Back in November at AnDevCon II, I met Jonathan Hirshon of Horizon Communications, who hooked me up with a complimentary robot from My Robot Nation. This had nothing to do with Android; it probably came up because we had a MakerBot running in O’Reilly’s booth printing out little Androids (using casainho’s Android magnet design from Thingiverse). Enough about androids and robots. As ST:TNG’s Lt. Commander Data is so fond of reminding us, there is a difference between the two!
After I returned home from the conference, I headed over to My Robot Nation’s WebGL-powered designer, and started working on a robot as close to Futurama’s Bender as I could get. I chose the type of head, torso, arms, and legs. Next, I added color, a robot part for the mouth, decals for his eyeballs, and posed him.
I placed my order, and a couple of weeks later, my bot Blunder appeared on my doorstep! The robot’s not posable, but he certainly is cute and fun to have around my office. (My Robot Nation has extended a 10% discount to readers, good until the end of January 2012, with the coupon code MAKE2011).
BBC News – Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship.
The scheme was outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
The project’s organisers said the Hackerspace Global Grid will also involve developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.
Longer term they hope to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon.
Hobbyists have already put a few small satellites into orbit – usually only for brief periods of time – but tracking the devices has proved difficult for low-budget projects.
The hacker activist Nick Farr first put out calls for people to contribute to the project in August. He said that the increasing threat of internet censorship had motivated the project.
“The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let’s take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities,” Mr Farr said.
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