Weblog of Fernando Reig Matthies

When you take a photo you are capturing an image of what you can see with your eyes.

Meaning enriches this image by automatically adding contextual information and allowing you to instantly share your picture, all with just one click.

Simply put: Meaning is one click publishing from your Nokia’s Series 60 platform to your Flickr account.

Rollyo, currently in Beta, gives you the necessary tools to create your own search engines within minutes (no programming required). Based on Yahoo’s search engine API, Rollyo will allow you to create personalized search engines narrowing information on sites you trust.

Let’s say you frequently do searches on Digital Photography, and instead of using a webwide search, you want to focus on sites that you normally trust and read, in my case dpreview.com, you can roll out a personal search engine customizing the sites to be searched and narrowing and enhancing the search.

Being a Web 2.0 app, the sharing component could not be missing:

you can explore and save searchrolls created by the community of Rollyo users and share your knowledge on a particular set of topics.

Another concept that Rollyo introduces is the one of High Rollers, top bloggers have all rolled custom search engines. If you’re Search Roll gets popular you will be part of the High Rollers.

Sample search rolls I found intresting are among others Interactive Marketing, Digital Cameras, MacAddict Mac Search and The Big Answer Deck by Seth Godin.

A neat feature is to get your Search Rolls easily on your Firefox search bar. It would be great if you could access other search engine APIs as an alternative to Yahoo.

A man throws boiling water into the air in Saskatchewan during a typical mid-winter, minus 40º C day.

Wired has a great story “Geeks in Toyland” talking about Lego’s Mindstorms next launch, the Mindstorms NXT presented at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2006.

The kit, due in stores in August, looks nothing like 2.0 and isn’t backward compatible. Users still program the bots from their PCs, but everything else about the experience has been changed. The centerpiece of a Mindstorms kit is the RCX brick, which acts as the robot’s brain. It receives input from sensors and sends instructions to motors, breathing life into plastic-block creatures. The new brain has a 32-bit processor—a huge upgrade over the old 8-bit processor—allowing NXT bots to perform more-complex tasks than their predecessors, like ambling with a near-human gait or reacting to voice commands. The chunky yellow brick in the old kit—which looked like SpongeBob SquarePants—is gone, replaced by a gray rectangle that could be the love child of an iPod and a first-gen Gameboy. The programming language has been revamped, as have the sensors, motors, and I/O ports. As a result, Mindstorms NXT robots look and act far more realistic than their predecessors.

It will finally support Mac as well as Windows. Users with Bluetooth-enabled computer hardware can transfer their programs to the NXT wirelessly, or anyone can use the included USB 2.0 cable to connect a computer to the NXT for program transfer. The inclusion of Bluetooth technology also extends possibilities for controlling robots remotely, for example, from a mobile phone or PDA.

Check out the article on how they set up a Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP, and how they exchanged countless emails with Lego, reeling off ideas for new sensors, redesigned input ports, and stabilized firmware.

Robot Magazine has some video footage of the Mindstorms NTX creatures in action.

やれ打����手を�り足を�る

Kobayashi Issa 一茶 (1762-1826)

Via BoingBoing:

Here’s a fan-produced music video for Grandaddy’s “Jed’s Other Poem”—the entire thing was produced using Applesoft II (a BASIC implementation) on a 1979 Apple ][+ with 48k of RAM.