Xeni Jardin posts a link to these videos of the DARPA Grand Challenge, the recent robot race across the Nevada desert. It’s entertaining to watch the robots weave their way out of the starting gate, bump into things, or merely stop moving, sit for a minute, and then start smoking. But the amazing th

Too stupid for words: Virgin Mobile unveils the left-handed Sony Ericsson LH-Z200 mobile phone. The number pad looks like this: 3 2 1 6 5 4 9 8 7 UPDATE 4/1/2004: It’s an April Fool’s joke.

“Felons and foreigners can, and do, own computer voting machine companies.” So says environmental activist Lynn Landes, quoted in Kim Zetter’s in-depth expos

MR told me about this full-body improvement on Rochambault (or “Rock-Paper-Scissors,” as most of the world outside the SF Bay Area calls it): Bear-Cowboy Ninja. You start back to back with your opponent. Walk five paces, then whirl around and strike a pose. The cowboy (hands making pistols and firin

I have to thank Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing for posting a link to the L5 Society web site, which features many gorgeous paintings of space stations taken, I think, from Gerard K. O’Neill’s Colonies in Space. I spent many hours poring over and daydreaming about this book when I was a kid, and these

There are some vaguely disturbing Gummi bear experiments happening on my desk right now.

More than you probably ever wanted to know about how to test digital cameras. And still more about digital imaging tests, from Edmund Optics.

Oh. my. god. The BED IS ON FIRE!!! No, wait, that’s just the alarm clock. Nevermind.

Dismayed by the lack of vendors offering “who cares what you think?” T-shirts, and emboldened by a suggestion from Bill Hangley himself, I decided to go into the T-shirt business. Here it is, then, by popular demand: The who cares what you think? T-shirt store. Don’t hold back — buy a shirt! Tell th

After you delete all the files from the SD card in a Kyocera Finecam SL-300R, they aren’t completely gone. When you turn the camera on, the LCD briefly flashes the last picture it displayed–even if that picture isn’t on the SD card any more. The camera is obviously storing this image somewhere in th

Phoenix Technologies, which makes BIOSes for notebooks and desktop computers, has a nifty idea: something called Firstware Assistant that lets you check your Outlook calendar and email without booting up the machine. You turn on the machine through a special quick-boot cycle that bypasses Windows an

I want the T-shirt!