Filed under: Fun, Games, Open Source
Play yourself at Rock, Paper, Scissors with an open source training glove
Those dark, dreary, lonely nights when you're up to date with your video games and you're out of books. You look at your last good friend, your ever-present ally that's seen you through thick and thin: your hand. Just one more time... I'll get a girlfriend soon, I promise...
I'm talking, of course, about Rock-paper-scissors: the fairest of compromise, the inexorable justice of fates, THE ULTIMATE EQUALIZER. Have you ever played it on your own... or tried to? No, I didn't think so, but Steve Hoefer has; that sad bastard. He cites a love of 'computers interacting with us on our own terms', but we all know it's because his weiner is horrendously chafed and in desperate need of rest.
He simply slips on his glove and goes to work: 'Ick... ack... ock!' (or however you do it in your country... you weird Americans!) -- and all the while, the glove is learning his habits and playing against him! How cool is that?! If you often open with rock, the glove will start with paper. That's about it really, but as is always the case with 'mods' (yes, this must surely be the first 'glove mod' I've seen), it's all about the making. Go check the masterful nerd's site for a complete walkthrough (yes, you can quite easily make one of these yourself!). For me, though, the most interesting bit was the 'open source hardware' used to process the glove's inputs and power the outputs. At its heart is a programmable prototyping platform called Arduino. You can purchase the boards, or make them yourself! The language used to program the platform is also open source-- cool.
It's all a bit nerdy, but as you can see in the video after the break, well worth the effort. No longer will nerds have to carry dice in their pockets to decide what to get for lunch at the canteen.
In what must surely be the least surprising news of 2010, 
The Interactive portion of SXSW is March 12-16, and Download Squad will be covering the event a little differently this year. We'll still have videos from developers, designers and business leaders, but in addition, we'll be harnessing the power of the crowd via Seed to cover the core takeaway from as many panels and conversations as possible.
If you're interested in covering SXSW Interactive ...
Mozilla's developers are busily crafting all kinds of features for future versions of Firefox -- Jetpack's no-restart add-on functionality,out of process plugins, a bigger, badder JavaScript engine. They're also taking a look at how we log in and out of websites and trying to standardize that process.
To that end, Mozilla has put together a draft spec (which you can view at Google Docs) which ...
In this corner, with a big head start, a huge userbase, and tons of features, it's ... Foursquare! In this corner, with millions of dollars in funding and a great-looking new design ... Gowalla!
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/DING_Round_2_Foursquare_Gowalla_both_update_iPhone_Apps'; By now, most people know that Gowalla and Foursquare have been going blow-for-blow in the location-based ...
Rejex is a very handy little site for building and testing regular expressions on the fly. It's composed of four simple text boxes and a very informative cheat sheet (not shown above, but after the jump). You feed your text into the "Test String" box (the middle one), and then your expression into the top box, and immediately see the matches in the bottom box. Here I am searching for instances of ...
One type of program I often forget to load on a fresh Windows install is a good photo resizing tool. Sometimes -- like when I want to create a screenshot tour of an app -- it would make things simpler to just dump a pile of full-size screenshots into a folder and let some little app churn out images resized to the dimensions I need.
Photo Magician is an excellent option. It weighs in at ...
Sushi Cat is one of the cutest Flash games I've ever run across. You play a blue cat with a major talent for eating and, fortunately for you, every level is filled with delicious sushi! The controls are simple: you aim and drop from the top of the screen using the mouse, trying to hit as much sushi as you can on the way down. Eat enough sushi, and you can go on to the next level.
Your score depends on how much sushi you eat, and which bucket the cat lands in when it finally reaches the bottom of the screen. The more ...
