Gadget junk

[tugrik]

First off, as a follow up to my earlier post: there's now a full pre-production review of the Canon 300D up. Those considering a dSLR should take this as a 'must read'.

Next up is news of a new Aibo by Sony. Sure, it's just a robotic dog, but I had an amusing through of what to do with it. Have you ever been in a colocation center? What you get is a locked 'cage' that's about the size of two office cubicles, containing racks to mount computers and equipment in. Some people put a small work-desk in there if they're spending a lot of time at the center. Others put up webcams and the like because even though they're locked some still worry that their equipment will get messed with.

My thought was to put an Aibo in there as a digital guard-dog. It's perfect for the task. It knows how to find its own power station and recharge whenever necessary. You could program it to get up and walk the cage boundary every so often. There's a camera in its nose and WiFi connectivity so you could use it as a remote camera to see who or what is in your cage. It has shape-recognition systems and motion-detection built into the camera, so if something changes or moves in the environment the Aibo can wake up, take pictures of it and email your support staff. While you can do this with some software and a quicktime camera, this would be far cooler. The robo-dog would literally 'look' at people walking near its cage (the head follows the motion) and give you live video of who was prodding at your fence.

Sure, it's a bit pricey and silly to do this, but you have to admit it'd get serious Geek Points. I'd find it fascinating to go into a colocation center and find 'guard dogs' watching me as I passed other companies' cages, corporate logos embossed on their little plastic-and-metal flanks.

(at least we don't have slamhounds yet, thank goodness.)

Comments

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

For the money I would just get a better Minolta Dimage, the 7i or 7h. I WANT my manual settings -- I want the control.

Ah well, BOTH are out of my range, at the moment. We'll see whats out there when things pick up, financially.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I think you'd get seriously more geek points (gp) from building your own security monitoring system from an RC car, a wifi card, an embeded computer and a camera.

The hardest part would be making the 'return to recharge' stuff.

For bonus points, add speakers and microphone so you can shout epitaths at burglers/gawkers/colocatordrones.

[zrath.livejournal.com]

The Aibo colocation guard dog.
That would seriously rock!!