Heart Robot

http://www.heartrobot.org.uk/

“We wanted to make a puppet to which people might respond emotionally. We wanted the puppet to seem vulnerable, alien, and cartoony. Something new! Something handmade, not factory-built”

this little British guy comes equipped with breathing simulation circuit and since its a puppet it can be controlled by hand. Its amazing to see how people almost automatically relate emotionally to this little creature. they have several other robots per-se (not only robots)

Probo

http://anty.vub.ac.be/info/Probo/

Probo uses sensors for vision, audio and touch to interact with the children. By means of artificial intelligence, Anty is capable of understanding and expressing emotions.

Personally i hate the way this one looks, but its very usefull as stories its aid with ill children at hospital sprawled all over the web. Its hability to detect emotions and react to them made it a perfect companion for hospital beds.

Needies

http://needies.com/about.html

Needies are interactive plush dolls inspired by codependent, high-maintenance relationships.

I was fascinated when i first learned of needies by Brett Schultz (i think they where his thesis project for ITP)  The coolest feature of a needie is that its emotionally dependant of its owner, (needs hugs) and each of them has a different personallity and reacts differently when you pay more attention to another needie he lives with. Not only they sense when you interact with itself but with its peers !

and they are quite huggable too

Huggable

http://robotic.media.mit.edu/projects/robots/huggable/overview/overview.html

It is designed to function as a team member that is an essential member of a triadic interaction. Therefore, the Huggable™ is not designed to replace any particular person in a social network, but rather to enhance that human social network.

This Super Teddy Bear is probably the most advanced companion/toy robot and seems to be mutually inspiration on the Movie AI.  MIT claims it has three main applications,

• Robotic avatar for remote family members
• Early Education Companion
• Therapeutic  Companion

I

for example, i could grow small vegetables in the top and use them to feed the ants, after a time, switch the earth from the ants to the top (im guessing it will be fertilized).

and finally, i guess it wont hurt letting the ants to the upper level everyonce in a while…

anyways this is just RC.001 i’ll be hacking mods and publish them

Coca-Cola Bottles turned into a indoor gardening tool
go green and make stuff !!

: )

the images are kinda shitty cuz they where taken with a mobile phone.

I just saw a conference Casey gave a few days ago, but since im the kind of dude that likes to download and watch stuff on the go,i didnt want to see it all online.

So i just went ahead and find the mov file for everyone to download

enjoy:

via tagr.tv

I have the power !!!!

Hopefully Processing might be part of the curriculum for digital artists and designers program at ITESM.

My code is slow and slopy, but it creates nice images : )

My good old mac must have the world record for most drops off starbucks tables and random bumps. The few of you that have seen it must must agree that it looks as if it just survived a train wreck.

It has died on me about 5 times and somehow I always managed to repair re-build re-format and revive. But this time… oh lord.. this was simply too much. It simply died and denied even to boot or give me open firmware (i once had to learn open firmware in 10 hours to bring it back).

So here is where our story starts, giving up on my mac for good i had to turn to an antique acer travelmate manufactured maybe 10 years ago (Kindly Provided by Mista Moi Kirsh).

The problem was, it had a screwed up windows instalation. With its CDRom and floppy drives not working i had few options to make this laptop usable again.

But allas a single search on google enlighted me.

I came to Wubi a point and click ubuntu installer for windows.

Instalation was a breeze, no problems at all, as easy as installer any other well formed application and it also comes with an unistaller too.

Now im not going to lie it did took me all night long to download and install updates but this was mainly cuz i had 256 mb of ram. But after it finished everything was love and sugar.

I don’t expect to be able to make some renders, graphic design or genetic algorithm design. but it sure has brought me the web back.

Today im 100% webbased Gdocs, Gmail GReader at excellent speed (using xubuntu a lightweight ubuntu distro for old computers) and i have to admit im a google bitch now and I’m loving it. 100% free and opensource now.This will keep me going till i get my new mac and who knows maybe i will just stick to linux for a while.

So if you see yourself in the need to rescue some old hardware or simply want to try linux this is a risk free method to get you started

Thanks Ubuntu and Wubi,
oh yeah a google too

So today i just went ahead and try it. Although i don’t need a messenger, bag i had lost my wallet (make that No. 10) so i decided to start practicing with small objects such as wallets. It turns out to be very fun although i might suggest having a decent design first (you might end up  with something as trashy as mines). 

Using old plastic bags seems a great idea to recycle stuff that otherwise i dont know where it might end up. 

I’ll share with you guys how to hack your Coda Editor in order to expand the auto-complete feature to include your own functions, regardless if you are using an open framework or just building from scratch.

As you can see in figure 1 and figure 2, I have modified my Coda to work with CodeIgniter php Framework. Now I am able to auto-complete some of the functions (they are a lot) and even complete constructer and model templates by typing three keys.

Ok.. so lets get to work.

1. First of all, create a copy of your Coda application, just in case we fuck up really bad. (quite improbable).
2. Second, open up your Coda contents by right-clicking the application and selection “Show Package Content” then go to folder Contents->Resources and hold it right there - or - you can simply type (shift+command+g) and type “/Application/Coda.app/Contents/Resources”  Newer versions of coda come with the files in Modes/*.mode/Contents/Resources/ Where * is your language or script or whatever you want to modd.

1. Once there you will find lots of interesting files, sort them by size, and you will see all the xml files. All of them but one are the auto-complete dictionaries (i know you are exited by now)!
2. Open up any you like I modded the php cuz im using code-igniter. Its a very big file, personally i preferred to open up with good old textEdit so i don’t waste too much ram on it.

When you open it you will find a xml well formatted, what we want to do is to add a sibling to file so lets take a brief look at the structure:

<dict>

<key>Hint</key><string>mixed number</string>

<key>ID</key><string>abs</string>

<key>MoveCursor</key><string>1</string>

<key>PostString</key><string>()</string>

<key>String</key><string>abs</string>

</dict> 

 

It consist of 5 variables, with a definition key and a string for its value.

• • Hint: the actually string to be typed for you
  • ID: identifier for the auto-complete item (make it unique)
  • MoveCursor: Character spaces you want the cursor to move inside the auto-completed string
  • PostString: This characters will enclose your Hint
  • String: the actuals tying you type upon which coda will filter

Here’s a Very Basic Example

<dict>

<key>Hint</key><string>session_id</string>

<key>ID</key><string>$this->session->userdata</string>

<key>MoveCursor</key><string>2</string>

<key>PostString</key><string>('');</string>

<key>String</key><string>$this->session->userdata</string>

</dict> 

 

• As you can see i named the ID with the same string as the “string” key to avoid duplications.
• I enclosed (used in poststring) the opening and closing tags along with semicolon
• Moved the cursor two characters to the right, this will cause the character to end up just after the quote. This is important because all the string in the Key hint will be selected by default to be replaced, in this case the string session_id will be selected for me to immediately start typing my desired id or variable and finally the hint that i want to get

Lets get to a bit more complex (not that much) example:

<dict><key>Hint</key><string>your@your-site.com</string>

<key>ID</key><string>$this->email->from</string>

<key>MoveCursor</key><string>2</string>

<key>PostString</key><string>('', 'Your Name');</string>

<key>String</key><string>$this->email->from</string>

</dict>

Lets place attention to the PostString KeyI included part of the functions content in the closing string for a reason, they will still be included within the autocomplete hint but since they are not part of the Hint key, they will not be autoselected when the hint is typed for me, so only the Hint string “your@your-site.com” hence i can start replacing this email right away without having to delete all the functions contentWell this is pretty much it, its quite straight forward. Just a hint

• You will have to restart Code every time you add new functions to the list, so be ready to add them as a batch.
• If Coda simply hangs up, or crashes, (happened zillions of times for the first time) it only means you typed in a malformed entry in the list
• review it or delete it and everything will be back to normal.

@CodeIgniter Community

I really started to use Codeigniter this same week I actually havent made my first app.I’ve done some work with the first classes from the user guide, but it would take a lot of time to include the complete framework all by my self and probably i’m taking the risk of not implementing the autocomplete functions the best it can.If you guys want to help me out i’m sure all the community can benefit from our efforts, drop me a msg and we can distribute the work.