Lego hacking tomfoolery

Image via WikipediaI love the way that there are so many other people out in the world who love to dig in to a beautiful piece of tech, in this case the LEGO Mindstorms RCX kit, and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things with it.

I got a set a couple of years ago from my girlfriend for Christmas, and at the time, because the bundled software wasn't the may west, I wasn't able to do a lot with it. Since then I've branched out a good bit into the wilds of open source code and custom hackery and discovered LeJOS (lejos.sourceforge.net). At it's core its a tiny JVM, based on (drum roll please) TinyVM . There are versions available for both the RCX, the older model that I've got, plus the NXT, the oh so wonderful beautiful shiny, fandiddlyastic new one that comes with aaaaaaalll sorts of goodies. There also other packages available in other languages, such as C#

What this gives you is the ability to write your own Java code to make the funny wee robots do damn near anything. The new version gives full access to the bluetooth commands (I think..) , so if you went with this OS, you'd be able to do fancy stuff like construct a motion detecting robot that looks like Johnny5 (God bless this woman, she is a LEGEND), that fires off lego rounds and chases people around the room. (I think I'm drooling on my keyboard...)

There's also a handy wee Eclipse plugin for both the RCX and the NXT that will do all of the interfacing between the machine and the brick for you, meaning that all the programmer has to do is write the damn code.

I've gotten all of the underlying basics up and running on my home system, or I had before it presented me with a delightful BSOD. Luckily I run an Ubuntu dual boot, and all of the shiny bits run under that too so I can just shift over. Whenever I actually get around to creating something useful is a whole other story. See related articles for other fun.



Note: Google just handed me this lovely little snippet of Lego-like goodness. Oh the fun we could have.....

Related articles

• Lego Warehouse
• Lego at MIT
  

Youngest Nova

This is pretty cool. Youngest supernova in the galaxy was recently found to have gone boom approx 140 years ago, called G1.9+0.3 and located about 26,000 light years away. There's a section in that article stating that "Astronomers have been puzzled, however, by a shortage of young supernova remnants in our galaxy. Only half a dozen have been found, as opposed to the more than 30—roughly two a century—predicted to exist." To my flighty imagination that conjures up fun images of star harvesting, artificial star longevity and so on. Or even fleets of Vogon destructors farting about in the sky, quietly demolishing solar systems while no-one watches.. Imagine the fun you could have spinning wild ideas around over a drink or fifteen:


AlienDude1: "My round"

AlienDude2: "Cheers buddy"

AlienDude1: "So what should we do with that crappy little yellow beastie sitting out in the Orion arm?"

AlienDude2: "Come on man, we've been working all week, no more work talk!!"

AlienDude1: "No seriously, we could have some fun with this one! Remember that time you got wasted and spread those black holes around the galactic core and used them as pockets for a giant pool game?"

AlienDude2: "How was I supposed to know they'd join up!! Not my fault the whole damn core is collapsing, blame Supply, they left them lying around!!"

.....

AlienDude2: "(Smirks) It was a good game though, right? Did you see that last trick shot? Knocked two gas giants and three moons into that star!! It flared like a bad fart after a hot curry! The rings were still spinning on the way in..."


AlienDude1: "Let's make this one a game of explowhumping planets!!"

.....

.....

AlienDude2: "What?"

AlienDude1: "You take a planet, right, and pump it full of custard. Then you spin them round their orbits real fast, and tilt them around so they spin out, and see which ones collide first!!When they hit the explode apart, and cos they're full of custard they just go 'whump'!! You can bet on the winners and everything, it'll be great!!!"

.....

.....

AlienDude2: "You seriously need to get out more"




Ah the fun of aliens that are just like Dublin Corporation workers...

What makes a good story

Recently subscribed to Neil Gaiman's blog, and reading some of the comments on it and what people have to say on other sites it got me thinking.

I'm a big fan of the Gaimanator's work, so much so that I've just ordered over €100 worth of his work off Amazon, including Vols 1 and 2 of The Sandman. Never read it but I hear its fantastic work. I already have several of his other works, including 1602, a fantastic piece set in 1602 in the Marvel Universe.

Frequently people write into him asking, How can I become a good writer, What are your secrets, blah blah blah, and to do him credit he doesn't just tell them to fup off, he does give a reasonable answer to people. But a separate question still stands of what actually makes a good story?

For me personally, its got to have characters with real depth, or at least the possibility of depth. Characters that are blatantly two dimensional are, to put it bluntly, crap. Similarly the universe it's set in needs to provide a convincing backdrop to the story, so it can't be hard sc-fi set in pinky pony land. You've got to have some real meat to the story, something that will draw you in and hold your attention, something that will physically stop you from putting that beast down until youve milked every last drop of literary goodness from it.

The more I write and think about this, the harder it actually appears to be to quantify... Obviously there are always different criteria for different people. Some of my favourites would include the almighty HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Discworld series, a short story called Flowers for Algernon, I am Legend, and sweet Jeebus too many to write down. But its an interesting subject, one of those things that drags you off on a tangent and wont let you go.

Maybe that means that the question itself qualifies as a story :)

Quality of life vs. Love of the job

We've all heard the ads on TV recently about work life balance, about how everyone should take time to ensure that their work doesn't overshadow their personal life. For a lot of people this can be a major struggle. The average person gets up early, goes to work, spends the bulk of the day there, and then returns home through another painful commute, to find that there is really only enough time to have dinner, crash out in front of the TV, and go to bed.

Obviously in these cases measures are needed to redress the balance, whether it be working shorter hours, working closer to home, or just structuring your days better to avoid the feeling of living a life that consists of work-bed-work-bed... For most people this is the case and with a little effort it can be done. But what about the people who don't feel any such problem, the people who, instead of having a job, have what can only be termed as a vocation?

Take, for example, programmers. As a group, especially the nerdier of the bunch, we tend to have an almost obsessive desire to learn more about our chosen profession, its no hardship or effort to take some of our vanishingly small amount of personal time to do something work related, because its not just work related, it is, in a very real sense, who we are. The typical nerd/programmer will think nothing of taking the time or effort after work, or on the weekends, to play with some new technology, or language, or just do something that's fun. I recently got it into my head that it would be a great idea to program my LEGO Mindstorms kit using Java, and try to find some way of adapting it to be accessible over the web. This could take days, if not weeks, of work, but it doesn't matter because its part of who I am.

So, in this case does the work life balance matter so much? Or is it in fact a case of the balance being reversed, where the old impression of nerds ("You need to get out more!!") applies? Its a subject that could probably do with some investigating, and more than likely already has, but its still interesting to think about.

Preferably inside, where I can get a good solid WiFi connection ;)