Let me clear the air before this one. There are four things to know about me. In no particular order…

1. I love humanoid robots.
2. I love androids.
3. I love drawing humanoid robots… and
4. I love Android OS.

Now that that is out of the way, let me say that this post doesn’t pertain to any of those four, for better or for worse. This post serves to shed some light on some custom robotic applications. As always though, FTW. While I am holding it down on Arduino and Lego Mindstorm front, there are, quite thankfully, people utilizing robotics to improve procedures in real situations. Nothing is better than robots, lasers, and gadgetry…unless it falls into another field dear to my heart. Quality assurance. I should trade in my twin monitors in for one of these bad boys: Now that looks like some precision automation exemplified. So the gist of my rant is that there are automated assembly applications all over the place. You name it, it can be automated…and with some crazy levels of precision… two tenths of a micron precision. Take a look at a exemplary robotic setup. I could color that sucker green, in an effort to appease my fan-base. Or, alternatively, I could throw up a pic of something slicker than green robots…. Could those be lasers? Yep…I’m talking about some 6-axis automated inspection system lasers…for the win. I’ll be the first to admit that high performance machine vision, 6-axis robotics, and bad ass software trumps my form of QA…even though our banking software is pretty sweet. Regardless of the preferences, hit the bump to read about some real robotics applications. They are numerous…from automotive, clean room, fuel cell, medical devise, solar, and semiconductor implementations, to my already-mentioned QA…there is a ton to check out. In the mean time, I’ll be horsing around with my robot drawings and laser pointers…pining for an Arduino.

green robots…sigh.

Improving Existing Products: A How-to Improving existing products is a snap! Start with a product. Here, I used this product, a dog poop receptacle. Pretty boring, huh? The first rule of thumb when improving existing products, is to make sure to improve upon the improvable, regardless of how improbable it is to improve appropriate items theoretically unprovable. Unlikely. Here is my improved product: Turds FTW!

FTL FTW

NAPKIN-BOT IS GLAD TO BE OF YOUR SERVICE IN REALMS OF ABSORBENCY

And here I stand, thinking that Apple fanboiz were at the pinnacle of pretentiousness…turns out there is a far worse type of consumer: I think there is a joke to be made about polishing a turd, but I don’t think this particular turd is polished. Maybe if they made it multitask or run Flash…however, this is what some dipshits at Mervis Diamond have done:

This gorgeous diamond studded iPad features 11.43 carats of diamonds, hand-set in a micro-pave styling. The diamonds are graded G/H in color and VS2/SI1 in clarity. Price tag: $19,999. Very limited quantities available. Orders will be available June 1.. Good luck with that. I’m holding out for an emerald-studded iPhone. Not. Like that? Bringing back the not.

Broke as a joke? If you need some cash in a pinch, you have several options: ~ Hit a payday advance joint (and get nailed w/ a generous fee) ~ Write a bad check (overdraft fee != good) ~ Cash advance the ol’ credit card (and pay a ridiculous finance rate) ~ Knock off a convenience store (insert your own soap-on-a-rope joke here) Or alternatively, you could hit CashGo.com, and get some loot the easy way….the easy and confidential way. MyCashGo is pretty sweet. Everything is directly spelled out…no hidden fees, no need of perfect credit, no direct deposit…basically, they get you cash in a hurry. Plain and simple. Hit the above link to test it out…they give instant approval, so you could be up and rolling in no time. FWIW, they have 50% off for new customers, so you got that going, too. Which is nice. ***Of course, you could write paid blog posts (like this) for some loot. Trust me, it is far less lucrative than it seems :( ***Also of note, MyCashGo doesn’t require any faxing of info. I propose all fax machine use be discontinued, in general. So 1992. :(

My SmackBerryz totes pwned lol

Hastily drawn.

MAXXIMUM AWESOME! **DISCLAIMER** ^ Windows XP is not awesome, and the Mini 9 is neither networked, nor running anything aside from my media player.