Vubx Coolest Gadgets

I have decided to blog about surely the simplest, but most probably one the most creative building blocks of all times, LEGO. The aim of this article is to give information about some interesting facts about LEGO cool toys and company, and some world record holding figures created by hobbyists.

• Well first of all, it is a Danish creation. LEGO (LEg GOdt) means “Play Well” in Danish, later the founder of the company discovered that it can be translated as “I put together” in Latin. What to say more? Linguistics science were supporting them naturally to their big successful fate, luckily for inspirational toy lovers.
• Founded in 1932, Started as a carpenter’s small wooden toys shop. Named as LEGO in 1934. Currently, the third generation grandson Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen rules the LEGO empire. One of the richest in the world, owning $3.3 billion fortune. His parents used his child photos even on some LEGO products as you can see one of them on the left.
• The world famous LEGO automatic binding bricks are not invented by LEGO company itself. They were very closely inspired by KiddiCraft building blocks, near to copying, but with getting partial rights. Here is the first building blocks patent photo and 1949 first LEGO bricks. LEGO later bought all the rights in 1981. Unfortunately, the original patent owner, Hilary Harry Fisher Page committed suicide in 1957, not seeing the huge success of his creation.
• Some LEGO Records
  Tallest Lego Tower in Nasu Highland Park in Japan. Built using around 430,000 pieces and it is around 29 meters long. It is a very fast expiring record because hobbyist build almost each year taller Lego towers from the previous record holder. Surely, Japanese are tough rivals for beating on gadget records !
  
• Longest Lego, according to my research. This 1,5 kilometers long snake is in Italy. Around an impressive 2,900,000 bricks are used. Built in 2005. Link
• Fastest time to build LEGO Star Destroyer. Yeah, it is just one of the hundreds of funny LEGO object building records. 3,100 pieces Lego set was built in 50 minutes with a group of up to five people in 2005. Dare to build another monster, LEGO Star Wars Death Star ? Not easy, it needs a nice amount of money just to start your career as a LEGO builder.
  
• Smallest Lego Gun Ever (Fully functional)
  You will find on youtube many LEGO videos claiming that they have built the smallest hand trebuchets, crossbows etc. Here is one of them.

Strong enough to tear paper.

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A nice, real looking hexapod application by Kare Halvorsen. This black ant which you would like to feed at home with electricity is quite capable of doing natural looking movements including the parts; legs, head, thorax and abdomen.

The hexapod robot is armed with a mandible which can grab and lift the objects easily. What else to add more? Watch the video below before you start building your own robot !

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By the development of the advanced satellite broadcasting technologies with HD quality, many new customers prefer Direct TV over cable TV and dish networks.

If you didn’t do until now the best time to change into direct TV or start your membership to one of the packages. Over 130 HD channels and 12 HD free movies monthly are available in direct TV network.

What about the signal quality? They guarantee 99.9% high definition signal quality. All sounds are Dolby Digital 5.1.

At Direct T V website, you can choose from several packets according to your personal viewing needs and budget. There is an ongoing promotion now. If you choose the premier plan, you will get three months for free. This package includes more than 265 channels. If you are a movie fan, you will be delighted because there are 30 high-quality movie channels. Some special sports channels are only on direct TV including NFL Sunday ticket, NASCAR hotpass and NCAA mega March madness.

So, what about the prices compared direct TV to cable TV? Yes, you get more for cheaper at DirectTV than ordinary cable TV. Cable TVs have major disadvantages of cable line collapses as well. If cable is line down say bye-bye to your cable TV. But on the other hand, your direct TV will be always available unless the satellites gets lost in the space DirecTV is the most logical and modern choice for HDTV broadcasting currently available.

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Actually I had written in one of my previous posts about controlling devices using mental power. Brainloop mental machine was a good example of this technology.

I think you already know about Honda corporation’s famous robot Asimo. Now, their hardworking engineers developed a system to control Asimo using sensors which measure the electrical activity on the brain and the blood flow. Namely, EEG and NIRS. All you need to wear this helmet and think about the several parts of the robot including left-hand, right hand, feet or tongue. Asimo robot will move the part accordingly. It is known that Honda is already investing on brain controlled applications for more than four years.

Such products are still in the early stages and we should wait for an unknown time to see the robot armies clashing each other. (which surely will be operated remotely by evil mind forces)

Source : CrunchGear

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Suppose that you or your software development team has managed to create a wonderful product which is planned to run smoothly on several web and database servers. Actually, online web software alone doesn’t mean much if you don’t provide constant availability and scalability to its customers. Providing the best service is only possible with a high quality systems monitoring service. As a professional who has worked as DB Admin and .Net web applications developer for several years, there are certain quality criteria for this service. It should immediately warn me about the bottlenecks and system failures, even in the process level help finding it. I remember that a special process triggered by a credit card application used in a bank which I have developed reports before, was always taking the CPU sources near to %90, and we couldn’t long time identify it because the system tracking software was not powerful enough.

Hyperic looks like one of the most efficient open source server management and monitoring software in the market.

First of all, all their products are open source and provides everything you can imagine and being developed regularly. Open source also means that you don’t have to bind yourself to a giant company which will charge you money for every server to manage.

Second, professional Hyperic products are being used already by heavily visited application websites like hi5, Cnet, real.com.

Third point is that server monitoring product should be very easy to install, deploy and use. I don’t want to be a master Linux system admin to be able to use the product. Hyperic sofware interface is intuitive and easy to use.

Hyperic offers different scaled software for different needs on a great range of operating systems including AIX, HP, Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac OSX, FreeBSD. Hyperic Open Source, Enterprise editions, Operations IQ, Amazon edition, Cloud monitoring are main product lines.

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