Group items tagged

LEGOs and Lincoln Logs are for Luddites. Sifteo cubes are the new building blocks. Each cube has a 128-pixel color LCD screen, wireless connectivity, a 32-bit ARM microprocessor, and an accelerometer that responds to tilting and stacking. You can arrange them to create everything from vocabulary puzzles to building challenges, all of which can be enjoyed by as many people as you can crowd around the coffee table.

Sifteo founders Jeevan Kalanithi and David Merrill previewed the cubes at TED 2009 when they were grad students at MIT. The cubes debuted at CES this year. The design marries classic tactility with new hardware and software. “Sifteo cubes are the first gaming solution to deliver truly hands-on play,” Merrill said. “[The cubes combine] the latest in embedded computing and sensing technology with a timeless play style.”

Organizing in Evernote

Access Information Anywhere, No Thumb Drive Necessary As a student, you’re all over the place: in class on your mobile device, at the gym, in your dorm room, at the library, etc. With Evernote, files, notes and documents are available to you everywhere – on your phone, your desktop, and anywhere you have an internet connection. That means that if you’re working in a computer lab, all your research is there. If you lost your thumb drive before your presentation, you can pull up your PowerPoint from a friend’s laptop. Having everywhere access to your Evernote account also means you can make great use of the in-between time we all tend to have. Whether you’re waiting for the bus, or for class to start, you can make quick edits to anything you’re working on. Evernote puts everything in one place, and makes it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, no matter where you are. If you’re doing research, alone or in a group, Evernote saves time and helps keep you organized.

If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard the news, Amazon debuted its $200 7-inch tablet, the Kindle Fire, this week. Make no mistake: It’s no iPad. There’s no front-facing or rear-facing camera, and it’s only got 8 GB of storage. But it’s not meant to be an iPad. It’s a completely different kind of tablet, designed for the pure consumer. That is, it’s designed for consumptive behavior: reading, listening to music, watching video content. The lack of local storage isn’t an issue, either; it’s meant to take advantage of the cloud with services like Amazon’s $80 yearly Prime service, as well as Amazon Cloud Drive. And the smaller form factor makes it extra portable, easy to whip out on the bus or the subway (much like a Kindle).

App Inventor for Android Create apps for your phone! Creating an App Inventor app begins in your browser, where you design how the app will look. Then, like fitting together puzzle pieces, you set your app's behavior. All the while, through a live connection between your computer and your phone, your app appears on your phone. Read more... App Inventor is a part of G

App Inventor is a part of Google Labs

On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.

When DIYers combine those cheap, powerful tools with the collaborative potential of the Internet, they can come up with the kinds of innovations that once sprang only from big-budget R&D labs. In 2009, a PhD student named Daniel Reetz turned two Canon PowerShot A590s into an improvised high-speed book scanner. He detailed the project on a website, DIYbookscanner.org, where readers have since posted hundreds of tweaks, suggestions, upgrades, and entirely new designs. The open source MPGuino project, which uses an Arduino microcontroller to track gas consumption as you drive, has inspired a small community of fans who help refine and customize the gizmo.