I've spent the day at home waiting for a delivery, so I've had a chance to roam the web looking for interesting bots.  I've already mentioned the Phasma, and now I bring you the work of Crabfu.  Crabfu is the website of I-Wei Huang, a games modeller/animator (I think) who also creates fantastic, award-winning original-looking robots.  He seems to specialise in RC bots, and of particular interest to me is his use of shapelock/polymorph to create natural looking bot bodyparts.

Phasma is a biologically inspired hexapod, inspired by the iSprawl from Stanford.  It's been developed by takram design engineering.  Looking at the video below, it's interesting how the cables have become of the insect-like design.  Beautiful wee beastie!  [Photos]

A couple of days ago, I changed my phone from an iPhone 3G to a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone.  I'd been swaying between getting an Android & going to the iPhone 4.  Although the new iPhone looks fantastic, the recent problems with the antenna and the difficulty of obtaining one put me off.  Besides, the openness of Android (access to the filesystem from any PC/Mac, ability to install apps from anywhere, etc.) had tempted me originally.

So far it's been a nice phone.  The hardware isn't as plasticky as some reviews have said - I quite like it.  Not as nice as the iPhone of course, but not as bad as some believe.

It's taking a bit of time to get used to it, and a lot of apps seem like iPhone apps were 2 years ago, but it seems they're catching up fast.

One irritant had been the USB connection.  It was a bit difficult trying to get it to connect to my Mac via USB.  Eventually I got it to work with the USB setting (4 different connection modes - can't imagine that on an iPhone!), and I also had to enable USB debugging to get it to work - again, not very friendly at all!  Finally, you have to go to the drop down menu on the phone and mount the phone from there!  I would imagine many non-geeks would have gotten quite pissed off long before this and given up.  This definitely needs to be simplified.

I did however see one app which will at least handle the auto-mounting of the phone 'Auto Mount your SD Card' which also seems to work if you don't have an SD card.  Search on the marketplace or scan the QR code on the link.  Then enable the setting within the app after install.

Just a quick posting to state that I really like Bean.  Bean is a simple, free word processor for the mac.  It's blindingly fast to start up (especially compared to Pages, never run Word on my mac, but I can imagine...).  It's great for relatively simple documents, has partial Word document support (although defaults to rtfd richtext files).  If I've got a quick doc to whip up, I really wouldn't use anything else :-)

I've been thinking recently that I spend a lot of time wasting time.  Facebook, browsing, video games, etc. all seem to take away time that people 50 years ago would have had for other things.  I'm sure they had their own unproductive vices, and it could be argued that these things listed above all have certain benefits, but often they feel unproductive.  So anyway, I was in the shower thinking that having thinking time in the shower is a good thing, when it occurred to me that you could use twitter to learn a language quite easily.

The twitter word game would involve picking a word a day (maybe from I Speak Japanese, or from your own choice) and come up with as many genuine tweets as you can using that word, in one day.  By genuine tweets, I mean the kind of thing people would tweet about in their own language - what they did or saw, their thoughts, links, whatever.

I'm sure someone's thought of this before, but I'm going to give it a shot.  Probably need a hashtag too, but I'll think of that later.