Building a fire-fighting robot
I’ve been looking for a reason to build another robot. A few weeks ago I found a list of robot competitions around the world. Ignoring the battle bot options, geography and capability led to me to the Penn State Abington Fire-Fighting Robot Contest: The objective of the fire-fighting robot contest is to design a computer-controlled […]
Taking Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course
This week marks the beginning of Stanford’s introductory course in Artificial Intelligence, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. This is the same course being given live at Stanford’s campus as CS221. Enrollment is free, and includes video lectures, quizzes, and (optionally) homework and exams. I have signed up for the full boat, they say […]
How to hack the bodybugg to work without a subscription fee
In my previous post I talked about the bodybugg and how I used it for body recomposition. Many people that look at the bodybugg hesitate due to the cost: first for the hardware itself, and second for the website subscription fee. The website displays those pretty graphs and totals that I showed earlier. More importantly, […]
Living with a Bodybugg: Lessons in calories, metabolism, and weight loss
In August of 2010 I purchased a Bodybugg in order to help my weight loss efforts. The Bodybugg measures calorie burn. By pairing it with a food log, I was able to figure out how to make calories out greater than calories in. I have been wearing it ever since for maintenance, and it’s done […]
Robot Fest 2010
Today the family and I went to Robot Fest, held at the National Electronics Museum. I had been looking forward to this for a long time, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were any number of fun displays and workshops, including in no particular order: compressed-air rocket launches, Lego robots to control and build, a vocoder […]