New Gadgets and Technology

[Darth Geek]

http://www.techject.com/dragonfly.html

[MartyS (Gromit)]

That is probably the most cool design I've seen of the dragonfly imitator types.   Still only 8 minutes hover time, but double or more if you use short power bursts and glide around between the bursts.

[Variety of Cells]

Well, perhaps fortunately battery technology is what is holding things back as far as making them smaller and flying all over the place.  That one I'm holding in my hand can only fly for about 5 minutes.  Bigger battery and it can't get off the ground (it's a question of weight ratios).  Battery power vs. weight was improving like crazy for a while but not so much the last 4 years or so.

There are definitely technical limitation when trying to create robots that are bug sized.  Much easier to assimilate existing bugs, Borg style.

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/futureoftech/remote-control-tech-turns-cockroaches-beasts-burden-985085

[Variety of Cells]

MYO - Motion control bracelet.

I call useless bullshit.  I don't doubt that the device is very sensitive, and can tell when you are pointing your finger or giving a thumbs up or whatever, but I do doubt that the device can tell the difference between an intentional command and scratching your balls.

This doesn't make anything easier.  I have to admit that the concept of the Wii seemed awesome when I was waiting in line at 4 in the morning on the black friday after it came out.  But now that I have put the Wii to rest in my closet, I can't think of any games I enjoyed that couldn't have used a different control scheme. 

Full arm motion controls are in no way better than buttons and joy sticks.  They can't deliver more precision, and do not free up a hand because that hand needs to be able to gesture.  The only motion control that makes sense is head tracking, and that's only because it's using a part of your body that doesn't normally have a controller in it, giving you further control instead of replacing it with inferior control.  They should focus on reading brain waves as a form of control.  I could see many advantages with that.

EDIT:  Unless they made this thing sensitive enough to read sign language.  Give it a little speaker that and a processor to translate.  That'd be pretty cool.  But I don't think that's possible.  Lots of subtleties with sign language.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

EDIT:  Unless they made this thing sensitive enough to read sign language.  Give it a little speaker that and a processor to translate.  That'd be pretty cool.  But I don't think that's possible.  Lots of subtleties with sign language.

I'm sure they could do that with extra sensors, a band on each arm would give you the finger/wrist positions and movements, then you would need a system that could read the position of the hands relative to each other and the body.

There must be some kind of calibration step when you put the thing on, to measure the electrical signals from each mussel is not hard, but figuring out where they are coming from would require exact positioning each time or recalibration each time.

[Variety of Cells]

No one on these forums has a 3D printer, right?  Because they can't really make much that is useful and it's a big waste of money and it'll probably just give you a lot of headaches trying to calibrate it and getting your 3d models to print correctly and not warp...

Then why do I want one so damn bad?  It's like freaking star trek!  I could think about an object, and then it would exist!  That's amazing!  Useless and expensive and abridged, but amazing!

So if someone on here has one, please tell me how it's not worth the trouble before I end up spending money on something I shouldn't. 

[Darth Geek]

I don't have one myself, but at my work where we design latches for cars and stuff, we have an FDM machine that is freaking amazing. And it's like 10 years old and way out of date. But it's still cool as hell.

This just makes me think of the last April Fools Day when Think Geek did a brilliant gag for a Play-doh 3D printer:

[Variety of Cells]

Guh. Words like "freaking amazing" don't help my desire to waste money.  Would it be too weird to put on my registry as a wedding gift?

[k1]

Guh. Words like "freaking amazing" don't help my desire to waste money.  Would it be too weird to put on my registry as a wedding gift?

I say go for it if your wife doesn't care.  We put all sorts of stuff that we wanted but would never be able to afford on ours.  You might luck out & have a bunch of friends who decide to pool their money & get something awesome. 

[Pak-Man]

So you may be saying to yourself, "I want an iPhone 5s, and that new biometric security system sounds nice, but I'm afraid a thief will just chop off my finger and use it as the world's most metal stylus!" Well fear not, because apparantly Apple thinks of these things!

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/17/iphone-5s-touch-id-wont-work-with-severed-fingers

[Variety of Cells]

Anyone else upgrade to ios 7? 

I absolutely love the few functional changes they have made.  It's stuff that I felt should have been added a long time ago, but I'm still happy to see it's here. 

The control center is the best feature.  Similar to the fairly useless notification center of past versions which had you swipe from the top down to see your notifications, the control center has you swipe from the bottom up and gives you a whole slew of options that you used to have to dig around in settings to find.  You can turn on or off bluetooth, wifi, airplane mode, rotation lock.  You have your music player controls right there, you can open up the camera, the timer, the calculator or even turn on the flash as a flashlight (which you used to need an app for).  But best of all, you can control brightness right from the control center, no mater what you're doing, without having to go back to settings and adjust it. 

The other nice thing is that while browsing the internet you can swipe from left to right to go back a page, or the opposite to go forward.  I figured this would lead to accidental swipes, but you have to start at the very left or right of the screen.  Works great.  Also, you no longer have to scroll to the top of the page to refresh. 

I'm indifferent about the aesthetic changes.  There are some things I like more, some I like less.  I don't like how the buttons look now, but the text and feel of the rest I like. 

The only downside I've come across so far is that I can't see embedded videos on the Rifftrax forum.  Hopefully that will be fixed someday, but I'm not holding my breath.

Problem was on my end.

[Compound]

Just an FYI for the Apple folks.

Despite claims in various places on the internet, iOS 7 does not make your Apple product waterproof.

[goflyblind]

there's a chance people might fall for that?

faith_in_humanity(now) < faith_in_humanity(previously)

[MartyS (Gromit)]

This is such a cool concept, not sure if it's technically possible but if they can get it to work maybe it would give some ideas to the bigger smart phone companies:

http://www.phonebloks.com/

[Variety of Cells]

This is such a cool concept, not sure if it's technically possible but if they can get it to work maybe it would give some ideas to the bigger smart phone companies:

http://www.phonebloks.com/

That's awesome.  My uncle is an electrical engineer and is always aggravated that no one knows how to fix electronics anymore.  Pretty much everything is just a replacement.  For example, there's a problem with the charging port on my phone.  If I could just replace that block, my phone would be like brand new.  This is a great idea. 

EDIT:  Just a shame I hate social media advertising.  If this was a kickstarter I'd be all over it.