So, y’all have seen cats, kittens and puppies riding roombas. It’s cute and all, but…

Not good enough.  This is a hamster DRIVING a roomba!  Okay, technically it’s the development platform version, but same diff.

Maximum Geek Factor!  Also, it won’t fall down the stairs like the hamster ball will.

Okay, there’s a lot of porn, holocaust deniers and other drivel and crap on the net.

And also some of the things we spend our attention on are pretty banal.  Cute, usually, or funny, but banal.

And then there’s sites like this one:  http://www.spinalistips.se/

This is a collection of tips and tricks for people with spinal injuries.  My first job was personal assistant to a quadraplegic woman, which was really quite eye opening.  It expanded my conception of what life can be, and how people can have good or bad lives entirely depending on their attitude.

So anyway, this was just really cool to see on the net.  via the Make Blog, which I spend entirely too much attention on.

This is really cool, it’s a truly vast picture that you can zoom through and pan around in.  It’s called a Gigapan as the images have literally Giga-pixels, being sitched together from many “normal” pictures taken with a robotic system of pan and tilt.  Software then patches the pictures together into the Gigapan.

I’ve seen similar systems homebrewed.  I think it wouldn’t be too hard to do this open-source, including the hardware.  I’d probably want to use steppers rather than servos just to make sure there wasn’t any jitter while the camera is shooting, but damping might solve that.  But an Arduino based system would be pretty easy to do, if you just get the encoder wheels to work on it.

Yet another project I don’t have time for.  Sigh.  YAPIDHTF.  It’s my new word, since I seem to need it frequently.