders, dances, and/or folds itself into "the bird." The barking part shouldn’t be too hard. As for the dancing, remember these guys ? The secret was just a bent shaft rotating in a flexible tube.
I’ve also stumbled across a proximity sensor that works on the same principle as the Theremin and, if I’m not mistaken, certain touchpads. I have a vague idea for a third robot that will perhaps use those, an old Palm (Clie, really) as CPU, and (perhaps too ambitiously) a synchro drive system. I tried that once in the past with disastrous results, but that was perhaps because the various materials I used were either too weak or too heavy. I should really have also used idler wheels to help support the system’s weight.
I have solved the mystery of the twitching shoulder. I didn’t cannibalize the old mixer as I’d planned. Instead, I found a reduction gear that meshed with the sprockets I was already using, which made things quite a bit simpler. It also appears the set screws I had been using were too big, and their occasional collisions might just possibly have been the cause of the problem. Both elbow and shoulder joints now move without a hitch.
The next step will be to construct a computer interface to the stepper motor driver board, as I’d prefer this robot to be controlled directly by computer rather than by the BASIC Stamp. I suppose a parallel port interface would work, but since I seem compelled to do everything the hard way, I expect I’ll be building an actual expansion card.
My free trial of Dungeons and Dragons Online is now over. What have I to show for it? Well, after a few more sewer slogs, I was finally able to exit the Newbie Zone and explore the rest of the city. This has so far consisted of a huge tented bazaar, (which would have counted as a "city" in other electronic RPGs,) a desert island upon which kobolds roamed, and a wizard’s basement.
Now, I still don’t care for the game’s mouse-mapping. It’s basically just a normal mouse pointer, with a left-click meaning "Use" and a right-click meaning "Attack." I would much rather have the left click mean "Select" and the right-click mean "Walk." Then I could use my left hand to operate hotkeys instead of to drive my character around. Unfortunately, the game’s designers are so certain that we will all love this aspect of the interface that they’ve forbidden anybody to change this. You can remap any other keys, but not the mouse buttons. (Actually, if you have a mouse with extra buttons, you can remap those buttons.)
But I did notice a tip on the loading screen that said one can use a gamepad. So I dug up an old USB gamepad and plugged it in. I did have to manually map all the controls to the pad, but it ended up working pretty well. A useful tip-of-the-day! How about that? I’d encourage anyone who doesn’t like using the mouse to try it.
Here’s how I have it set up:
Unfortunately, some sort of bug seems to have surfaced that prevents some of the buttons from working while a window (such as the inventory) is open, and other buttons from working when no windows are open. Most inconvenient.
I still haven’t decided whether I like this game enough to buy the full version. Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t. It seems as though whenever someone tells me to "get this, and we’ll all play online, and it’ll be great," it never quite works that way. We’ll see.
ERIK
