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Rubén Romero: My test results – Nokia N900

- 12 hours and 32 minutes ago

Thanks everyone for your questions to my previous post on this subject. Now the results:

Everyone should install the Maemo Extras application catalog. Just unleash your phone by installing this repository.

After you are done installing this we go to the questions:

How is XMPP working out?
Good, so go doing your Facebooking or Jabbering everywhere. not to speak you Google Taking
The “Unlocks with ’sudo gainroot’” needs a footnote:
* you need to enable the Maemo Extras application catalog (see above) and install “rootsh”
* or, alternatively (and less conveniently), you need to enable R&D mode with the flasher command-line tool on a PC, with the N900 connected over USB
Does the browser (fennec iirc?) include support for playing back Ogg video and audio?
Ogg support can be added as an additional download. You do have the real Firefox now, or so claims Nokia.
Telepathy supports skype? Haven’t heard of this, but it would be _really_ cool!
As written in my post “you have skype, but no skype app which is a plus.”Â Yes telepathy handles skype as it handles any other protocol. MSN call support is coming soon as well.
I’d really like to know how easy is to exploit all the cool features of N900 in a self made program (with Maemo SDK or maybe QT 4.6).Â I mean, the N900 has a built in camera, AGPS, accelerometer, FM-transmitter and so on... is it possibile to write a custom program that uses one or more of these things?Â For example (it is really just a weird example) if I want to take a photo with the camera each time the phone is “shaked”, I could do it?Â If I want to save my GPS coordinates every 30 minutes in a text file, I could do it?
I guess I won’t be answering that question in this life time… If (and only if) I ever try programming anything for maemo it will be in Python. I guess you can do pretty neat things with QT + other libs as this application shows. A detailed example of that app here (De-Spotify related).
Test a/v calling on gtalk,jabber using telepathy works or not?
tried once and didn’t work. It could have been me or my other peer either being retarded or just using Linux with the wrong sound config (experienced it before and it had nothing to do with i.e. skype being wrong)
I have seen many people talking about unexpected errors, slow performance, etc. What´s your overall experience?
I experience it as the easiest piece of tech I have ever had. It really is fast and gives me no headaches.
Can you install .deb packages that are valid for a standard PC?
I guess I should elaborate in this question but I won’t. A deb package made in your PC for the N900 architecture (armel) should work. But a standard x86 deb will not.
Can you install pidgin?
Why on earth would I want to do that? Telepathy is totally integrated in my contact list and relevant applications… Pidgin in this context would be like having a skype application: Just overhead! Think of this as a new approach at the way you communicate, not a reproduction of an ineffective way of doing things.
I assume you mention OpenSSH from a client perspective. Can the N900 run the server side? (not sure that makes sense, but I am curious)
It can and it rocks.
How many apps you feel it can run in parallel before it feels bloated?
I have my screen full of phone related apps, browser windows, multimedia stuff and random apps (terminal, chess, camera) and it still does not feel bloated at all. I really mean it. I never get irritated by this phone!
For how much you bought it and from where i am in Egypt and i want to buy one?
I did not buy it. I am just borrowing it (sort of) from a friendÂ @ Nokia.
Its usefulness ...
It helps me being more effectiveÂ when I am on the move and at the office. So it really is useful. Not to speak of its awesomeness when enjoying my private time (i.e. camera & video features)
I’ve ordered one that wont arrive for another month =( A few questions related to barcodes. Can you take a picture of a barcode show it full screen and have scanners scan it?
I read somewhere that you should be able to do so. Google it mate. I don’t need that and really don’t have time to test that, sorry.
Is there a barcode scanner tool? Bonus for price comparison tools. Sometimes I’ll be browsing used game stores and see a game fairly cheap and wonder whether I can get it cheaper elsewhere.
Read Â questions #14
If it isn’t too much trouble, I would like to know how well emacs works on the device, I notice it doesn’t have a meta key.
Have given emacs way too many chances in other devices to make my life harder in this one. I am really not the right person to ask as I do not feel emacs works at all anywhere (and the same goes for vi/vim so do not hate the player, hate the game!
Web browsing while playing music (recorded or streaming); heard complaints that playback may become choppy.
Works like a charm even under crappy wi-fi conditions.
Listening to music over BT stereo headphones and answering calls. Voice commands over BT?
Lost my BT headset for a while ago and I really am not interested in buying a new one. If someone has experience on this please answer in the comments.
Video calling. I know it’s not there yet in the integrated skype. But what about Fring or Gtalk or Ytalk?
Tried skype and it worked like a charm. Do not use any of the others, sorry.
Voice announcements of incoming messages while listening to music over BT?
No idea. Read #18
Smoothness of video playback, whether recorded or streaming? (Again, heard complaints of choppiness.)
I recorded the audio and video at a concert last weekend and it really worked well. It might just be me and my lack of interest in video/audio quality in general.
Does it have what it takes to play h264 videos in mkv containers?
How can i test that?
Can you try different resolutions?
Why should I ever wish that? Drop me the command and I will run them
How is the sound quality on mp3, ogg and flac files?
Great. Nokia ere is king among mobile producers. Nothing can even compare to it, specialy when playing from the speakers. When using headphones it just rocks!
How is the performance like for traditional desktop apps(amarok, akregator, openoffice.org)?
I dreamed of installing the debian extra for maemo but never got far with it. Now I really do not feel like blowing up my preciously nice working N900.
How is the performance of the â€˜big’ desktop environments (xfce, gnome, kde)
Hope I never have the time to go through that operation so I won’t have an answer.
I’d like to see tested is how well this device works as a phone while all the other crazy hacks are going on.
Works like a charm!
Test call quality, battery life, address book functionality, etc.
Cal quality is good. Battery life could be better (will last one day and two at the most)Â Â and Address Book functionality is very nice specially if you think about how well integrated everything is. I have had several smartphones over the years and never seen anything like this.
I am curious how well the calendar works, and more importantly, how well it synchronizes with Google Calendar.
I’ve heard it works like a charmÂ although I do not use Gcalender so I couldn’t tell.
Does it run X11?
I want to know but I don’t. It might do as I can connect to external machines with ssh -X and get apps running on the N900 (such as eclipse)
In other words, is it pie-in-the-sky to expect to use it as a full-blown Linux box?
It ain’t a box, it’s a pone with debian. Isn’t that enough for you? It certainly works for me!

Thanks for reading!

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6,4,config,googles,google

I Love You, Phillip Morris

Guardian Unlimited

- 14 hours and 27 minutes ago

Jim Carrey is a fraudster who falls for Ewan McGregor in a Texas jail. Peter Bradshaw enjoys an intriguing, offbeat comedy

Jim Carrey's rubbery, hyperreal face achieves a sheen of panic and desperate neediness in this stranger-than-fiction comedy drawn from real life. Steven Russell (Carrey) is a fraudster, a hypnotically plausible fantasist, and a formerly married ex-cop who comes out as a gay man, before finally getting sent to jail in Texas for insurance scams, and there finding the love of his life. This is the shy, young innocent Phillip Morris, nicely played by Ewan McGregor, who, like the rest of the world, trusts the exuberant and charming Steven implicitly. Morris himself tells his own story in a seductive, honeyed voiceover, rather like Reese Witherspoon's narration in Alexander Payne's Election.

Electrified by his new romance, Steven redoubles his fanatical determination to trick and manipulate the world around him to get what he believes he wants: Phillip. When his own prison term ends, Steven poses as a lawyer to get Phillip released on licence â€“ forging documents, faking voices on the phone, and maintaining a series of inspired bluffs â€“ and then constructs a massive, fraudulent career in both law and finance so that they can live together in luxury as a super-rich gay couple. But it isn't long before the police close in, and Steven has to demonstrate his almost superhuman talents for evading the law: shabby deceptions theoretically consecrated to his love for his beloved Phillip, who hasn't grasped how he has been made complicit and co-dependent in Steven's delusional career of lies.

This movie, from writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa â€“ who wrote the Billy Bob Thornton comedy Bad Santa â€“ is intriguing, at least partly because it is not immediately clear what it is centrally about. Steven's own lifelong identity crisis, which may stem from the traumatic discovery of having been adopted, has a parallel in the film. Is it about gay romance? Is it about a con man's criminal career? Are we, the audience, supposed to trust Steven Russell, to take him at his own estimation of himself?

Not exactly, no. Even calling him a fraudster doesn't describe the character Carrey plays. His compulsive lying is an addictive habit like kleptomania; it forces him to live in a growing web of relationships based on bad faith, from which more scams will be needed to escape. Like many liars, Steven has developed a lovably roguish personality as a cover for when he gets caught and has to admit guilt, and as a face-saving device to allow his dupes to grimace and pretend they sort of suspected as much. Steven is not a con man in the sense of a cool, rational grifter who knows exactly what he is doing and why. He is in the grip of a compulsion, which distracts him from a batsqueak of terror that he doesn't know what or who he is. Steven seizes messianically on his gay identity and his gay love for Phillip Morris. The title of the film is a kind of personal mission statement. But to the very end, this grand passion may not entirely explain his behaviour.

Steven's soon-to-be-ex-wife Debbie, played by Leslie Mann, asks a doctor if Steven's "gay thing and the stealing" are part of the same disorder. Steven's then-boyfriend Jimmy, played by Rodrigo Santoro, is disgusted by this homophobic remark. And yet Debbie, in her blundering way, has come close to something. It is not Steven's gayness that is of a piece with his stealing, but his pretending to be straight, and then pretending that his embrace of a gay identity is the solution to all his personal problems. What counts is the deception, and the way it melts into self-deception.

With its chequered and meandering story-path, I Love You Phillip Morris reminded me surreally of serial killer films like David Fincher's Zodiac, Cédric Kahn's Roberto Succo and Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine â€“ about criminals whose modus operandi and repetitive patterns of behaviour look like a rationally pursued criminal "career" â€“ but it is a career that could digress or disappear at any moment.

Carrey and McGregor certainly succeed in making it all funny. Carrey's anti-hero is, after all, a very clever man, who gets away with a lot of stuff because of a genuine mental ability, which he unfortunately supplements with lies. (There's a nice montage sequence in which Steven tells a "lawyer" joke at the office, and then overhears dozens of people retelling that same joke badly, revealing their various crass prejudices.)

And there is something funny and touching about this anarchic, abortive love affair, a chaotically doomed relationship that neither of the principals understand, and it is the very muddled and messy quality of this relationship that announces that it is drawn from real life. Steven's bluffs and blags are arguably just a crazily magnified version of the fake-it-till-you-make-it routine that many entirely honest people find themselves needing to use. Poor Steven does see himself as basically one of these decent, honest types. "Sometimes you've got to shave a little off the puzzle-piece to make it fit," he muses. The puzzle fits together very entertainingly here.

Rating: 4/5

Peter Bradshaw guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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4,love,medias,movies,prisons

Best Of GDC 2010 - #1: The Entire Show, More Or Less

Connexion automatiquement à l'interface de Plesk

What does an insect see?

CiteULike: Borelli's watchlist

- 19 hours and 20 minutes ago

J Exp Biol, Vol. 212, No. 17. (1 September 2009), pp. 2721-2729.

The compound eye of the bee is an array of photoreceptors, each at an angle to the next, and therefore it catches an image of the outside world just as does the human eye, except that the image is not inverted. Eye structure, however, tells us little about what the bee actually abstracts from the panorama. Moreover, it is not sufficient to observe that bees recognise patterns, because they may be responding to only small parts of them. The only way we can tell what the bee actually detects is to train bees to come to simple patterns or distinguish between two patterns and then present the trained bees with test patterns to see what they have learned. After much training and numerous tests, it was possible to identify the parameters in the patterns that the bees detected and remembered, to study the responses of the trained bees to unfamiliar patterns and to infer the steps in the visual processing mechanism. We now have a simple mechanistic explanation for many observations that for almost a century have been explained by analogy with cognitive behaviour of higher animals. A re-assessment of the capabilities of the bee is required. Below the photoreceptors, the next components of the model mechanism are small feature detectors that are one, two or three ommatidia wide that respond to light intensity, direction of passing edges or orientation of edges displayed by parameters in the pattern. At the next stage, responses of the feature detectors for area and edges are summed in various ways in each local region of the eye to form several types of local internal feature totals, here called cues. The cues are the units of visual memory in the bee. At the next stage, summation implies that there is one of each type in each local eye region and that local details of the pattern are lost. Each type of cue has its own identity, a scalar quantity and a position. The coincidence of the cues in each local region of the eye is remembered as a retinotopic label for a landmark. Bees learn landmark labels at large angles to each other and use them to identify a place and find the reward. The receptors, feature detectors, cues and coincidences of labels for landmarks at different angles, correspond to a few letters, words and sentences and a summary description for a place. Shapes, objects and cognitive appraisal of the image have no place in bee vision. Several factors prevented the advance in understanding until recently. Firstly, until the mid-century, so little was known that no mechanisms were proposed. At that time it was thought that the mechanism of the visual processing could be inferred intuitively from a successful training alone or from quantitative observations of the percentage of correct choices after manipulation of the patterns displayed. The components were unknown and there were too many unidentified channels of causation in parallel (too many cues learned at the same time) for this method to succeed. Secondly, for 100 years, the criterion of success of the bees was their landing at or near the reward hole in the centre of the pattern. At the moment of choice, therefore, the angle subtended by the pattern at the eye of the bees was very large, 100-130 deg., with the result that a large part of the eye learned a number of cues and several labels on the target. As a result, in critical tests the bees would not respond but just went away, so that the components of the system could not be identified. Much effort was therefore wasted. These problems were resolved when the size of the target was reduced to about the size of one or two fields of the cues and landmark labels, 40-45 deg., and the trained bees were tested to see whether they could or could not recognise the test targets. 10.1242/jeb.030916
Adrian Horridge

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1,images,test,trains,train

BBC launches massively parallel Tweet-in

A parallel and incremental algorithm for efficient unique signature discovery on DNA databases.

BMC Bioinformatics

- 1 days and 5 hours ago

Publication Date: 2010 Mar 16 PMID: 20230647Authors: Lee, H. P. - Sheu, T. F. - Tang, C. Y.Journal: BMC BioinformaticsABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: DNA signatures are distinct short nucleotide sequences that provide valuable information that is used for various purposes, such as the design of Polymerase Chain Reaction primers and microarray experiments. Biologists usually use a discovery algorithm to find unique signatures from DNA databases, and then apply the signatures to microarray experiments. Such discovery algorithms require to set some input factors, such as signature length l and mismatch tolerance d, which affect the discovery results. However, suggestions about how to select proper factor values are rare, especially when an unfamiliar DNA database is used. In most cases, biologists typically select factor values based on experience, or even by guessing. If the discovered result is unsatisfactory, biologists change the input factors of the algorithm to obtain a new result. This process is repeated until a proper result is obtained. Implicit signatures under the discovery condition (l,d) are defined as the signatures of length = d. A discovery algorithm that could discover all implicit signatures, such that those that meet the requirements concerning the results, would be more helpful than one that depends on trial and error. However, existing discovery algorithms do not address the need to discover all implicit signatures. RESULTS: This work proposes two discovery algorithms: the consecutive multiple discovery (CMD) algorithm and the parallel and incremental signature discovery (PISD) algorithm. The PISD algorithm is designed for efficiently discovering signatures under a certain discovery condition. The algorithm finds new results by using previously discovered results as candidates, rather than by using the whole database. The PISD algorithm further increases discovery efficiency by applying parallel computing. The CMD algorithm is designed to discover implicit signatures efficiently. It uses the PISD algorithm as a kernel routine to discover implicit signatures efficiently under every feasible discovery condition. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed algorithms discover implicit signatures efficiently. The presented CMD algorithm has up to 97% less execution time than typical sequential discovery algorithms in the discovery of implicit signatures in experiments, when eight processing cores are used.post to: CiteULike

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tolerance,bmc,how tos,databases,journals

The dynamic genome of Hydra.

Nature

- 1 days and 5 hours ago

Publication Date: 2010 Mar 14 PMID: 20228792Authors: Chapman, J. A. - Kirkness, E. F. - Simakov, O. - Hampson, S. E. - Mitros, T. - Weinmaier, T. - Rattei, T. - Balasubramanian, P. G. - Borman, J. - Busam, D. - Disbennett, K. - Pfannkoch, C. - Sumin, N. - Sutton, G. G. - Viswanathan, L. D. - Walenz, B. - Goodstein, D. M. - Hellsten, U. - Kawashima, T. - Prochnik, S. E. - Putnam, N. H. - Shu, S. - Blumberg, B. - Dana, C. E. - Gee, L. - Kibler, D. F. - Law, L. - Lindgens, D. - Martinez, D. E. - Peng, J. - Wigge, P. A. - Bertulat, B. - Guder, C. - Nakamura, Y. - Ozbek, S. - Watanabe, H. - Khalturin, K. - Hemmrich, G. - Franke, A. - Augustin, R. - Fraune, S. - Hayakawa, E. - Hayakawa, S. - Hirose, M. - Hwang, J. S. - Ikeo, K. - Nishimiya-Fujisawa, C. - Ogura, A. - Takahashi, T. - Steinmetz, P. R. - Zhang, X. - Aufschnaiter, R. - Eder, M. K. - Gorny, A. K. - Salvenmoser, W. - Heimberg, A. M. - Wheeler, B. M. - Peterson, K. J. - Bottger, A. - Tischler, P. - Wolf, A. - Gojobori, T. - Remington, K. A. - Strausberg, R. L. - Venter, J. C. - Technau, U. - Hobmayer, B. - Bosch, T. C. - Holstein, T. W. - Fujisawa, T. - Bode, H. R. - David, C. N. - Rokhsar, D. S. - Steele, R. E.Journal: NatureThe freshwater cnidarian Hydra was first described in 1702 and has been the object of study for 300 years. Experimental studies of Hydra between 1736 and 1744 culminated in the discovery of asexual reproduction of an animal by budding, the first description of regeneration in an animal, and successful transplantation of tissue between animals. Today, Hydra is an important model for studies of axial patterning, stem cell biology and regeneration. Here we report the genome of Hydra magnipapillata and compare it to the genomes of the anthozoan Nematostella vectensis and other animals. The Hydra genome has been shaped by bursts of transposable element expansion, horizontal gene transfer, trans-splicing, and simplification of gene structure and gene content that parallel simplification of the Hydra life cycle. We also report the sequence of the genome of a novel bacterium stably associated with H. magnipapillata. Comparisons of the Hydra genome to the genomes of other animals shed light on the evolution of epithelia, contractile tissues, developmentally regulated transcription factors, the Spemann-Mangold organizer, pluripotency genes and the neuromuscular junction.post to: CiteULike

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journals,discovery,evolution,evolutions,reproduction

Woot How-to: Let there be Light! (for your Rovio)

Hack a Day

- 1 days and 6 hours ago

Before we get into the how-to, we felt it would be appropriate to explain a little bit about how this came to be. As many of you may remember, a couple of months ago we attended CES 2010. While there, we also attended the It Won’t Stay in Vegas Blogger party and ended up meeting the guys from Woot. After all of us spent a little bit of time appreciating the open bar, a group of us stood ended up standing around and talking shop for a while. All of a sudden, a member of our group, Jeremy Grosser, proposed the idea that Hackaday and Woot form a partnership. Basically, they would give us a heads up on what they are going to sell and we would write up a how-to on how to do something cool or useful with that product. Then, when the day came for Woot to sell the product, we would post our how-to. What you are reading right now just so happens to be that idea in action, the first official partnership between Hackaday and Woot. In this how-to, we’ll be taking apart the Wowwee Rovio mobile webcam robot, adding some super-bright LEDs for better see-in-the-dark action, and see how some software called RoboRealm can give it a little bit of artificial intelligence.

If don’t have a Rovio yet, you should probably head over to Woot and pick one up so you can follow along. Also, be sure to pick up a copy of RoboRealm at deals.woot while you’re at it. It is important to note that while writing this how-to, we used a modified design of the Rovio Head-Mounted LED hack, posted to RoboCommunity by [Rudolph].

Parts

- 6 super-bright white LEDs (Ours were rated for 3.3v with an intensity of 7000mcd.)
- 1 2N2907 PNP Transistor (We found ours in a 15 transistor combo pack from RadioShack.)
- 1 10ohm resistor
- 1 2.2k ohm resistor
- 22g solid hookup wire
- RadioShack 3×2x1″ Project Enclosure (We used the plastic back panel as a place to mount our LEDs.)
- 5mm LED holders (Optional. We ended up using them to mount our LEDs in their poorly drilled holes.)
- Heat-shrink tubing (Optional, but recommended.)
- A small strip of perfboard

We picked up most of our parts from RadioShack, but these parts are so common that you should be able to pick them up from any electronics components store.

Disassembly

The first step towards giving our Rovio some much needed extra light is, of course, to disassemble it. After turning the Rovio upside down, remove the six phillips-head screws and carefully remove the top shell to gain access to the Rovio’s internals. While you won’t be able to fully detach the top shell, you should be able to lay it next to the bottom part of the Rovio as seen above.

Inside of the Rovio, there are two main PCBs, the control board and the power supply board. For the purposes of this how-to, we will only need to modify the power supply board. To gain access to the power supply board, simply remove the two phillips-head screws that secure the board vertically. After you gain access to the board, you will then need to identify the ground and positive pads on the PCB. We will be tapping into these pads later to power our array of LEDs. One other item of interest to us is the white wire leading from the control board to the LED headlight board. This wire will allow us to control our new headlights through the Rovio’s web interface.

After firing up your soldering iron, you’ll need to solder two wires onto the power supply board. As you can see above, there are two areas with tiny little holes, allowing for easy access to both GND and VCC. After you have soldered both of these wires, screw the board back in and then turn your attention towards the white wire mentioned previously. After cutting the white wire, solder a length of hookup wire to the end of it and insulate it with appropriately sized heat-shrink tubing. Also, it’s probably a good idea to remove the LED headlight board entirely. This gives you three openings to run your wires out of from the Rovio to our new headlight panel. After you’ve removed the board, you can cut the wires leading to both the infrared LED and receiver. These function as a forward facing “radar” to alert the user if there are any obstacles ahead. We decided to salvage ours by placing them both in the new panel that we will soon be creating. If you choose to salvage your infrared “radar” as well, then remember to solder extension wires between the appropriate leads and the LED and receiver. We actually used some telephone tap connectors (from RadioShack) to extend the three wires leading to the infrared receiver, but soldering should work just fine. Now that you’re finished with all of the internal modifications to the Rovio, we can move on to the circuitry behind this hack.

The Circuit

In order to make sure that we can control our replacement LED headlights through Rovio’s web interface, we need to build a circuit that will detect when the headlights are triggered via the web interface and activate our headlights accordingly. To do this, we’ll use a PNP transistor to switch the ground of our headlight circuit. As you can see from the schematic above, the white wire that we mentioned earlier will be connected to the base of the transistor via a 2.2k resistor, the ground from the power supply board will be connected to the collector of the transistor, and the emitter of the transistor will be connected to the ground of the parallel array of LEDs. If you want to, you could probably add a few more LEDs to this design. Just remember, if you change the number or type of the LEDs, you will have to recalculate the value of the current-limiting resistor between VCC and the positive pin of the parallel LED array. After we’ve reviewed our schematic and we’re comfortable with it, we should be ready to breadboard.

As you can see, there really isn’t that much to our circuit as far as components go. The black and red wires come directly from the power supply board. Our voltage reading was right around 6.5v. Please note that your voltage may vary depending on the charge of your Rovio’s NiMH battery. The green wire was soldered to the white wire inside of the Rovio, and controls whether the transistor lets the ground flow to the LEDs. We found that the best way to test this circuit while breadboarding was to turn on the Rovio and turn on and off the headlights using the web interface. After confirming that the circuit works consistently, you can go ahead and solder the circuit onto some perfboard and connect to the Rovio.

The circuit really doesn’t take up much space on the perfboard. We decided to use the extra space on our board as a makeshift terminal block to extend the infrared LED. While soldering the circuit onto the perfboard, be sure to remember the orientation of your transistor. If you accidentally put it in backwards, you could switch the collector and emitter, burning out the transistor. We mention this only because we actually did it the first time we assembled our board, and we ended up having to swap in a new transistor before reassembling the board. After you’ve assembled and verified that your circuit works, we can move on to assembling our headlight panel.

Drilling and Wiring

On your blank panel, carefully drill 8 holes in any configuration you would like. When drilling your holes, be sure to use a 3/16″ drill bit. While it is actually slightly smaller than a 5mm LED, you can rotate the drill once or twice around to widen the hole. The main thing is that you don’t want to make the holes too large for the LEDs, which, incidentally, we ended up doing. One of them was so wide that we had to change the placement of our LEDs to make sure that they all more or less fit.

I don’t think that I need to get into too much detail here, but the major thing to remember is that the LEDs need to be wired in parallel. Also, be sure that you are connecting cathode to cathode and anode to anode, otherwise the whole circuit just won’t work. After you’ve completely assembled the panel, attach the wires the ground from your perfboard and the VCC from the power supply board to the circuit, and use the web interface to test that the LEDs get switched on when they’re supposed to be. If you decided to salvage the infrared “radar”, don’t forget to attach the infrared LED and receiver to the board in the two holes left over.

After you’ve finished with the drilling and wiring, you should be ready to attach the panel to the Rovio. While it was a little tricky for us, we were able to epoxy the panel to the underside of the front of the Rovio so that it looked like it was vertically mounted.

Now that your Rovio can see better in darker situations, lets take a look at RoboRealm.

RoboRealm

While investigating all of the different things that we could do with our Rovio, we stumbled upon a piece of software called RoboRealm. RoboRealm allows you to take video input from any webcam, including the Rovio, and run it through any number of different modules to process the images. After the images are processed, the software can even see if any pre-defined conditions are met, and if they are it will instruct the robot to act accordingly. Combine that visual input with the audio input/output on the Rovio, and you can do some pretty cool stuff. The interesting part about this software is that it officially supports the Rovio out of the box. We’ve had a chance to mess around with it a little bit, and as far as we can tell, it seems like pretty powerful software.

We already know all of the cool things that we want to do with this software and our Rovio, but we’re curious, what would you do with it? Leave us your answer in the comments, and if we see something that we find truly inspiring, we’ll do some research, write it up, and post a how-to explaining how to do it. Who knows, there might even be a brand new Rovio and a free copy of RoboRealm in it for the winner too…

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6,1,3,2,robots

The effect of monastrol on the processive motility of a dimeric Kinesin-5-head/Kinesin-1-stalk chimera.

MacUpdate bundle offers Parallels, other apps for $50

Topological frustration in betaalpha-repeat proteins: Sequence diversity modulates the conserved folding mechanisms of alpha/beta/alpha sandwich proteins.

Journal of Molecular Biology

- 1 days and 13 hours ago

Publication Date: 2010 Mar 10 PMID: 20226790Authors: Hills, R. D. Jr - Kathuria, S. V. - Wallace, L. A. - Day, I. J. - Brooks, C. L. 3rd - Matthews, C. R.Journal: J Mol BiolThe thermodynamic hypothesis of Anfinsen postulates that structures and stabilities of globular proteins are determined by their amino acid sequences. Chain topology, however, is known to influence the folding reaction, in that motifs with a preponderance of local interactions typically fold more rapidly than those with a larger fraction of non-local interactions. Together, the topology and sequence can modulate the energy landscape and influence the rate at which the protein folds to the native conformation. To explore the relationship of sequence and topology in the folding of betaalpha-repeat proteins, which are dominated by local interactions, a combined experimental and simulation analysis was performed on two members of the flavodoxin-like, alpha/beta/alpha sandwich fold. Spo0F and the N-terminal receiver domain of NtrC (NT-NtrC) have similar topologies but low sequence identity, enabling a test of the effects of sequence on folding. Experimental results demonstrated that both response-regulator proteins fold via parallel channels through highly structured sub-millisecond intermediates before accessing their cis prolyl peptide bond-containing native conformations. Global analysis of the experimental results preferentially places these intermediates off the productive folding pathway. Sequence-sensitive Go-model simulations conclude that frustration in the folding in Spo0F, corresponding to the appearance of the off-pathway intermediate, reflects competition for intra-subdomain van der Waals contacts between its N-and C-terminal subdomains. The extent of transient, premature structure appears to correlate with the number of isoleucine, leucine and valine (ILV) side-chains that form a large sequence-local cluster involving the central beta-sheet and helices alpha2, alpha3 and alpha4. The failure to detect the off-pathway species in the simulations of NT-NtrC may reflect the reduced number of ILV side-chains in its corresponding hydrophobic cluster. The location of the hydrophobic clusters in the structure may also be related to the differing functional properties of these response regulators. Comparison with the results of previous experimental and simulation analyses on the homologous CheY argues that prematurely-folded unproductive intermediates are a common property of the betaalpha-repeat motif.post to: CiteULike

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