Japanese Moon Base!

I read about this months ago, but having recently started this blog I figure what better place to discuss it?


So the basic idea is Japan hopes to have large humanoid robots on the moon by 2015, 660 pound behemoth bots with tracks instead of legs, But humanoid none the less. These bots will be equipped with seismographs and humanoid arms for gathering and collecting sample that will be returned to Earth via rocket. The robots will be controlled from Earth, but they'll also be imbued with their own kind of machine intelligence, making decisions on their own and operating with a high degree of autonomy. These will be surveyor bots designed to pave the way for base construction. They hope to finish construction by 2020.

above: Artists conception of partial base.

below: Official concept design for initial robots

"Those initial surveyor bots will pave the way for the construction of the unmanned moon base near the lunar south pole, which the robots will construct for themselves. That base will be solar powered and provide a working/living space future robot colonizers, as well as -- presumably -- a jumping off point for future human moon dwellers." - popsci.com

above: Officially released concept

Any thoughts or opinions on this subject? Discussion is highly encouraged :)

SNES The right way.

So while surfing the web I came across this amazing little mod.

That, My friends is an SNES controller with an SNES emulator built into it, Plug it in Via USB and you can bring your Super Nintendo anywhere USB is available. Now I think that  nintendo should hop on this band wagon and release all of its older systems in this fashion, or at least something similar, thoughts?

Quote from Hack a Day:

"Want to take your SNES emulation to your friend’s house? [Chris] worked out a way to fit the important parts inside of an original Super Nintendo controller. He removed the case from a 4GB thumb drive as well as a USB hub. Using a RetroZone kit he gave the controller a USB interface. By soldering the thumb drive and RetroZone board directly to the hub he’s reduced the package down to just one cable. Everything fits inside the controller case and now when you plug it into the computer you can fire up the ROMs you copied from your original cartridges that are stored on the thumb drive."

Original Link:

http://hackaday.com/2009/12/22/snes-system-in-the-controller/

Simple Truths

People seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People…they don’t write anymore - they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.