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Talay Robot will document your tweet, give it a soundtrack, Twitvid the results (video)
Tweet a message @talayrobot and something magical happens. An ST Robotics arm whirs to life inside Sony Music's London HQ and starts transcribing your words of wisdom unto a glamorously lit whiteboard -- in the finest handwriting font its designers could find! Best part is that the whole thing gets filmed and the video is sent back to you within a matter of minutes, equipped with an audio clip from Sony's Talay Riley. Yes, it's a promotional stunt, but it's also undeniably one of the coolest intersections of robotics and social networking we've yet seen. Skip past the break for some video examples or get tweeting and create your own.
Justifying the tiered badge system
Wrath is almost all wrapped up, and while we didn't know much about it before the expansion, we've all certainly experienced the token system that Blizzard implemented as they went along, where early instances drop one kind of badge/token, and then the newer instances offer up new tokens, which can then be exchanged back for the older ones and their rewards. Now that we see the big picture at the end of the expansion, it's pretty ingenious, actually, and it even allows Blizzard to beef up other parts of the game, as they did with the rewards in the new Dungeon system. Not that he needs to, but Bornakk steps up on the forums to justify exactly this kind of tiered system. Players complain that Ulduar is "useless" now that you can obtain its badges from lots of different places, but Bornakk says this system is definitely preferable to what Blizzard did in vanilla and BC, which was requiring new raiders to run through all of the old content before seeing the new and shiny stuff. They don't want the old content to sit useless (and it's not -- lots of guilds are still running Ulduar and even Naxx for the hard modes and achievements), but after the high-end raiders have their fun, it's important to get everyone else up to speed as well.
Mirror-enabled videoconferencing on the iPhone
The iPhone application community continues to amaze me-- this time, Engadget's got the heads up on an iPhone video conferencing system, made possible by not only a cool little piece of code (designed for a C4 contest) that fetches an iPhone's camera input and feeds it out to another iPhone via a webserver, but also these ingenious mirror settings that work as a little periscope around the phone, and let you both see the image on the front while the camera on the back grabs yours. Wild!The Ecamm folks are old hands, apparently, at the ingenious use of mirrors around an Apple camera, but this definitely tops anything I've seen in the past. Just an amazing hack, both in terms of software and hardware. Unfortunately, the source (for either hack) isn't available yet, but they promise that something is coming soon. In the meantime, just bask in the glow of what these iPhone guys are capable of.Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
