Yeah yeah we’re behind the power curve on this one, but here, video in the vein of the rapture-making Arthur Ganson, of a machine that ties a tie. Oh what a tie is tied.

Thanks as always to the kickass AdaFruit for the link.

Hey all you Mechwarriors kung fu fighters and RoboOne aspirants, here’s a nice hack that will definitely make you the belle of the competition in April

Although if Taylor Veltrop, humanoid roboticist and Kinect hacker extraordinaire, shows up to RoboGames, you guys are going to have some scrambling to do:

The robot is based on the ever-popular KHR-1 humanoid platform, and tweaked with ROS and the electronics have been replaced with a RoBoard.

[PSSST- Register for RoboGames HERE!]

Now, get the hell off his lawn.

Mark Pauline, punk rock übermensch of Survival Research Labs gave a talk at the Sonoma County Museum of Art the other day, in which he related his experiences starting up SRL,trials and tribulations along he way, and how the damn kids can’t even fix a toilet nowadays.

This is the first of three parts for this talk, for the other two hop on over to SRL.org

SRL has made a move from the greasy innards of the city to the kinder more pastoral environs of the far north suburbs, to reflect the mellowing with age that affects us all. This just means that when you are hanging on the rear end of the exposed high-speed workings of the Big Arm in order to counterbalance the Running Machine, which is stuck on the truck and threatening to pull everything down with it, instead of skinning the hell out of your knees on oily concrete when the whole thing goes over, you end up up to you shoulders in positively pillowlike hay bales and sticks, not that anyone here has any experience with that, also, ow.

Gritty, we got gritty. West Oakland, CA, is not really the place for a family picnic on a Sunday afternoon, unless your family picnics involved metal recycling, used needle avoidance and occasionally fire (ours do, but I am told we tend to be the exception).

Alliance metal in West Oakland is one of those places to take your used robot combat arena for a little bit of quick cash to trade for that new speed controller or TI billet you have your eye on. Also, crack.

However, the constant rattle of shopping carts and danger of having your car, yard and person stripped for recyclables is abated somewhat, because they have some amazing art, made entirely out of junk, out front.

From Oaktown Art:

On the other hand, the center does provide a means of income for those who seemingly have no other means. Unfortunately, many of those people take their hard-earned cash and promptly smoke it or shoot it, leaving a trail of associated unpleasantries throughout the adjacent residential blocks. sigh.

Kal Spelletich, Robot Artist extraordinaire, does things with machines that should be marginally illegal, and probably are. He is having a show this Saturday in San Francisco, which you should go to if you are geographically situated.