As you probably know The Pirate Bay is always hiding the location of their servers since governments can often cause a huge speed bump in their activity when they want to. The Pirate Bay Servers might soon be GPS Controlled Drones to allow the server farm to not only not be tied to a building on earth but it could be commanded to fly to a new location in moments. I guess this is one step down from launching a satellite but unlike a satellite these servers can’t be easily located if The Pirate Bay chooses to move the drones around on a regular basis. Of course pirating is wrong I love the innovation that is being considered to evade the authorities!

Via: Ars

“One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We’re just starting so we haven’t figured everything out yet. But we can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.”

Music boxes are so nice because they play such nice music from a very simple mechanism. In this case the music is still nice but the Digital Enhancement player uses a much more complex method to get the music out.

Via: Make and Laughing Squid

 ”Digital Enhancement” is an interactive sound installation consisting of an electrified Symphonion Brevet No. 28, a synthesizer, an amplifier and four headphones. The Symphonion musical box dates back to the beginning of the last century and its mechanical workings are combined with digital technology to convert it into a MIDI sequencer. The original music, embossed on steel plates, can be played on the synthesizer, which is programmed to mimic the sounds of the Symphonion. In order to operate the sequencer, a hand-cranked dynamo serves as a remote control.”

Do you like gardening and electronics? If so the Horto domi might be just the thing for you to tie these two loves together. The kickstarter is almost 1/3 funded and there is 50 days left, looks like it has a good shot at getting funded!

 ”Horto domi is an open hardware raised-bed garden unit with environmental control and monitoring via web-interface thanks to Arduino Ethernet. DIY sensors, such as those collecting moisture and temperature data help monitor the environment within the dome and will eventually be used to automate conditions. “

 Just like us Sal can look around in his environment so he can watch things that are interesting. Sal uses the iLab Neuromorphic Vision C++ Toolkit to make the magic work. You can also download the code to play around with building your own version of Sal. Thanks for sending this in Lior.

Read more here.

 ”Sal is a robotic head that makes head and eye movements to follow interesting things in its environment (the activity of people and objects in its surroundings). In addition, the head will is capable of locating and recognize visual objects in real time.”

If you have an Arduino project and need a few extra pins have a look at the way that Mark from SpikenzieLabs did it. He removed the crystal and 22pf capacitors then he added a pin header to access the pins easily. To use this configuration you then need to set the fuses so that it uses the internal oscillator.  The internal oscillator is not as accurate as the internal RC time constant but most applications aren’t time critical so this is normally not an issue.

 If you hate cold days and want to have some active heating to keep you warm this Battery Powered Warming Poncho might be just the project for you. Berto uses a 12 volt battery in a bag that runs the poncho. Being from Winnipeg and knowing lots of avid snowmobilers I have actually seen lots of warming gloves and vests for riding all day in the cold but a warming poncho is a great idea for the being out and about on the cold days. If this is a project you are going to take on be very careful since with that much battery power it would be very easy to get seriously burn if there was a short circuit due to some faulty wiring.

Thanks for sending in your project Berto.

“You can use a 12 Volt electric blanket. The only thing you need to do is to make a slit in the center of the blanket, to put your head through. And sewing a collar around the hole with a strip contrasting cloth.”

This is the Biped Robot Project that Mark from the Harford Hackerspace has been working on for that past 2 years. We will have to keep track of the future progress since they have a goal to have it walking in the next few months. So far they have totally succeeded in making something that looks like it belongs in a Terminator movie, if I saw this thing walking down the hall towards me I think I would probably turn around!