"Taking Back Our World" The Make/Hackerspace/Creativity Movement
This Thursday evening (June 3rd), at the Tokyo PC Users Group, we'll be talking about small groups of creative people are joining together to redefine and revitalize everything from personal computing, arts, crafts, gardening, and even manufacturing. The talk will feature photos and videos of Hack Pittsburgh, Makerbot Industries, NYCResistor, Dorkbot NYC, the Spring 2010 NYU ITP Exhibition, and Tokyo Hackerspace.
National Institute of Informatics Open House
If you can manage to get by in the Japanese language, and happen to be in Tokyo later this week (June 3/4th), the National Institute of Informatics is opening their doors to the public for what should prove to be a very interesting Open House event.
In addition to the demonstration areas, which are scheduled to show off current projects at the institute, several of the presentations look extremely interesting.
Two that immediately caught our attention included Hiroshi Ishiguro's keynote address titled “A learning society and the future through human androids”, and Kageura-san presenting on “Technology opens the door for global multi-language translation: Machine translation and human translation or something different?”
There was no mention whether it will be the real Ishiguro delivering the keynote presentation, or one of his famous clones. In any case, the abstract of his presentation states:
“In this lecture, while introducing a series of studies exploring the human android robot, about the relationship between humans and androids in a futuristic society, discussed from the perspective of robotics and philosophy.”
Early Observations on the iPad
Photo Credit: Johan Rooms
A lot of readers and friends have asked how I like the iPad, and whether it can replace a laptop. Here's what I wrote after my experience last weekend:
“I used the iPad with the BT keyboard exclusively during BarCamp Tokyo 2010. BarCamp was an extremely intense, day long (9 am to 9 pm) event with short (typically 15 minute) sessions packed back to back continuously with only short breaks for lunch and dinner.
People had to move from room to room to participate in the sessions they were interested in. With the iPad I was able to shift locations quickly without having to worry about cables, power, or weight. More important, with the keyboard and my ability to touch-type, I found it easy to take notes while keeping my eyes and attention on the discussion/presentation - often participating in the debate without getting distracted by a computer.
The normal laptop is a distraction, and forms a 'wall' between the participants. The iPad is non-obtrusive. And I was able to use it all day without being plugged in, carrying spare batteries, recharging. The instant-on feature made using it a pleasure instead of the frustration I've experienced with WinDoze laptops.
I also used the Camera app for the iPad that allowed me to take photos with my iPhone and have them automatically transferred to the iPad via BlueTooth. That worked well, basically *as advertised* by the app developer, and I was able to capture images during the sessions then create blog posts using them real time. The major drawback is that the iPhone camera currently doesn't allow you to change the image resolution when taking the shot. All the iPhone images are 2 megapixel, which can take a while to transfer using BlueTooth. Of course other iPhone camera apps allow you to take lower resolution shots, but the iPad Camera app doesn't support that feature yet. This would be especially helpful while blogging since blog post images can be just a fraction of a megabyte.”
Do I like the iPad? Well, in the four weeks or so that I've been using it I've only resorted to turning on my laptop about three times. That was to grab some files off it, and in one case to process a large batch of photos and videos.
Of course, your mileage may vary. 
RoboGames Day Two: Photo Gallery
We're finally starting to get caught up on the >20 Gigs of photos, videos, and interviews we were able to collect during our US tour. The RoboGames Day Two photo gallery includes the Willow Garage PR2 robot platform, robot sumo, humanoid battles, and lots of other robot goodness. 
ROBOTECH – Next Generation Robot Manufacturing Technology Exhibition
The first “ROBOTECH” – Next Generation Robot Manufacturing Technology Exhibition, is scheduled for July 28th (Wednesday) through 30th (Friday), 2010 at the Big Sight convention center in Tokyo. Concurrently, the 21st MEMS/Micromachine exhibition, billed as “the world's largest nanotechnology exhibtion” will take place.
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