If like me you love Giant Robots and Mecha, then you will love this.
I have lovingly collected (and I am continuing to collect) some of the largest and most fearsome robots from all of Science Fiction - books, movies, TV, comics and figures.

Sci Fi Giant Robots and Mecha

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Since I have written plenty on the Lego RCX, I have decided to distil the many different articles into one article in one place.

The Lego RCX, Inside and Out contains info on programming one, buying one, adding your own sensors and powered devices, opening the RCX up, getting the RIS software and IR tower working on newer OS's and I will be collecting up and adding more in the next few weeks.

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Hmm - it turns out that I have less time to play games these days, so I found time by writing about some of my favourites.

My current favourite game (I go through fads) is Simutrans - an Open Source Transport Simulator, that happens to run nicely on Linux, Mac, Windows and even the iPhone.

First I compared it with OpenTTD, a transport game I had been playing before OpenTTD vs Simutrans - The Linux Transport Simulation Showdown.

As I played it more, I decided to share my best tips (which I am still collecting) with other players on Simutrans Help and Tips.

I may be on a roll with games articles for a short while, but will be back building robots or power things soon enough...

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What do you think are the best ever free Linux games?

After playing games for years, some just seem to stand out as top choices. These are native to Linux, open source and free. Nethack in particular is over 20 years old, and still one of my favourite games. It is still being discovered by players and still in active development. OpenTTD has a huge following. Wesnoth is superb and there are others...

I have written in detail about my favourites:
The Best Free Linux Games Ever

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Okay, I am now well involved in the phenomenon that is twitter, and for those interested it is http://twitter.com/dannystaple.

I have been thinking about AI's and chatbots for twitter and will be figuring out which I can adapt myself. However, there are plenty of clever tweeps out there who might be able to code their own or adapt something.
Bring out your Twitter AI's! If you simply pipe twitter to Alice or Eliza, or even Psychoanalyze-pinhead, code your own complete AI, dust off and bring out NIALL then I want to know here.

So here - put your best twitter chat bot forward - a link to twitter to follow, as a comment, and tell us a little about how it is written. I will be getting people to test it from around the twitterverse (is that a word?) at silly hours of the day, to ensure it really is a bot (it may be hard to prove this bit).

So go on - give us your best, chattiest bot - I want to hear from you. Let the OrionRobots Twitter Turing Test Begin!

For those who want a short name, I am thinking Twuring!

Rules:

• Must be on twitter - with its own profile.
• Twitter profile should state it is a bot, and an entry to twuring.
• Be prepared to tell us a little of how you did it (enough to prove it is a bot and not a fake) - a link to a blog/article about how you did it would be good.

Update:
This is now being tracked (including a twitter widget to see recent activity) on http://squidoo.com/twuring.

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After a few years in the making the new look, feel and most recent Tiki CMS code have arrived to Orionrobots!

This has been a major effort in design, testing and preparation for myself. To have it finally live is a huge relief. I expect there will be teething trouble, so please use the site feedback forum to feedback any problems.

New features include:

• The new Orion Technologies brand and logo are introduced. While OrionRobots will still talk a lot about robots, this marks an acceptance that other technology is just as interesting to me, and will be written about on the site. Expect to see more other hi-tech articles as well.
• Tags - while there were some attempts (half-baked) at site tags before, newer articles (and some revised ones) can now have real tagging as they are created. This is still under test.
• Commenting issues fixed.

Known Issues:

• Currently this may be slightly slower as the page templates and caches are created again.
• A number of minor and annoying stylesheet issues.
• Old techtags (my previous tagging system) will no longer show properly.
• Some of the old drawings may be missing - and need to be updated to the new formats.

I have ironed out (I think) any very serious problems, but hope my readership can let me know if they spot anything I have missed.
Enjoy - I think I am going to have a party now that this is finally done.

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Buying consumer level robots for the home in the Uk can still be pretty difficult. The Roomba has proved pretty hard to come by. However, Robots Inc are a company who specialise in exactly this.

As well as a number of articles on the state and future of robotics, they stock some great robots including:

• The Roomba - a robotic vacuum cleaner.
• I-sobot - A very small servo driven humanoid robot.

There is more on the site, so I recommend taking a look.

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A Happy New Year to all my readers.
2008 has been interesting to say the least. Here are what I see as important for OrionRobots:

	It has brought us the first true to market fuel cell car - the Honda FCX Clarity, which by pushing fuel cells further into the mainstream, brings the possibility of seeing them in robots and laptop computers closer.
	2008 has also brought the economic gloom we know, but this may be an opportunity for change. While companies like Woolworths, a fairly old UK High street chain, have sunk under, companies like eBay and Amazon have had the best year ever - online shopping has almost become the main method during the Christmas rush.
	2008 was the year of the NetBook - small form factor laptops, very light, cheap and good battery usage. The ASUS eee PC is a great platform for sitting on a robot - with a built in camera, WiFi, USB ports and an SD port, linking it with a microcontroller to play horse and rider makes a lot of sense for more complicated robots.

And 2009? Who knows - I hope it will be safe, prosperous and bring more technological delights. Perhaps the new economic situation will bring out the maker in people, so they will be more ready to bring out a screwdriver and fix or tinker with things. Perhaps it will also bring out the community spirit a little - you may actually get to know who your neighbours are.

So here are a couple of tips I have for 2009:

Road Safety - Don't Die Rushing	OrionRobots has always been very hot on keeping its readers safe. Consider this, nothing you are trying to get to, be it a wedding, job interview or exam, is so important that you should risk your life to get there. Better planning may avoid you needing to as well.
Use Thinking Rock to plan	Talking of planning, this is a good habit to get into. Thinking Rock is some great multi-platform computer software for planning.
Start some seeds	Although robots are fun, don't make it all that you do. Try growing something, take some supermarket tomatoes, squirt the seeds onto a tray and grow them! This link will show you what you need to get them started.

Whatever you do, have a great and safe new year. No matter how bad it seems, do not overlook the opportunities it may present.

Terms used

• Fuel Cell
• WiFi
• USB
• More about OrionRobots
• microcontroller
• Horse and Rider

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As usual, this year I had fun ensuring that Christmas lights worked again. However, I had a crafty idea on how to speed to process up - and wrote about it.

HOWTO: Fix Broken Christmas Lights Quickly

The crafty bit is the use of what the more technical readers will recognise as a binary search - dividing the haystack each time, leaving significantly less space to search for the next iteration.

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As readers probably know, robotics is not my only obsession. So from time to time I write about other technologies and stuff.
PortableApps? is a really cool tech that lets you install your favourite apps, along with their configuration and user settings onto a USB device or removable drive. It is free software for windows and I often use it to write and modify stuff on orionrobots.

Read more here - Using Portable Apps to take you applications with you.

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