inportb

Early this month I heard about the ECCERobot, or Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot. While standard humanoid robots mimic humans in appearance, ECCE copies the internal structures and mechanisms. The anthropomimetic design incorporates such elements as bones, joints, muscles, and tendons, allowing for the potential for human-like activity. ECCE’s drive system of elastic cables and drill motors may be complicated and inefficient, but it provides insight into our own design.

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Recently, I rewrote from scratch a two-year-old project of mine. Imagine, a browser-based image editor, had been sitting around collecting dust, so I figured I’d delete all the legacy code (almost all of it) and create something better. I’ve also been evaluating the possibility of integrating Imagine into Google Wave.

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I used the Kde4 + Firefox3 theme before I upgraded to Firefox 3.5. When I upgraded, I noticed how incredibly ugly Firefox looked because the theme was not compatible with this new version. After a few days, I set out to search for a slightly more compatible theme.

As it turns out, the author of the original theme also has a Firefox 3.5 compatible one called KFirefox. I think it looks a little better than the original, even. Here it is.

Having unpacked much of my stuff at my new house, I found a neglected helium-neon laser. I’m surprised that I still have one of these things, since solid state lasers seem to be all the rage these days. Anyway, the design makes it quite suitable for experimentation. I dusted it off and decided to have some fun with one of my storm windows…

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