Tech Digest Daily Roundup – 17 May 2007
Forget complex universal remotes, I’d rather control my TV with a device that looks like the joysticks I used to fwap in my youth playing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. Here’s one, modelled on the Atari 2600 joystick. It’s mighty purdy.
Moving onto robot vacuum cleaners (something Atari resisted the urge to when the 2600 was phased out), did you know that Procter & Gamble had plans for a home cleaning bot? They’ve just come to light, but only because the patent has been abandoned, sadly.
Y’know those chatbots that you can talk to? The ones trying to pass the Turing test, and usually failing? Well, someone’s had the frankly long-overdue idea of getting two of them to talk to one another. Click here to read the surreal flirtation between ALICE and Jabberwacky.
More robo-fun: how about a 59-foot Gundam robot? I’m not trying to sell it to you, don’t worry – and besides, your living room’s too small for it. But if you go to the Fuji entertainment park in Japan, you can check this one out (pictured).
Google doesn’t make 59-foot Gundam robots. Not yet, anyway. But it has got a nifty Experimental Search site that lets you try out the ideas it’s trying out. If that makes sense. Timeline and map views, keyboard shortcuts, and new flavours of right-hand or left-hand navigation (I think the latter is what people do when Googling for filthy adult sites).
