For those that like it big...

Intech have just been commissioned by the new York Police Department to provide a video wall for their operations center. How much would you love to have one of these? This would be fun after hours for a bit of big-screen Quake :)

Today I bought a new toy. Those of you that know me well will not be suprised to know it was some Lego. For those that don't know me well, I'm desperately trying to hang on to my childhood. At 24, that's a bit of a worry ;)

But the good news is, I can justify my interest in these (children's) toys through both my education and employment. This Lego can be programmed. Programming is good. It is fun, and it gives me money (to buy things like Lego).

It's part of Lego's Spybotics range, which consists of four models. The premise is that the owner of the Lego is a secret agent, and they are to use the model to complete secret missions. These missions are uploaded via a customized communications cable, which connects to a COM port on your computer (it's a good thing I have the docking station for my ThinkPad).

It took me about 2 hours to build the robot. I found it unusual working from 'digital' instructions (there was no familiar paper instuctions, instead I had to work off the electronic version, which was made using Macromedia's Shockwave).

With the green-machine built and ready for action, I connected the optical communications cable to the 'brain brick' on the car, and uploaded a test program to the car. The car has an arc of lights on the roof, and a yellow light behind them. They are used to indicated messages back to the driver (like mission progress, or in this case, direction and distance). The brain block has several sensors on it, including two light sensors (this is how the cable uploads programs to the brick), a touch sensor at the front (for detecting impact, and backing up), and several IR sensors that can be used to triangulate the location and distance from the CPU to the remote controller. This is well cool. With the test application, the closer I got to the car, the faster the yellow light would flash on the roof. Also, my direction was indicated with the arc of lights - it would light up the two LEDs that were closest to me, meaning that walking around the car would cause the arc to systematically light up. Very cool again.

That's all I've had time to play with it, but it looks like others have hacked the onboard processor and managed to get it doing other cool things, like following a track made of coloured tape (using the light sensors). I'm also interested in the Not Quite C language (and compiler), which will hopefully open up some other avenues for hack potential.

... you're absoultely exhausted, but you've gone past the point of being tired.

At Maggie's place this afternoon/evening, I was really tired, and on the way home my body said "right, if you're not listening to me, I'm not gonna bother anymore." My brain gave up trying to to tell my legs to walk me to bed.

Now, I have to wait a little while, and hopefully my brain will resend the SLP packets, and this time my legs will respond with an ACK.

If you've seen the Flurry screensaver on Mac OS X before, and you're a Windows user, you're probably jealous.

Well, instead of turning completely green, download Flurry for Windows! It uses OpenGL, and the source code is also available, if you think you can do better, but need a push in the right direction.

It doesn't like my multiple screen setup (the LCD and 17" ViewSonic CRT), but the included readme.txt indicates that a driver update might fix that. I'll check with ATI later. For now, I'm happy with only a single swirl to distract me.

Maybe my, with the extra RAM I've just acquired, my Indigo2 will have some purpose again. By purpose I mean "no use at all, other than displaying a screen saver all day for entertainment value." These machines kick some ass when it comes to OpenGL (though a GeForce whatever can probably match/beat it).

Today I won a few auctions on eBay for some RAM. I paid US$20 for four sticks of 32MB, and US$7 for eight sticks of 8MB. Postage was next-to-nothing (the RAM will weigh a few grams and is quite small in size).

The problem I had was that the seller would only ship to US postal addresses, and as you all know, I don't live in the States. That's where Withered comes in ;)

Mark's been spending heaps of time in the US lately, working with Wired City in the US. OSISoft (they used to be Wired City's parent company, but now they've merged so the lines are even blurrier) has an office on the West Coast and Mark has a few mates there. One of them was kind enough to assist in the relaying of mail for me. To make things even better, there's a chance I could get it through their internal mail system, which means there'd be no charge! :)

Now I'll have two SGI Indys, and one SGI Indigo2 Impact, with enough RAM in them to actually be useful. 32MB in each of the Indys really wasn't enough, and they hurt when running anything remotely intensive. As an onsite Debian server they make nice 'appliance' boxes, and as an X Terminal they rock!

Again, yay for Debian's 11 architectures! And yay for Mark's general wickedness!