Had the opportunity to see a sneak preview of “Whip-It” today:

This is Drew Barrymore’s debut as a director- and she did not disappoint.  The movie is fun to watch and enjoyable on multiple levels.

I have always wondered what the actual rules of roller derby are-  apparently there is a position called a “pivot” that is supposed to have a striped helmet cover (the movie only had the jammers wearing the star covers).  Basically you have a giant moving pack with two jammers (one from each team) behind it.  The jammers must attempt to pass the pack in order to score points.  (The aforementioned pivots are simply the last line of defense for the pack.)

All too often movies these days annoy me with awful camera work designed to do one of two things:

1. Make up for weak action shots

or

2. Induce feelings/moods that the director was to inept to create in any other way

I’m happy to say that Drew didn’t fall prey to this- the actual derby scenes were entertaining, and craptastic camerawork was not used as a cheap ploy to make the matches seem more action-packed.

Will see this movie a second time.  Highly recommended.

So I just got an email from a friend with this link:

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/08/mysteryboxchallenge/

Wow.  I should have tradmarked the name.  Wired themselves even did a story on me prior to that one…funny:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/08/the-defcon-16-m/

Just about everyone calls the contest “Mystery Box Challenge” and has for over five years.   I love people who can’t come up with original titles

There is a new category of ultra-portable projector showing up, the pico-projector.  Currently there are two LED based projectors in the wild, one being the MPro 110 from 3M.

There is extreme geek-coolness factor going on here.  A projector that fits in the palm of your hand AND can be run on batteries-  but does it live up to the hype?  Kind of.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

I’ve been trying to update the references and write-ups on the Mystery Challenge. So far I’ve hit the AP, Forbes, Wired, Cnet, and numerous blogs. I am sure I am missing some-

https://ten-five-seven.org/on-the-web

If you know of any references to the Mystery Challenge, please let me know-

SkullTronix have just released an addition to their talking skull line, fully articulated skeletons!

Headed by Jerry Jewel, SullTronix first entered the animatronic/professional haunt industry with their talking skull line.  Recently they have been awarded the IAHA 2009 best new product award for their new full skeletons.  Jerry’s group, ScareU, routinely produces some of the best haunted house attractions in the country.   Notice the electronics are hidden inside the bones, really professional work.  Pricing and purchasing information available on their website.

So I threw together a quick and dirty carrier board for an LM386 OpAmp and an Emic Text-To-Speech module.

Thrown together while watching Star Trek II: Khan! Khan!

What did you do with your afternoon?

Jeff Moss, founder of Black Hat and Defcon, was appointed to the DHS Security Advisory Group yesterday:

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1244227862914.shtm

Congratulations Jeff.

Nao from Aldebaran

The Aldebaran group has started hitting magazines such as Servo and Nuts and Volts with ads for NAO, their new humanoid robot.  Full production hasn’t begun yet, but you can order directly from their site.

As soon as I get my hands on one I’ll post a hacker’s perspective review.

Stay tuned…

I just added a page discussing how J.J. Abrams and I see the world.

The Schmartboard guys are having a contest for Propeller board give-aways.  I like to win free stuff, and you can register to win here.

If you don’t know who the Schmartboard guys are they make the surface mount ‘easy solder’ boards.  Basically you purchase boards that have a mask that is raised, so your surface mount parts fit down into ‘grooves’ in the boards.  Solderpaste is already there, and you simply tack the SMT part down.  

They also have recently launched the solder by numbers website, a social networking site for electronics geeks.  

I joined the site, and I’ll give a full review later.  So go register to win your free stuff.

So Freescale is hitting the streets with the S08LG line  - designed to assist with driving LCDs.  They’ve started hitting Youtube with horrible videos, like this one:

Sometimes it pays to have a little production quality-  even if you are marketing to engineers.  I especially enjoy the parts in the video where her hand is in the way of the LEDs that are a prime part of that particular demo…

So go get some free samples, and see what you think.  May be overkill for simply an LCD driver, but depends if you want to integrate it into your project it may be a nice way to reduce part count.  Feel free to post thoughts here.

64 bit RC Product key: D9RHV-JG8XC-C77H2-3YF6D-RYRJ9

 64 bit RC key: D9RHV-JG8XC-C77H2-3YF6D-RYRJ9

32 bit RC key: 4HJRK-X6Q28-HWRFY-WDYHJ-K8HDH

I went to get Windows 7 RC product keys from the Technet site, and found a few interesting things:

1. The site really doesn’t like it when you use Iron (or Chrome).  Shock there.

2. When you actually break down and use IE, you can hit the back button quickly twice to get a ‘new’ key generated.  I did this a few times for both the 32-bit and 64-bit English versions.  I found that the keys cycled every 6 times for the 32-bit and every 5 times for the 64-bit.  

So there is nothing magical about the RC keys, they just pick one randomly for you out of their pool.  Well we’ll just have to wait until Tuesday for the actual download now wont we…..

ST Microelectronics (www.st.com) as released the Primer 2, a cell phone sized development platform that includes a color touch screen, joystick, and several connectors.

PRIMER 2 dev platform

The Primer 2 is an update from the original “circle” unit, the Primer 1, which inspired the Circle OS, an open-source software framework allowing easy development.

Primer 1 ("the circle")

The STM Primer2 is available for around $50.  A price compairson showed Mouser to be the cheapest vendor to sell the units directly.   Be warned, the direct vendor channel versions are limited in the code size that can be debugged.  STM  must be contacted directly for the full code-space versions.

It is once again time for Defcon, and I’ve got lots of work to do on the Mystery Challenge.  The Hardware Hacking Village is also in the planning stages, and taking up considerable time.

I find that WP is suited more for straight blogs than for websites. I will probably put up honest-to-goodness pages, and just throw WP in as a blog, rather than an entire content management system.