robo-rainbow on Vimeo

by Carlyn Maw on February 3, 2011, no comments

Keepon finally gets a cheaper version – Hack a Day

by Carlyn Maw on February 1, 2011, no comments

Keepon, the adorable bot meant to help autistic kids with its jovial dance moves, seems to finally be getting a cheaper version. The original cost $30,000 and did a lot more than dance. Actually, we got to play with it a little bit at CES a couple years ago. The commercial version most likely won’t have facial recognition or any of the other fancy features of the first one, but we hope it can dance well. We’ve actually seen a couple home made versions and we’re hoping that the new one has some major hacking potential. The temptation to have one of these cute little bots around is made even stronger when you see that some of the money is going back into autism research.

via hackaday.com

Yay!

As the reminder of how awesome Keepon is from Wired:

Oh and from the Press Release, they are being desinged in LA!

“Wow!’s design experts and robotics engineers, based in their recently-opened Los Angeles office, worked closely with BeatBots to design a toy that captured the essence of the Keepon character while replicating the robot’s most engaging interactive traits. These features include reactivity to touch and an amazing ability to listen to music, detect the beat, and dance in perfect rhythm! “

Discussion of Censorship at the Smithsonian happening now

by Carlyn Maw on January 29, 2011, no comments

via voanews.com

Head over to the Samuel Freeman gallery to discuss between 11am and 3pm. Tad Beck, the current artist, will be there and so will the Reverend Ethan Acres.

http://www.samuelfreeman.com/nav/e_2011_01_beck.html

More:
– http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-b-keegan/for-the-smithsonians-sake_b_81…
– http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/01/smithsonian-censorship…
– http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2011/01/cloughs_la_flip-flop_on_the_re…

If I see another search result from eHow I’m going to cry.

by Carlyn Maw on January 27, 2011, no comments

So this is how to exclude certain sites from Google searches.

I don’t like eHow.com. I don’t like About.com They irritate me. Personal pet peeve. And don’t even get me started on Associated Content, Yahoo! Answers, Etc. Where misinformation goes to breed.

I could avoid seeing them by starting my search from somewhere other than a search engine, somewhere like delicious.com (sigh) or pinboard.in or wherever real people will have had to bother to tag the pages. Or even by starting at Wikipedia.com, where at least if someone is wrong on the internet it can be addressed.

But I like Google, so I keep going back. I could turn on Google History and only search where I’ve been before, but I think it’s a little creepy, and it doesn’t help me if I need inforamtion that is beyond my ken.

So I created my own custom search engine on google

Went to http://www.google.com/coop/cse/, followed the steps (you have to create a search with a limited reach first, pick any random website).
Then went to the new CSE’s “control panel” and at the bottom of the “Basics” page is the option to search the whole web still.
Then on the “sites” page is where you can add websites to exclude. In bulk.

The result:

I put it on my iGoogle page. It promotes sites like instructables.com, lifehacker.com, the LA Times, The Mayo Clinic , etc. and excludes sites like, about.com, answers.yahoo.com ehow.com and associatedcontent.com

Use it. It’ll make me money, I think?