I found out about an interesting service recently called StuffBak. It’s a business that helps people return lost items to their owners–sort of a global 21st-century Lost & Found system. The basic idea is that you put their stickers on valuable things you might lose, like cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, portable electronic games, laptop computers, backpacks, flash drives, cameras, eyeware, keychains, briefcases, sports gear, luggage, etc.–anything you move around that you can stick a label on, in short. The labels have a serial number and StuffBak’s phone number and web address. You register the serial number with them and provide your contact info. If you lose the item and someone finds it, they have a way to return it to you. StuffBak makes it even easier for them to do so by providing free services for sending your stuff back to you. read more

There’s a couple of videos here of a dancing robot built by some fellow at Carnegie Mellon. It’s actually a pretty impressive bit of engineering, although the demo with music is more impressive than the demo with the hand tapping the drum. (Click the “Keepon dancing to Spoon” label on the video player to see the music-based demo.) What makes me laugh, though, is that it looks like a dancing Peep to me.

It’s possibly also worth mentioning that the page says that the programming was done in Max/MSP, a product I worked on before founding Audio Damage. It’s amusing to know that my work may contribute to the advancement of dancing yellow blob bots. read more

There’s an article on CNN here documenting one of the worst computer mistakes I’ve heard of. It’s one of those tales that kind of makes you wince when you read it, and feel gratitude that you’re not responsible for this kind of data.

I do wonder, however, why nobody sent one of the drives to a data-rescue service. They can usually recover data from a reformatted drive with little trouble.

I’m fiddling with this site again. Apologies if you happen to be visiting while I’m messing with it.

The temperature broke 70F today, which, frankly, is a bit warm for March. However, in a happy event that may or may not be related, Tracie spotted a butterfly circling in our front yard. I managed to get a fairly good photo of it, despite not being able to get closer than about 10 feet to it. (The digital zoom on the Canon SD700 IS works remarkably well.)