A LEGO Robot That Continuously Builds Itself A Taller And Taller Tower To Climb

https://geekologie.com/2019/04/a-lego-robot-that-continuously-builds-it.php


This is a video of several different LEGO climbing robots constructed by Japanese LEGO builder muniment Bekkan, who likes to "perform physics experiments using LEGO." First up are a couple variations of pole-climbing (but not dancing) LEGO robots, then one that continuously builds and climbs a taller and taller tower using quadruple stacks of DUPLO blocks. That one is particularly clever. Obviously, now you need to construct a giant version and– "Rebuild Notre Dame." Too soon — way too soon. What’s the matter with you? Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to spot-clean my sofa so I can offer Quasimodo a place to crash for a little while like an actual decent human being.
Keep going for the video.

Thanks to Jeffrey S, who agrees even if you build it, he may not come, but he’ll at least watch the video on Youtube.

via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/

April 17, 2019 at 02:27PM

Bendgate 2.0: Samsung’s $2,000 foldable phone is already breaking

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1492643

  • Steve Kovach of CNBC had his Galaxy Fold die right along the display crease.

  • The Verge’s Galaxy Fold review unit had something press against the back side of the screen, killing several rows of pixels.

  • A tweet from Mark Gurman: “The screen on my Galaxy Fold review unit is completely broken and unusable just two days in. Hard to know if this is widespread or not.”

  • Gurman says, “The phone comes with this protective layer/film. Samsung says you are not supposed to remove it. I removed it, not knowing you’re not supposed to (consumers won’t know either). It appeared removable in the left corner, so I took it off. I believe this contributed to the problem.”

  • From YouTuber Marques Brownlee: “PSA: There’s a layer that appears to be a screen protector on the Galaxy Fold’s display. It’s NOT a screen protector. Do NOT remove it. I got this far peeling it off before the display spazzed and blacked out. Started over with a replacement.”

Samsung’s futuristic Galaxy Fold is launching this month, and the device has already made its way to a select group of reviewers and influencers. During the run-up to the device’s launch, there were concerns about the durability of the folding display, and now after just a few days with the public, the device is already experiencing problems. There are numerous reports of Samsung’s $2,000 device breaking after a single day, sometimes due to poor durability, other times due to user error.

First up, we have a report from Dieter Bohn at

The Verge

, who had a piece of debris get 

under

the Galaxy Fold display (possibly through the hinge?) and press up against the back of the display. In addition to causing an unsightly bump in the OLED panel, it eventually pressed against the display enough to break it, killing a few horizontal and vertical rows of pixels.

Since the Galaxy Fold folds in half, the flexible OLED display quickly forms a visible crease in the middle. People were worried about the durability of folding a display in half like this, and it looks like Steve Kovach of CNBC has experienced everyone’s worst fear: his Galaxy Fold display broke right along the fold crease—all the pixels in the folding area went black and the screen started flickering like crazy.

We’ve also seen some reviewers peel off a layer of the display on purpose, thinking it was a removable protective layer that many phones ship with. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman shared a gruesome photo of a removed layer of display film, saying, “The phone comes with this protective layer/film. Samsung says you are not supposed to remove it. I removed it, not knowing you’re not supposed to (consumers won’t know either). It appeared removable in the left corner, so I took it off. I believe this contributed to the problem.” The “problem” Gurman is referring to is his totally dead Galaxy Fold display. After removing the layer of the display, first the left half of the display died, then the display completely died.

YouTuber Marques Brownlee also tried peeling off this protective layer, thinking it was just a display protector for shipping. After picking at the layout a bit, Brownlee says “the display spazzed and blacked out. Started over with a replacement.”

Right now we’re at the very edge of viability for folding smartphones, and the Galaxy Fold is the first device from a serious manufacturer that is reaching the hands of the masses. For this first year, foldables are definitely first-generation, early adopter devices, with delicate plastic screen covers, visible display creases, radical new hinge designs, and a variety of competing form factors in development. So far Samsung has been suspiciously protective of the Galaxy Fold, and despite announcing it in February alongside the Galaxy S10, people haven’t gotten to even touch the device until this week.

The early hype for the Galaxy Fold seems to have struck a chord with consumers, with Samsung.com citing “overwhelming demand” and selling out of Galaxy Fold pre-orders in just a day. Devices ship to the general public April 26, so if the final production units have the same problems, we’ll see a lot more reports then. So far, Samsung has not commented on these durability problems. Place your bets on where this issue will rank among exploding smartphones or S-Pens jamming in devices.

Listing image by Mark Gurman

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

April 17, 2019 at 02:41PM

You can now download the source code for all Infocom text adventure classics

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1492683

Photograph of a keyboard of a late '80s/early '90s computer.
Enlarge /

The Apple II, one of the myriad personal computers used to play Infocom games years ago.

The source code of every Infocom text adventure game has been uploaded to code-sharing repository GitHub, allowing savvy programmers to examine and build upon some of the most beloved works of digital storytelling to date.

There are numerous repositories under the name historicalsource, each for a different game. Titles include, but are not limited to, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyPlanetfall, Shogun, and several Zork games—plus some more unusual inclusions like an incomplete version of Hitchhiker‘s sequel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Infocom samplers, and an unreleased adaptation of James Cameron’s The Abyss.

The code was uploaded by Jason Scott, an archivist who is the proprietor of

textfiles.com

. His website describes itself as “a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them”—in particular those of the 1980s. He announced the GitHub uploads

on Twitter

earlier this week.

The games were written in the LISP-esque “Zork Implementation Language,” or ZIL, which you could be forgiven for not being intimately familiar with already. Fortunately, Scott also tweeted a link to a helpful manual for the language on archive.org.

Dive in and you’ll find that things are very different now than they were then. At the time Infocom was active, personal computers did not have a widely shared architecture, so the path ZIL’s architects took was to allow game creators to write instructions for a virtual machine called the Z-machine, which was then brought to the various platforms of the day. There are interpreters available today for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, among other platforms.

The interactive fiction community is still quite lively, and people are still making games using ZIL and the Z-machine today. But they’ve been joined by creators using new tools for spinning interactive, text-focused games like Twine and Ink, some of which are used as middleware in modern graphical game productions big and small.

The news was reported by Gamasutra, which covers news for the game developer industry. The site also noted that Activision still owns the rights to Infocom games and could request a takedown if it wanted. For now, though, historians, narrative designers, programmers, and gaming enthusiasts alike can benefit from Scott’s effort.

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

April 18, 2019 at 05:35AM