Portent

This is almost certainly one that should be filed under the “Don’t try this at home” category. Mankind’s ingenuity has developed many different types of weapons of which one of the most nasty is a flame thrower. They have their uses- clearing bunkers and caves in wartime. Of course one of the things you don’t realise is that man carried flame throwers made the wearer a bit vulnerable- one stray bullet and you become a human torch as the fuel was carried under pressure and …

So it’s a bit of a risky thing to try – I could easily see anyone doing this ending up in the Darwin Awards one year so try it at your own risk… But it’s still fun to look at someone else doing it!

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The links go to a youtube video of the fan in action. Unless it was a fridge I doubt you’d find anything er cooler! There are 42 LEDs and through careful timing, you can program all sorts of animated graphical effects. I suspect that you need to be half decent at programming it- it comes with 5MB of storage and you need a serial port. Also, it costs $389 from here.

If that is beyond your budget they also sell a cheaper ($5.00) hand held fan that can have up to 6 messages.
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Now this is quite ingenious. There are some (not me) who believe that RFID represents a grave threat to mankind. These devices are used to simplify the tracking of goods when being transported and on shop shelves.

Unlike a bar code which has to be scanned, an RFID responds to a signal and returns some useful information from a short distance away. No need to look for the code. But some people are concerned that rfid chips are easily hidden and can be used to spy on you. As the site says “Implantable RFID tags for animals allow concerned owners to label their pets and livestock. Verichip Corp. has also created a slightly adapted implantable RFID chip, the size of a grain of rice, for use in humans.”

So this device detects hidden rfid tags and lets you stops them functioning as long as you want by shielding them from being interrogated.

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This is a pretty good resource. Every gadget, device, or appliance of anything more than the simplest comes with a manual which inevitably gets put in a drawer or lost. With safemanuals.com (I’m not sure if there are any manuals for safes!!!) you can go online and download the manual you need.

I tried it for my phone-a Nokia N73 and sure enough it’s there along with many other phones. You can access by brand, or by category (Domestic Appliance, Phone, Cell Phone, Digital Camera, TV, Car, Motorcycle, Car Player, DIY, Video Game, Software) and for example under mobile phones there are nearly 90 manufacturers and providers listed.
Highly recommended.

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With the prevalence of Wifi, and cheap programmable devices, Chumby comes out very soon. It reminds me a little of a Gp2X though that was a games console and Chumby is different.

A Chumby is an always connected (if you have Wifi), battery backed but mains operated compact device (little bigger than a mug) that displays useful and entertaining information from the web: news, photos, music, celebrity gossip, weather, box scores, blogs etc.

It’s Open, running Linux and programmable. It can’t quite do video but that may happen. It has a touch screen so no keyboard needed. Feature wise it has 32 MB of RAM, 2W Speakers, a 320 x 240 Screen, 2xUSB ports, ambient light sensor, headphones socket and Wifi Connectivity. Looks interesting…

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A Canadian chap fitted a moveable camera to a radio controlled aircraft. He wore a Virtual Reality head set and received a live feed from the camera and controlled the camera pan and tilt by moving his head. The quality of the video is very good- it looks as if it’s shot from a real plane until the last few seconds when it’s landing and you can see the bloke on the ground as it approaches the field. There are subtitles on the video in English and French.

What makes this quite revolutionary is the view point from the plane- it makes you feel like you are flying.

I guess the next step might be to completely control the aircraft with head movements, though possibly a bit dangerous if you get distracted!

Link to Radio Control forum with discussion of this plus links to other Videos. The rc-cam.com website is about radio control model video and projects and if you like R/C well worth a visit. Mind you it looks like it could be an expensive hobby!

Visit any computer shop and the console games you’ll see on sale are just for the PSP and Nintendo consoles. Yet there is a stylish and powerful games console costing just £125.00 that runs Linux out of the box and has loads of free software available. You don’t need to hack it to run your own software like you do with the Sony PSP. Most manufacturers lose money on the hardware and make it with software so they don’t want you messing with it.

GP2X is at heart a games machine. It has two 200mhz CPU’s with 64meg of RAM, custom graphics hardware and decoding chips and takes SD cards.The display is 320 x 240 pixels which is slightly better than my old Commodore 64. By comparison the more expoensive PSP has a resolution of 480 x 272, and the Nintendo DS display is 256 x192. Films though can be viewed at resolutions up to 720 x 480 through the built in custom hardware and if you plug the GP2X into a TV or monitor you get a whopping 1048 x 720 display.

I’ve been burnt by buying a game console before. Remember the ill fated Gizmondo which had $100 million spent on promoting it and had very little software available. Well the GP2X has outsold it without any budget for promotion. The firm behind GP2X have already sold an earlier console the GP32 and have been around for at least five years.

The biggest difference is the sheer volume of free software available now for the GP2X and their open attitude to development. GP2X have taken the Nokia path, giving away software development kits to encouraging game development rather than the Nintendo/Sony/Gizmondo way where only ‘approved’ devleopment companies can produce games for it. Even if you don’t want to learn game programming, as a games console there are so many games available now- for instance over 1,100 alone with MAME, SNES games with a SNES emulator and ports of Doom, Quake 1 and 2, Duke3d, Neogeo, Hexen and many more.

The link takes you to a detailed review of the software available and you can see many of the games listed in a 11Mb WMV video download.

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