Jonathan Arbib

Got myself the new SpareOne Emergency Phone! From the SpareOne website: “The SpareOne emergency cellpower is powered by a single AA battery for up to 10 hours of use. Able to make emergency calls, even without a SIM card. The SpareOne Doesn’t leap tall buildings, but does come in a floatable, waterproof package.” Mine just arrived in the post… Let’s have a look inside the box!

The packaging looks very well presented and designed. Upon opening the box, there are no instructions accompanying this device. The phone itself feel very light ad easy to carry. Ergonomics are possibly not the best, but I am sure that was not up high on the priority list of features when designing this device!

Inside the phone when opening the back cover we can see the plastic tab which is isolating the battery on the top, the SIM Card slot on the left, and a micro sim adapter on the bottom (very smart accessory to add to this phone!)

I’ll update the blog when i try it out and make a phone call!

:-)

Bilal Ghalib and Alex Hornstein have embarked on a fun, educational road trip. They’ve packed a Prius with 3D printers, dubbed it the Pocket Factory, and are traveling around the country exposing people to 3D printing and the potential of desktop manufacturing.

[Source: http://blog.makezine.com/2012/01/20/the-pocket-factory-takes-to-the-road/]

Definitely worth following these guys if you are in the USA!

Twitter: @pocketfactory22

Website: http://pocketfactory.org

Look slike a good idea for small form-factor drones :-)

The OrcaM Orbital Camera System will take any object placed into its maw and create a submillimeter accurate 3D model, complete with color, texture, and reflectivity maps. Seven individual cameras orbit around the sphere with the object inside it, taking simultaneous high resolution pictures while different combinations of projected light and shadow are used to help define object geometry. It’s completely automatic, and when OrcaM is done taking pictures, you can pull the original out unharmed along with a perfectly rendered digital copy.

Source: [http://blog.makezine.com/2012/01/20/news-from-the-future-reconstruction-sphere-makes-digital-copy-of-anything/]

As you may already know, David Lang, our Zero to Maker columnist, is involved in the OpenROV project, an open source camera-equipped R/C submersible, designed to look for water-burired treasure. They’re taking the ROV prototypes up to Hall City Cave in Northern, CA tomorrow for some preliminary dives. How exciting!

Source: [http://blog.makezine.com/2012/01/22/openrov-to-perform-preliminary-dives/]

[Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/with-bitcasa-the-entire-cloud-is-your-hard-drive-for-only-10-per-month]

The cloud is now your hard drive. And not just a few dozen Gigabytes, Terabytes or even Petabytes, but all of it – infinite storage – for only $10 per month. This is the incredible promise of the new TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Bitcasa.

Read More

Bitcasa Reveal Video from Bitcasa on Vimeo.

Near Space Balloon Flight, shot with HD HERO cameras from GoPro from Kevin Macko on Vimeo.

More info on: https://www.sifteo.com/

Simple stats script:

#!/bin/bash
clear
while [ 1 ]
do
 uptime
 df -h | grep Filesystem
 df -h | grep rootfs
 df -h | grep usb
 echo ""
 Temp1=$(cat /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/lm90/0-004c/temp1_input)
 Temp2=$(cat /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/lm90/0-004c/temp2_input)
 echo "MB T  = "$Temp1
 echo "CPU T = "$Temp2
 sleep 1
 clear
done

Insert it in a file. I called it stats.sh

chmod a+x stats.sh

and run with ./stats.sh

It updates every second and returns:

• uptime with load
• Disk space and usb disk space
• MB temp
• CPU temp

You can add all you want in there or remove what you don’t need :-)