dev.SquareCows.com

[Viorel] wrote me about an interesting project he and his friends from Robofun developed during the 2011 Yahoo Open Hack in Bucharest, and won the Hacker’s Choice Award. The diorama becomes a physical representation of tour friends’ behaviours.

If you’re a both nature lover and a geek, you would certainly love the Yahoo Farm. The Yahoo Farm is a 60 cm wide diorama, sitting in your bedroom and bringing you online data from the Yahoo ecosystem.

For example, the wind mill rotation below is directly controlled by the wind speed outside (being connected to the Yahoo Weather API), the hand-painted backgrounds are switched according to the weather state, a new sheep is coming out of the barn each time one of your friends gets online on Yahoo Messenger, and each new email lights up a fruit in the Email Tree.

Give a look at the presentation used for the 90 seconds pitch during the event.

via [Technorama.ro]

#Ubuntu catching #RH in OS share: http://sqcows.com/2y

Arduino Forum User [UnaClocker] shared a cool hack on its Maytag dishwasher:

The control panel on the front of it died, it failed from corrosion getting into the laminated plastic PCB that it’s made up of. Not really repairable, just meant to be replaced, except that it’s a $150 part. From what I could find online, it seems to be a common failure, so why buy an overpriced part that’s just going to fail all over again?This is one of the things I love about the Arduino, it allows me to consider alternatives that I’d have NEVER been able to consider before. If I had to program a controller in assembly, or flat do it with just discrete chips, I’d have never considered this as an option. But with the Arduino, not only can I build my own controller, but it’s almost stupidly simple to do.

via [Arduino Forum] source [NeonSquirt] with Code!