Hacker Friendly

Ars Technica reports that the Supreme Court has invalidated Teleflex’s patent on a self-adjusting gas pedal in KSR v. Teleflex. The Supremes ruled that the Federal Circuit court that heard Teleflex’s appeal did not appropriately apply the test for obviousness. The obviousness test says that an invention cannot be patented if a “person […]

 

Sculpted Prims are coming to Second Life. While the recently released 1.15.0.2 viewer doesn’t yet support them, the FAQ mentions that they might be available in the beta viewer as early as next week.
It looks like the sculpted shapes are made by deforming a sphere according to a “sculpt texture” that maps R, G, […]

 

Somebody just asked me which, out of all of the free Web 2.0 services I’ve ever signed up for, has proven to be the most useless.
Why, Useless Account, of course! (While it was a close race with Twitter, the really spiffy twittervision hack blew the curve…)
 

 

Last week at CanSecWest, Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco demo’d an interesting GPS hack: sending bogus data over the RDS-TMC channel. In English: You can send fake traffic updates, alerts, and other data to GPS systems that update over FM radio. Looks like we’re one step closer to GITS.
There is a brief write-up […]

 

Not to be outdone by the Wii Bowler, GarageGeeks brings us Guitar Heronoid: The Guitar Hero playing Android.
Guitar Hero strikes me as a considerably more difficult game to teach to a robot. Instead of mastering a single physical movement (something robots are very good at), an intentionally distracting visual field must be analyzed […]

 

Cat Sharp kicks off our new “Better than Blank”™ book series with Bellwether No. 1. The theme for this issue: years of obsessive exploration of female portraiture.
The book collects more than 140 beautiful illustrations and surrounds them with mostly blank space. It is full of pretty, amusing, and poignant depictions of women (and […]

 

Last night I went to another fantastic Ignite Seattle event. This time, the maker challenge was to make paper airplanes and throw them through a hula hoop from a good distance away. There were some innovative designs, but it seemed like the traditional long dart model did the best.
Actually, I was too busy […]

 

Meet the Monster Smart Car: an unholy mashup of a Smart ForTwo and Unimog.

“DaimlerChrysler has always had an unusually large range of off-road vehicles - from the M-Class to the G-model and the Unimog. One look at the smart forfun2 (pronounced smart forfun to the second) and you see straightaway that it is based on […]

 

Scientists are getting closer to the man-machine interface: digital processing of rat brain neurons, with live cyborg rats planned for later this year.

Berger’s research team—an all-star roster of neuroscientists, mathematicians, computer engineers and bioengineers from around the country—has so far managed to reproduce only a minute amount of brain activity. Their chip models fewer than […]