Category Archive for 'TechTalk'

Physics engine in Sketchup

Friday, June 13th, 2008

I knew Sketchup was a great modeling tool, but apparently it’s also scriptable via a Ruby API and embedded web browser. At Google’s IO conference, Scott Lininger showed off some of this awesomeness.
20 min into the video below we see Scott capturing keystroke events within the browser instance and using them to control a modelled [...]

Google TechTalk: OLPC

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

Another brilliant Google TechTalk, this one on the massive tech challenges of the One Laptop Per Child project.
The revolutionary hardware design was hard enough, but the software goals are incredibly ambitious, particularly in the areas of security and long-term user data persistence within a very small space. Right now the permanent data store is [...]

Human cycles not wasted

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Luis von Ahn creates simple games that have people solve problems that computers can’t (Google video). Every time you play a game of Taboo, the hinter generates associations between words and the guesser, by guessing the correct word, is verifying the quality of those associations. By isolating players via the web and collecting their responses, [...]