RobotSkirts

I was a bit heart broken because my HMD dreams didn’t work out, but I thought of something else to do with my goggles: build a sound and light machine. I already had an extra MiniPOV3 kit so it wasn’t too much trouble to put together. I’ve got photos from the assembly on Flickr. I decided to take a modular approach. The two wire pairs were salvaged from an old computer a while ago. They worked out really well since the connectors on one end of the wires easily hold the LEDs without soldering.

Still wondering what it does? It does some sort of electro-hippie entrainment crap that forces your brain into certain brain wave states. I guess you can use it for relaxation, meditation, etc. All I know is you put the goggles on and your brain starts showing you light patterns that aren’t actually there. It’s a neat trick.

A couple months ago a post circulated about how you could get a cheap head mounted display (HMD) from Wild Planet’s Spycar toy. It was an RC car with a video transmitter. Replacement headsets for the toy could be purchased for $25 and that would get you a 300×225 monochrome display. It has a stereo minijack for a composite video signal and power. Bre gave me one of these and a pair of welding goggles. I tried to stuff the HMD inside the goggles, but it didn’t work out… Nevertheless, i did learn exactly how tiny this gear is. (more…)

Somehow I’m taking over the internet without even trying. First there was that picture of me on the Wired blog. Then the other day my Xbox 360 I bought on launch day was laid bare on bunnie’s blog. Just now I saw my serial LCD, that fbz and I had been playing with over the holidays, on We Make Money Not Art. Frankly, I think it’s just an indication that I’m not publishing enough on my own blog…

The week before I left for Europe I bought an unlocked North American Nokia N95 from Mobile City Online. At the time, I bought it for two main reasons. First, having an unlocked GSM phone meant I could purchase any pay-as-you-go SIM card off the street in Europe and it would work. Secondly, it has a 5.0 megapixel camera which meant I could leave my bulky 2.1 megapixel Panasonic FZ1 at home.

Now that I’m back in the USA, I signed up for service from AT&T and want to talk about the many many other things this phone does. (more…)

Engadget picked up the FPGA story. If you look at the comments on my original story you’ll see at least four sites that have published the story directly from Engadget’s RSS feed.

blackbox hasn’t gotten much serious use since I built it in January 2006 (bought my mac mini 2 months later). I fired it up the other day because I wanted a dual monitor mac without paying an arm and a leg. Well after a series of scientific pokings the hard drive is completely flakey. I don’t really need this but the hardware is new so I thought I’d offer it up for sale. All of the specific bits are covered in this Engadget article.

• 3.0GHz Pentium 4
• 2GB DDR2 Ram
• DVDRW
• 8 SATA ports, 2 banks with a RAID controller each
• 3 IDE w/RAID controller
• 7 USB2.0 ports
• Memory card reader
• Firewire A/B
• Dual TV tuner
• nVidia 6200TC RGB DVI and TV out
• 7.1 audio analog/digital in/out
• 2 1Gb ethernet ports
• Nice case, scratch on top
• Flakey (at least in Linux) 250GB SATA drive

Without the hardrive, these parts cost me $1000 in January 2006. First reasonable offer gets it.

Xilinx and Altera are both showing FPGA coprocessor modules that plug directly into Xeon motherboard sockets at the Intel Developer Forum today (for use on dual and quad socket servers). Versions for PCI Express are being developed as well.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays are used to emulate dedicated hardware. While not as fast as a dedicated chip they can be incredibly fast compared to a general purpose CPU. The FPGA can be reprogrammed on the fly for doing tasks like video and audio compression, decompression, encryption, decryption, and other tasks that are generally CPU intensive. David Hulton, from Pico Computing, demonstrated using an FPGA to check password hashes for WPA at ShmooCon. On a standard PC you can check 300,000 hashes per second; using one FPGA you can check 12 million per second — the entire 40-bit key space in 24 hours. It works just as well for attacking things like FileVault.

Manufacturers are already selling dedicated processors for doing tasks that could be replaced by these FPGA coprocessors; take this USB iPod/PSP video converter for example. When I bought my last TV tuner card, I selected it because it had onboard MPEG2 compression/decompression. With a coprocessor I wouldn’t have to make that decision. Render times in programs like iMovie would also be greatly increased. Let’s hope these coprocessors go main stream and don’t stay mired in the server and high performance computing industries.

Main stream adoption will take time of course, but we use dedicated cards for our 3D graphics now. Something very few were doing 10 years ago. Semi-dedicated chips like this may actually speed up adoption of other dedicated devices like the physics boards that have been floating around the past few years. You’d get decent performance from a physics engine in an FPGA, but if you wanted more performance you could get the dedicated board. If computers started coming from the factory with these FPGAs you wouldn’t have any cost of entry to try out something like dedicated physics processing.

A related announcement: Intel confirms programmable, multi-core chip.

CES is this week and it’s huge. I’m sure this would be a lot of fun for someone not actually covering the event. If you really want to know what’s going on here you should just read Engadget. I enjoyed AOL’s whimsical geodesic dome and Nokia’s massive Borg cube next to it. I know this all sounds really disconnected, but that’s really all my brain can manage.

I’ve got a new phone and service. My number has been ported over so it’s the same as it’s ever been. I got a decent deal on a LG vx8500 Chocolate. I had looked at a LG vx9900 and a Sidekick. I didn’t want a PDA/smartphone, but I eventually decided I didn’t want some qwerty phone that did an okay job with email and IM so I went with a normalish phone. (CK says I’m losing whuffie points for that move) The chocolate has a nice form factor. The face buttons are heat activated while the keypad is normal push buttons. I think mixing the two is kinda hard on the fingers. Also the keypad automatically locks after a few seconds even with the slider open. A bit of a nuisance, but it is to prevent your cheek from activating the pad during a call. I haven’t played with it too much yet. I still need to figure out how to tether it to the Mac so I can use EVDO.

I’ve been responsible for at least four people switching to Macs in the last 6 months (I even bought one myself). I think Apple owes me a prize. Of course this actually part of a greater sinister plan to take silly screenshots of friends in iChat. Brigitte bought her Mac to start vlogging for celeb blog Pop Crunch check out the teaser, episode one and two.