Here's a cool Christmas tree video installation from Ricardo @ klip.tv

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G3ckoG33k writes "Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a popular way to run Windows programs on Linux, and it has an impressive compatibility list. After 15 years of development it reached version 1.0 a few months ago. Now, Wine developer Maarten Lankhorst has succeeded in running 'Hello World' in 64-bit, natively! The 64-bit variety is unexpectedly named Wine64."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

G3ckoG33k writes "Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a popular way to run Windows programs on Linux, and it has an impressive compatibility list. After 15 years of development it reached version 1.0 a few months ago. Now, Wine developer Maarten Lankhorst have succeeded in running 'Hello World' in 64-bit, natively! The 64-bit variety is unexpectedly named Wine64."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ozmanjusri writes "Dell has tripled the charge to upgrade Vista PCs to XP. Under current licensing 'downgrade' agreements, system builders can install XP Pro instead of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate; however, Dell has opted for a surcharge of $150 over the price of Vista for the older but more popular XP Professional operating system. Rob Enderle says the downgrade fees could potentially be disastrous for Microsoft: 'The fix for this should be to focus like lasers on demand generation for Vista but instead Microsoft is focusing aggressively on financial penalties," says Enderle. 'Forcing customers to go someplace they don't want to go by raising prices is a Christmas present for Apple and those that are positioning Linux on the desktop.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

• Custom House Portraits in Felt
  
• HOW TO - Nearly-Instant Apple Cinnamon Mini-Tarts
  
• Periodic Table Mini-Sweaters
  
• HOW TO - Expandable Stocking
  
• Paper Cuts from Musee des Miniatures
  
• Swissmiss Alpenglow Project
  

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If you missed our video earlier in the week today is a good day to sit back and enjoy the stylings of Collin with "MAKE presents: The Resistor"... Simple, commonplace and absolutely vital to our electronic world - take a closer look at the current-fighting backbone of circuitry, the resistor! To get our MAKE videos as they come out, subscribe in iTunes.


Here it is downloading "live" on an iPhone with the new podcast feature!

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darthcamaro writes "Canadians were among the last people in the world to get the season 4 finale of Doctor Who which already aired in the UK and Australia. The Canadian public broadcaster — CBC — decided to cut out nearly 20 minutes from the episode, leaving fans wondering what was going on. Doctor Who isn't the easiest show to follow at the best of times — but Canadians are now up in arms (or at least hockey sticks) over their taxpayer-funded broadcaster's lack of respect for SciFi hosers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: USBattery. You can view the video here, grab the PDF here and subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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GeekDad Holiday Gift Guide #6: Kids' Games & Building Sets
All chores and no play make Jack a dull boy. Kids love games, and parents love games that are smart -- or at least engage kids constructively for a spell. For more suggestions look for our list of gift guides on the right, accentuated by tasteful holiday art.

Here Be Gingerbread Dragons
Gingerbread houses have become so passé! This year the Mrs. and I decided that our gingerbread peasants needed a bit more misery and woe in their tasty, albeit brief, little gingerbread lives. What better way to turn up the heat than with a bit of delicious burnination!

10 Ridiculously Expensive Geeky Holiday Gifts
Here is GeekDad's list, in no particular order, of geeky (some only slightly so, some extremely so) gift items that you might consider buying for your loved ones, if you happen to have a pile of large bills sitting around doing nothing.

Previews of Letters to Santa: A Muppet Christmas
As Muppets fans everywhere are keenly aware, it's been far, far too long since there's been a really good Muppet movie or TV show. This coming Wednesday, the new TV special Letters to Santa: A Muppet Christmas airs in the United States.

And last, but not least...The 3rd Day of Geekmas: Win Bead Art from Doctor Octoroc and a Lego Creator Set
Our 3rd prize pack is centered on one of our favorite concepts: building. We GeekDads are Lego lovers (but not, like, in a weird way), and 2008 has seen its share of Lego-related posts. This year we also featured a post about the relatively new phenomenon of bead sprite art, specifically the work of artist/musician Doctor Octoroc.

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Roland Piquepaille writes "As you probably know, Earth's magnetosphere, 'the invisible bubble of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surrounds and protects the planet from the periodically lethal radiation of the solar wind,' was discovered in 1958. Until now, it was believed to comprise five regions, including the ionosphere or the Van Allen radiation belts. Now, a US research team has discovered a sixth region, called the warm plasma cloak."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roland Piquepaille writes "As you probably know, Earth's magnetosphere, 'the invisible bubble of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surrounds and protects the planet from the periodically lethal radiation of the solar wind,' was discovered in 1958. Until now, it was believed to comprise five regions, including the ionosphere or the Van Allen radiation belts. Now, a US research team has discovered a sixth region, called the warm plasma cloak."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year we discussed a proposal from the FCC which would have required winning bidders for a portion of the wireless spectrum to use some of that bandwidth for free internet access. A vote for the plan was scheduled for next Thursday, but now the FCC has canceled those plans, facing "opposition from several top officials, wireless providers, and even civil rights groups." The internet access would have had some level of filtering, to which privacy groups took exception, and the Bush administration objected to forcing requirements on the winners of the spectrum auction. Others simply asked the FCC not to take on such a major project as the transition between analog and digital television transmissions looms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What do you do with 27 pairs of used shoes? If you're like Ingrid Bachmann, you would make them into interactive art.

Each shoe has a toe and heel tap used in tap dancing attached to it. The shoes move or dance independently of each other. The mechanical motion of tapping is created using solenoids (tubular magnetic sensors) that move up and down when activated by a switch. Each switch, 52 in total, is controlled by a microcontroller and software that activates the sequence of the tapping of the shoes.

More about the Symphony for 54 Shoes by Ingrid Bachmann

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HotTuna writes "I'm responsible for a closed, private network of retail stores connected to our corporate office (and to each other) with IPsec over DSL, and no access to the public internet. We have about 4GB of disaster recovery files that need to be replicated at each site, and updated monthly. The challenge is that all the enterprise file replication tools out there seem to be client/server and not peer-to-peer. This crushes our bandwidth at the corporate office and leaves hundreds of 7Mb DSL connections (at the stores) virtually idle. I am dreaming of a tool which can 'seed' different parts of a file to different peers, and then have those peers exchange those parts, rapidly replicating the file across the entire network. Sounds like BitTorrent you say? Sure, except I would need to 'push' the files out, and not rely on users to click a torrent file at each site. I could imagine a homebrew tracker, with uTorrent and an RSS feed at each site, but that sounds a little too patchwork to fly by the CIO. What do you think? Is BitTorrent an appropriate protocol for file distribution in the business sector? If not, why not? If so, how would you implement it?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Super Forest has a nice write-up about Michel Bayard, a pinhole camera photographer out of New York.

A few years back I was walking through the city and I passed a man selling photos. What instantly caught my eye was that each photo was exactly the size of one frame of film, no enlargements, a one to one transfer.

I stopped and had a gander at the works, speaking in vague pleasantries with the vendor. The work was really good! I asked the guy: "What did you use to shoot these?"

And he replied: "This" taking a small plastic film container out of his pocket.

More about Michel Bayard

In the Maker Shed:


High-Speed Photography Kit Version 4

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A couple years back, my friends Paul and James opened a pair of chocolate shops in London, Paul A Young Fine Chocolates, with one branch in the City and the other in Islington, in Camden Passage. Paul is a self-taught chocolatier whose truffles I'd been lucky enough to sample over the years, and James is a very sharp entrepreneur, technologist and activist, so I knew that whatever they made, it would be tasty.

But I didn't count on it being this good.

In a few short years, Paul A Young chocolates have won more awards than I can count, including the Academy of Chocolate's "Best New Chocolate Shop," "Best Dark Chocolate Truffle" and "Best Filled Chocolate," and so on -- and when I dropped in this week to buy the last of my Christmas presents, I discovered that the Observer and the Financial Times had both put Paul A Young on their list of the 10 best chocolates in the world. I'm pretty well travelled, and I've enjoyed some magnificent chocolate here and there, but I'm hard pressed to find a chocolate I find myself thinking about, dreaming of, tasting the phantom of, more than Paul's.

Here are a few of my favourites from the shop. First, the drinking chocolate -- a gently heated pot of molten Valrhona chocolate guarded by several jars of fine ground spice, ranging from chilis to ginger to cardamom, cinnamon, and many others. Get a cup and season to taste, stir, drink, fall unconscious. I'm also a great fan of Paul's chewy, rich brownies, which have the texture and color of good, loamy soil and the flavour of high-cacao artisanal chocolate adulterated with such additives as stem ginger.

But my favourites have to be the truffles -- they were special treats for my wife during her pregnancy and after her delivery, they're the gifts I give to friends come from out of town, they're the treats I go for on days when nothing seems to be going right. There are the "normal" truffles (for example, the gold-medal-winning Sea Salted Caramels have a hard, glossy dark shell that shatters in your mouth, revealing a slow, decadent slurp of salty caramel, or the Kalamansi truffles, with a centre of tangy tropical citrus), and the exotics -- truffles stuffed with Marmite, stilton, and other savouries that turn out to be extremely witty and improbable taste-combinations that are inevitably delicious in a way you never expected.

What's the catch? Well, they're kind of expensive -- especially if you're used to buying an assortment of milk chocolates at the grocery store. And they're also only available in person at the shops in London -- no mail order. Paul's chocolates are made fresh daily on the premises, without any preservatives of any kind, and they just don't travel (I've successfully brought abroad them in my hand luggage, but I wouldn't try to ship them as cargo or by mail). So this is a pleasure strictly reserved for Londoners and those who visit London.

It's this last part that's kept me from mentioning them here for so long -- it seems like a cheat to tell you how goddamned fantastic this stuff is and then announce that you can't have any. But it's the end of the holiday shopping season and plenty of you live in London. If you're looking for an extraordinary gift that comes from a local small business, won't clutter up the house after it's opened, and will certainly be warmly appreciated and fondly remembered, this is my top choice.

Oh, and Paul's hiring staff -- his business is doing very well, despite the crummy economy, and I can't think of a better place to work (except for the risk to your waistline!).

Paul A Young Fine Chocolates

Update: in the comments, James Cronin - Managing Director, Paul A Young Fine Chocolates, sez: "I'll brief the team in the morning that if anyone mentions that they read about us on Boing Boing they can have a free chocolate on me."

Jennie sez, "My husband and I have solved a problem plaguing Jews for hundreds of years: the boring, yet ubiquitous Dreidel Game. We've created a new game, fun for adults, that crosses dreidel with Texas Hold'em poker: No Limit Texas Dreidel."

No Limit Texas Dreidel combines the traditional dreidel game with Texas Hold'em poker. The objective is for each player to create the best dreidel "hand" by combining dreidel spins. You will combine dreidel "spins" in your shaker, which only you will see, with other Community Spins, which will be seen by all players. Players bet in rounds using poker betting rules. The game is best played with chocolate gelt (coins), as is the traditional wager for the Dreidel Game. No Limit Texas Dreidel is an entertaining adult party game and is family fun for everyone ages 9 to 99.

No Limit Texas Dreidel on Amazon, No Limit Texas Dreidel homepage (Thanks, Jennie!)

I'm on an American Airlines flight from New York to San Francisco. It has wifi from Gogo Inflight.

Aside from immediately posting a note on Twitter, I checked to see if it had enough bandwidth to access my Slingbox, and it does. I'm listening to the roundtable on This Week while I write this.

Before we left I took a picture of the plane and uploaded it. Maybe later I'll take some morepics .

I got a special offer of 25 percent off the $12.95 price.

All the more reason for American Airlines to have clip art for blog posts now that we're going to be blogging from the air.

According to Speakeasy, I'm getting 1201 kbps up and 269 down.

LostDiver writes "Computerworld Australia caught up recently with Larry Wall of Patch and Perl fame. He talks about the development of Perl as 'scratching an itch,' a release date for Perl 6 (Christmas day, year unknown) and beauty versus practicality. Computerworld also has some more information on the upcoming Perl 6. A while back they interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame as well." jamie pointed out a interesting, related video of a presentation by Clay Shirky from last year's Supernova conference in which he discusses why the Perl community (or any web community) drives progress and innovation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The ongoing fight against the Canadian DMCA is the focus of a new documentary film called Why Copyright? Produced by Michael Geist and available as a streamed version, OGG download version, or a torrent, the film features Red Hat founder Bob Young, sci-fi writer Karl Schroeder, the owner of Skylink Technologies (which fought the DMCA garage door opener case) and many other voices from across Canada."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anonymous Coward writes "A recent study suggests the downfall of individual researchers, who are being rapidly replaced by enormous research groups. Quoting: '... in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is my own video on the future of education, that completes and extends what I was able to deliver this past Wednesday at LeWeb in Paris. Photo credit: Giorgio Montersino In this brand new video presentation I have recorded, I contend that we are about to see a deep change in how we look at education and learning in the coming years. The deep changes we have been witnessing in the worlds of mass media, advertising, marketing and communication in general, and much of what we have been labeling under the 2.0 title needs to be harmonized with our educational approach to schooling inside society. If we have come to appreciate the value of collaboration, sharing, co-creation, mashing up, bottom-up contributions and grassroots media creation, as well as those of listening to customers, of starting true conversations, of opening to critical feedback, and to suggestions from all your clients, we must also be able to see that these same principles and approaches can be transposed and utilized effectively in delivering a more valuable educational experience to our kids. a) Teaching is not learning, b) What are the things we really need to learn, c) What is the context and resources in which a new educational paradigm can emerge, are the key issues that I bring forward in this video presentation. I must thank once more LeWeb organizers Loic and Geraldine LeMeur for having provided me with this great opportunity. Here the video:

Love of Education - A Shifting Paradigm

Video presentation by Robin Good duration: 34'

My LeWeb Presentation - missed opportunity

I must admit it: At LeWeb I did a poor job of delivering this presentation. While I rehearsed several times what I wanted to present I did not pay enough attention to total delivery time and assumed without asking that there would have been some flexibility around this. My computer also unexplainedly hang-up twice during the presentation, causing extra pressure and loss of precious time. End result was, at least from my personal point of view, a missed opportunity to carry out the full message I had been working on for so long. I was quite disappointed to say the least, though I rather immediately realized it was all of my fault. As a matter of fact I apologized multiple times to Loic LeMeur, organizer of the event, for my bad performance and for having left the stage, after my early forced ending, expressing somewhat visibly my deep frustration and disappointment. Having had a couple of days now to think over this, I have come to accept my big mistakes in preparing a presentation without making 100% sure that it could be delivered precisely within the allotted time. I overestimated my ability to manage the topic and in my rehearsals I focused more on finding the best way to express each specific concept rather than worrying also about the specific time each one would have required. As I see it now, ridiculous mistakes, for someone who should know a lot better what it takes to stay within a clearly specified time.

Feedback Received

Notwithstanding my disappointment I received quite a lot of good feedback from those who attended or viewed my presentation via the Internet. The Twittering audience and the international friends I met off stage were generally more enthusiastic than I would have ever thought and you can trace most of the bad and the good ones I got through on Twitter Search. A bunch of strong negative reactions came from a post made by one of the official bloggers from Italy who gave great emphasis to my lack of touch in leaving the stage and accusing me of having rumbled the word "f**k" after having left the stage while my microphone was still open. Here is the original recording of my presentation delivery at LeWeb, and indeed (I myself had no memory or recall of having consciously said this) you can hear from the recording that I did complain to myself for having had to close my presentation early. After having heard myself the recording, my personal impression is that it is pretty evident that I did have an expression of disappointment right after having gone off stage. What is never said in the critical reporting is that it appears quite evident that my expression was said in a voice tone that clearly reveals the fact that I was talking to myself, it was expressed in a rather low voice tone, it was pronounced when I was clearly well off stage and it was heard only because my microphone was inadvertently left open longer than needed by the audio people. It seems clear to me, but I leave you with the freedom to evaluate yourself, that I clearly did not intend to make that statement public and that it was exclusively due to rather a late reaction from the audio engineer in closing my mike that allowed my personal disappointment to be heard by those who paid attention. At that moment I was clearly unaware of being still with my microphone open and the unhappy expression I used was clearly addressed to myself and specifically to my inability to carry out in full my presentation. I like to take responsibility for this and to apologize to all those who felt disturbed or offended by it, as, at least among the Italians present there, it seems there were quite a few who felt such incident really ruined not only my presentation, but also my country reputation at the international level and, according to what they have written, even the opportunity for other Italians to be called in to such major events in the future. (If you read Italian, you can check yourself such reporting and comments. I was pretty surprised on the other hand, that none of such people, found the opportunity or time to come forward and tell me their impressions in a direct and open way, and chose to express their feelings by sending me nasty, unfriendly comments (have Robin get a Valium injection in his neck) and by choosing to write their disappointment with no reference to the content or ideas being presented. In any case there was enough technology there for you to make up your mind about my behaviour at LeWeb without believing me or any other blogger. Check by yourself in the video recording here below. Streaming .TV shows by Ustream I really have no bad feelings with the organizers or the way I was treated. My time was clearly 20 minutes, and I didn't manage to stay within them. End of the story.

In the coming days I will publish an article that further explains and corroborates, via the use of video interviews I had recorded for this event, my full view on the future of education and what it is going to take to get to it. I must acknowledge also, which I had no time to do on stage, that my ideas were strongly influenced and inspired by the extensive work done by Ivan Illich in the 70's, and by Seymour Papert in the '80s. I also utilized ideas developed by Stephen Downes to whom I owe great respect for the extensive research work on the future of education he has already done. Further thanks go to Howard Rheingold, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard, Jay Cross, Teemu Arina and George Siemens who have provided me with invaluable feedback and video material on this very topic and which I will shortly publish here on MasterNewMedia.

Mitch Trachtenberg writes "Ballot Browser, an open source Python program developed by Mitch Trachtenberg (yours truly) as part of the all-volunteer Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, was instrumental in revealing that Diebold counting software had dropped 197 ballots from Humboldt County, California's official election results. Despite a top-to-bottom review by the California Secretary of State's office, it appears that Diebold had not informed that office of the four-year-old bug. The Transparency Project has sites at humetp.org and http://www.humtp.com." Trachtenberg also points to his blog for the Transparency Project, and his own essay about the discovery and the process that led to it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Live Labs have introduced a new service that lets users collect snippets of information from Web sites and share the collections with others. It's similar in concept to Mozilla's Joey, a defunct project that let people copy and paste portions of Web pages onto a single page that they could access from their mobile phones or another computer. Thumbtack is also like other available services, including Google Notebook. But Thumbtack developers think their service has a difference. 'Thumbtack stands apart in its ability to introspect on incoming data in order to automatically classify it and extract structure from it using machine learning,' according to the FAQ about the service."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Creating a Maker Course
In the next month or so I will have a semester change, and with it an opportunity to restructure the sequence of three courses. Robotics, Building and Repairing Computers and Web Design are three classes that I have taught before, and am looking to streamline the content of the courses. The high schoolers taking the classes range from 9th graders to seniors. The classes are unleveled, meaning that anybody can take the class. The result of this is that you may have a 15 year old next to an 18 year old, a student with mild curiosity to deeply held career goals that relate directly to the subject, from reluctant to excited and engaged all in the same class. That's just the nature of public schools. In this school system, students are expected to write in every class for at least 5 minutes every day.

Measurable
Projects that students do should be clear cut and have a purpose that relates to previous work and future projects as well. Sequential, foundation work is a good idea, but should not be taken so far as to remove the creativity that kids have and need to develop. Students should develop relevant skills while having a good time learning and creating something of personal value.

Assessment
Students need to be able to know how they will be evaluated early in the project and course. Rubrics are a standard in many school systems. Testing can and likely should be built into the process of assessment.

Developing student interest
With a diverse population of learners, it is important to provide differentiated instruction, allowing all students to get the best out of the classroom environment. Ideally, even the most reluctant student should be able to deepen his or her interest in valuable ways. through experience with the ideas, tools and materials and processes in the course. Sometimes, students repeat courses, so it is useful to have projects that can be done in multiple ways and still provide useful learning experiences.

Equipment available
Some of the tools available are: Powermatic bandsaw, Delta drillpress, 12 inch chopsaw, Hand saws, power drills, wood lathe, manual Sherline metal lathe, Taig Micromill, metal foot shear and bending brake, Roland vinyl cutter, 4'x8' Shopbot (in a separate room), electricity cabinet with soldering irons, breadboards, copper clad board, resistors, transistors, capacitors, switches hand drafting tools, 20 stations of Pentium 4 windows XP computers with internet connection, black and white laser printer, scanner, 4-5 work tables with lockers underneath, 120 volt power and ethernet drops, computer projector display.

Time structures
The class period is 70 minutes. There are 5 periods per day, 7 in the cycle, so either 3 or 4 class meetings per week (except holiday weeks). The courses are semester long, 10 weeks per term, 5 weeks per half term. At the end of the semester is an exam which is 20 percent of the full grade.

What would you do?
How can teachers cultivate creativity and competence while developing skills in their maker students? What do you think the best and most essential projects for kids to learn in Robotics, Web Design, Programming and Building and Repairing Computers? What experiences worked best for you? What do you wish somebody told you early in your learning of these subjects? What are the best materials and tools for students to work effectively and creatively with? Have you developed a maker-friendly curriculum? Do you have great projects that you know work for situations like this? Have you got an online portfolio of the projects you use in your classroom? What techniques do you use to evaluate student learning? Tell us your success stories! Add your comments of ways that you make your classroom work, and add photos and video of student work to the Make Flickr pool.

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Photograph by Rob Carter of Mixed Greens Gallery

In Lee Stoetzel's world, Harley-Davidsons, Volkswagen buses, Macintosh computers, and McDonald's Big Macs all grow on trees. Or at least the materials to make them do.

The Pennsylvania artist recreates iconic products entirely out of wood, with a little steel and Bondo for support. "I stick with very recognizable parts of American culture," he says.

Stoetzel's woody representations tie these objects of conspicuous consumption back to the power of nature and the fragility of the Earth. Just don't call him a hypocrite. All of the wood comes from trees that were already killed by fungus and dredged from rivers. Indeed, it's the wear of the wood that attracts Stoetzel.

In 2004, he built an exact replica of a 1942 Jeep based on an Italeri model kit. The gouges and scars in the pecky cypress wood reminded him of bullet holes, he says, perfect for a classic military vehicle that has since become the quintessential four-wheel-drive.

There's also the 1960s counterculture car-of-choice, the VW bus, whose wood doppelgänger is currently parked in his dining room. That one was tough because he based it on his daily driver. "Every time I saw the real bus in my driveway, I'd notice something wrong about the sculpture," he says.

In the case of Chopper (seen above), the custom "Captain America" Harley-Davidson from the film Easy Rider no longer existed. So Stoetzel started with a small Franklin Mint replica, scaled up with careful caliper work.

Stoetzel's woodworking chops come on a need-to-know basis. Much of his knowledge was picked up chatting with the "older retired guys" who still put in a few days a week at the woodcraft store where he buys his supplies. The rest comes from the web and DIY books. While constructing the VW, he built his own steam bender from PVC pipe to shape the wood into the bread-loaf shape of the bus.

"After spending two years on the bus, I'm not being as ambitious with scale," he says. "This week, I'm making a pizza."

>> Stoetzel's Woody Wonders: leestoetzel.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 12, page 20 - David Pescovitz.

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Fabulous Maker and rogue photographer Bre Pettis paid a visit to the Technisches museum and snapped their "30 Ways to Die of Electrocution" exhibit. I like the emphasis on urine and pranks in the list.

30 Ways to Die of Electrocution (via Geisha Asobi)

We've previously covered the student projects that come out of Cornell's microcontroller design courses, and I'm always excited to see what's released each semester. Bruce Land wrote in today with an update on the Fall 2008 FPGA projects:

During the last 5 weeks of the fall semester in ECE576, Advanced Microcontroller Design, students at Cornell University are given the responsibility of using an Altera/Terasic DE2 FPGA development board to build an interesting system-on-chip project. This year's projects include an graphical L-system generator, a brute-force DES keyspace searcher, a polygon render pipeline, and speech recognition engine. The projects are typically combinations of hardware specified in Verilog and C software running on an embedded controller, although some are pure Verilog generated hardware. The projects range from tools to games. The parallel nature of the FPGA encourages graphics and audio applications, but infrastructure applications such as hardware UDP are encouraged.

Show above is a two player FPGA version of Tetris. If you've been interested in developing software for FPGA devices, the Altera development boards will set you back about $600, but the projects from this course all all open source and a great place to look for inspiration.

ECE 5760 - Advanced Microcontroller Design and system-on-chip
Advanced Microcontrollers Final Projects

Previously:
Cornell University's student microcontroller projects - Spring08
Microcontroller design final projects from Cornell University
ECE576 Final projects

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Sleeper hit game Katamari Damacy has rolled onto the iPhone in a slimmer yet tilt-sensitive form called I Love Katamari. According to our man Brandon Boyer at Boing Boing Offworld, it's still a ball of fun, managing to "recapture the harrowing anxiety of the originals." Full review on Offworld. Katamari rolls onto iPhone

vik writes "According to local media, multiple eye witnesses are reporting that a meteorite crashed into a warehouse in Auckland, New Zealand last night, setting it on fire. The warehouse roof was destroyed but no nearby buildings were damaged and there was only one minor casualty — a man who happened to be inside the building at the time. The fire service have not yet made an official announcement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt writes "The new crop of Cornell University ECE 5760 projects are now online. Some really cool projects, as well as the previous two years' worth of projects." Since it's mid-December, many other schools, too, have either just let out or are about to; can you point to any other online collections of cool technical projects?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I got my brand spanking new Chronulator 2 kit in the mail! I had big plans for opening it all up and taking photos of the parts. I figured I go out and find an amazing case to build it into. I have a two-year-old with a cold. I figured wrong. I got as far as the PCB and the two meters before she, shall we say, grew tired of my reindeer games.

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Trepidity writes "In its roundup of how to choose a netbook, The Economist suggests that users 'avoid the temptation' to go for a Windows-based netbook, and in particular to treat them as mini laptops on which you'll install a range of apps. In their view, by the time you add the specs needed to run Windows and Windows apps effectively, you might as well have just bought a smallish laptop. Instead, they suggest the sweet spot is ultra-lite, Linux-based netbooks, with a focus on pre-installed software that caters to common tasks. They particularly like OpenOffice, which they rate as easier to use than MS Word and having "no compatibility problems", as well as various photo-management software." Besides which, does Windows offer spinning cubes for coffee-shop demos?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.