Amazon Price Helpers

Amazon will refund you the price difference 30 days after you buy an item.  These sites will monitor the price and email you if the price drops lower than you bought it for.

Flamingo World’s price watcher has a nice interface which lets you preview the item after you enter the item number

RefundPlease is another Amazon price watcher.  The site claims to be working on compatibility with other sites, so keep your eye on this.

Webgadgets will show you a graph history of the prices on Amazon, as well as listing entire Amazon wishlists.  Price histories are better for more popular items since the prices seem to be tracked whenever someone views the graph for the item.  Also offers rss feeds for item prices.

PS3 Hacking Sites

List of sites with ps3 hacking news / forums

http://www.ps3hax.net/forums.php

http://forums.qj.net/f-ps3-hacks-exploits-and-homebrew-282.html/

http://www.ps3-hacks.com/forums/

http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewforum.php?f=25

http://www.ps3news.com/

Tensegrity

 Straw and rubberband tensegrity structure

 

http://georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/straw-tensegrity.html 

Siooma

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/08/my-lunch-with-fester.html

Wii D2CKey Installation Video

Guy installs the D2CKey Wii mod chip with in under 18 minutes. Pretty impressive considering this chip has 30 tiny connection which need to be made. D2CKey and the FlexPCB will run you ~$60 + s/h.

http://www.psxcare.com/product.php?xProd=725

GNU Octave 3.0

GNU Octave releases new version 3.0. Octave is a free open source Matlab-like command line tool. Works for Linux and OS X. Windows users will have to wait for the Cygwin or Octave Forge version to be updated to 3.0.

Octave 2.9 / 3.0 Features (from Octave FAQ)

• integer types
• fixed point arithmetic
• sparse matrices
• Linear programming code based on GLPK
• 64-bit compilation support
• gzipped files and stream and consequently support of matlab v7 files
• better support for both msvc and mingw
• a fully compatiable MEX interface
• many many other minor features and compatibility changes

Compare this to Sage (University of Washington’s open source Matlab alternative)

Facebook Puzzles

Facebook seems to be recruiting a la GLAT (google labs aptitude test) with their own puzzles

Nerd Sniping / Infinite Grid of Resistors

 The problem: (comic from xkcd, problem taken from the GLAT, google labs aptitude test)

 

The solution method: (this is the solution for the diagonal resistance, but the knight’s move resistance can be calculated from their formulas at the end)

Dancing Robotic Blob

 ”Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US, and Hideki Kozima of the National Institute of Communications Technology (NICT) in Kyoto, Japan, programmed the squishy, yellow robot, called “Keepon”, to pick out the beat in a piece of music and move along in time. It can also track the rhythmic motion of a person or another object and move in time to that.”

 

http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/robots/dn11434-robots-with-rhythm-could-rock-your-world.html?feedId=robots_rss20

Robot Hand Detects Slippage

 UK researchers at Southampton University develop robotic hand which uses piezoelectric sensors to detect slippage.

http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/robots/dn10785-robotic-hand-has-a-builtin-slip-sense.html?feedId=robots_rss20