Wikipedia has a general, if somewhat fuzzy, policy against the inclusion of "fancruft" in articles. This is entirely fair; it's amazing how much vitally important information about Pokemon and Buffy The Vampire Slayer would appear in... well, pretty much every Wikipedia article... without such a policy.
As the terse TV Tropes entry on the subject mentions, the "In Fiction" and "In Popular Culture" sections in countless Wikipedia articles are focal infection points for the fancruft disease. And, as it also says, TV Tropes is where you should be putting that stuff anyway - if you can settle for somewhere other than Wikipedia as a repository for your invaluable creative output.
There are, however, some articles on Wikipedia where fancruft is pretty much the purpose of the exercise.
There are hordes of those things, each cooler-looking and less legible than the last. But I suppose this is just the harmless perversity that afflicts all obsolescent products. For years it's been possible to buy a $5 quartz watch that keeps time better than a $3000 Rolex Oyster, and almost nobody with a mobile phone needs a wristwatch at all any more. So, today, practicality is ruled out from the very start as a reason for almost anyone to purchase a wristwatch.
Anybody who wants to make expensive wind-up watches today, therefore, has to add more complications and curlicues to get attention. And anybody selling expensive quartz watches has to turn them into sci-fi escapees.
It's not the most straightforward, or mechanically efficient, way of achieving the same feat; it wouldn't even beat the human-powered punkin' chunkers. But point-and-click aiming for a trebuchet-type flinger (actually, this is more of a staff sling) is still a pretty nifty achievement.
More information, and one much more disgusting video (which is also rather surreal, thanks to inspired costume choices), at the Mana site.
The Gizmodo dudes took TV-B-Gones to this year's Consumer Electronics Show.
There's only one thing you can do with a TV-B-Gone, and CES is full to the brim with big-screen TVs over whose remote receivers nobody thought to put a piece of tape.
Frankly, I found the older Apple Remote Front Row prank more amusing, but the sight of a video wall full of advertising going dark still warms my heart.
But man, check out some of the (500-plus!) comments on the Gizmodo page. Plenty of people just think it's funny, but there are many others accusing the pranksters of destroying the livelihood of the poor working stiffs at the show, endangering Gizmodo's own precious press "access", and thereby mis-serving their readers by reducing the chance that Gizmodo will be able to keep on covering the latest and most exciting developments in the world of high technology.
Bull, if I may coin a phrase, shit.
First up: Gizmodo are working stiffs too. They paid to go to the stupid show in the God-forsaken sweaty spangle-hole that is Las Vegas, and once they got there they couldn't quite figure out why they'd bothered.
I'm only peripherally associated with the gadget-blog world, and can only imagine how spiritually corrosive it is to be right at the coalface of Western society's ceaseless pursuit of boundless superconsumption of stupid crap, every day of the damn week.
I give a standing ovation to anybody who can cope with this strain by merely turning off a bunch of flatscreens, rather than taking systematically directed advantage of Nevada's easygoing firearms laws.
Former Gizmodo head Joel Johnson wrote, memorably, about the issue of gadget-mania a while ago. It is, as he says, insane to ceaselessly pursue every latest new gizmo, when long experience has taught you that new gizmos are always just as buggy and disappointing and unlikely to turn your life around as every previous device.
Devices that actually can change your life for the better do exist, but they're less than one per cent of the market, for reasons cogently explained in the above-linked Ten Reasons We're Doomed piece. And, hell, wait five years and you'll probably be able to pick up a bugless version for ten bucks. If you haven't been given six months to live, mellow out and see if you can't have just as much fun with a toy from yesteryear.
Secondly: I'm not sure exactly what Gizmodo (a site with Google PageRankeight, versus only six for dansdata.com) would have to do to get public relations people to shun them.
I don't think urinating on each and every PR person they met would quite do it.
Stabbing them might.
Turning off their video walls? That doesn't make the cut.
Oh, and when I used to do trade-show stuff years ago, we'd get at least one dude a day who thought it was fun to just yank cables out of the back of our gear. If the cable had a screw-in plug, you'd better leave it unscrewed, or a whole computer could be taking a ride off the top of your chintzy glass display case.
We freakin' dreamed of an attack that could be defeated with a few squares of electrical tape.
(Said "staffer" is Richard Blakely, who did indeed do the dastardly remote-control deed but is not actually even one of the standard Gizmodo writers, so won't necessarily have any need to go back to CES anyway, even if they don't completely forget about the ban.)
The White Glove Tracking project got a lot of people who probably should have been working to identify the location of Michael Jackson's famous sequined white glove in every frame of his 1983 TV performance of Billie Jean.
The video is just one - relatively trivial - example of what you can do when you turn elements of moving video into separately manipulable data, and then start fooling with that data programmatically, in this case with Processing. There are several more examples on the whiteglovetracking.com gallery page.
Thanks to Ole Kirk Christiansen's disturbingly compelling TechnicBRICKs blog, I now know that a Lego automatic transmission can be surprisingly simple.
I've seen outrageously bulky and complex variable-ratio Lego transmissions before, but this one...
...is pretty much pocket-sized.
It's actually a continuously variable transmission (based on differentials rather than the belts often found in full-scale designs), not a conventional auto with a small integer number of ratios.
But don't worry, there are plenty of separate-ratio autos, too:
Gakken's Mechamo Centipede is, as I explained in my review of it, a very cool toy.
But, as the following video demonstrates...
...it's not really in the same class as the Tyco N.S.E.C.T. Robotic Attack Creature.
I think a ludicrous name is, in this case, entirely justified. The RAC, as I'll call it for short, is big and beefy and obviously always in a very bad mood.
The RAC was one of the big toys of Christmas 2006, and I didn't manage to find one for a reasonable price. But then, in late 2007, a new-in-box unit showed up on eBay here in Australia and I picked it up for $AU75 delivered, which is well under the list price.
I had no idea the thing was going to be so big.
It's only a little longer than the 1.1-kilogram mostly-aluminium Centipede, but it weighs more than 2.3 kilos. That's more than your typical backyard-basher electric 10th-scale R/C truck.
I like the RAC's gait, too. The Centipede's mesmeric millipede-like circular gait is more interesting, but the Tyco robot walks not unlike a real beetle. Its legs whip forward and whack down onto the floor, then sweep backwards more slowly to propel the thing. The legs don't lift far enough to make the RAC capable of conquering much more than medium-pile carpet, but like the Centipede, it shouldn't have any trouble making it over trailing cables or rug fringes.
Oh, and that racket it makes on the hardwood floor? It's louder in person.
And it's not because of the one-piece plastic legs. The tips of the legs are actually covered with rubber. I think I might give them soft silicone socks, or something.
The pincers on the front are controlled by one of two index-finger triggers on the remote control. They're strong enough to allow the RAC to pull about as much weight as it can push, as long as there's something for it to bite onto.
The missile shooter (which is depicted as shooting sucker darts, but in my case just came with little plastic tubes with rubber bumpers on the front) is deployed by a safety-covered glowing switch on the remote (if you hold the switch down, it retracts again - I did that once by accident in the above video), and fired with the other trigger.
The launcher doesn't have much range, or any accuracy. But c'mon, people. It's a missile shooter! It pops up from under the bug's wing covers! And the RAC's eyes turn red when it does! That's awesome!
The RAC has a kid-sized transmitter that runs from a nine volt battery, just like every other cheap radio controlled toy. But that's the end of the bad news, electricity-wise.
First, yes you can get two and have them fight. My green model has a 27MHz radio, but there's also a blue one that's 49MHz.
And the RAC itself runs not from a horde of AA batteries, but from a standard six-cell rechargeable stick pack with a white nylon plug on it, of the sort you can buy from any hobby store. The bundled pack is a NiCd unit of unspecified capacity, and you also get a plugpack overnight charger. A proper hobby charger will (and in my case, did) charge the bundled pack much faster, and higher-capacity stick packs will also work fine in the RAC, as long as they've got the right plug.
Oh, and one 9V battery for the transmitter is included as well. Classy.
And now that I've gotten you all excited... I think Tyco's discontinued the Robotic Attack Creature. There are a couple of other toys in the N.S.E.C.T. line that still seem to be available from major retailers - Amazon, for instance, currently have a "Nano" version of the RAC for cheap, and some thing with a tail too. But the N.S.E.C.T. line doesn't seem to exist on the Mattel site any more. There's just this sad remnant.
Fortunately, though, plenty of dealers seem to still have at least some stock of the RAC, and some of the prices are very reasonable.
I haven't played with the thing for very long yet, or taken it to bits, so I don't know whether it's been discontinued because all of the legs always fall off after half an hour, or because of the abominable foot-racket, or because kids just didn't dig something that can't tear around fast enough to break when it hits a chair. Mattel/Tyco have remedied this last with the even more ridiculous looking Tri-Clops, which should be of considerable attention to nerds because it is, I think, the first mass-market toy with proper omnidirectional wheels.
But that, of course, means that the Tri-Clops doesn't have legs. So although it does seem to work pretty well...
...I can't say I'm very excited about it.
(Actually, looking at Amazon again, I note that the 27MHz and the 49MHz Tri-Clops toys are currently discounted by seventy-five per cent. So if you live somewhere to which Amazon will deliver things other than books and DVDs, I think you're now practically obliged to buy one.)
The Robotic Attack Creature is probably not nearly as hackable as the straightforward, open-chassis Centipede. It's also completely devoid of educational value, since unlike the Centipede, it comes assembled and ready to go, rather than as a box full of (surprisingly easy to assemble) pieces.
If you're looking for something to keep your cat on its toes, though, the RAC gets both thumbs up from me.
