Sphero
That looks kind of cool but sadly for me it'd have to fall into the £20-ish price bracket alongside those remote-control mini-helicopters
‘Tis the season for dropping unsubtle hints about gifts that YOU’D like to receive, or – if you prefer – for making a list of things that you would buy for nephews and nieces but, because you’re an evil misanthropic Uncle or Auntie, you’ll buy for yourself instead. At least that way there’ll be no tantrums round the tree and …
Sphero 2, from the gosphero.com shop, including shipping (to UK) and taxes, ends up as $189, or £115.
I got a sphero1 for christmas last year, and it's good fun, for a few weeks. The new one is supposed to be much quicker, which should make climbing obstacles (ramps etc.) easier, and you get two ramps in the box as well.
My main issue with the sphero1 (which i guess would apply to the 2 as well) is that to get the most out of it, you need a reasonable amount of space, as is true with all RC toys, which I, unfortunately, don't have.
"I got a sphero for the wife so she can use it with the cats,"
That (and dogs) was what I first thought of when I saw it.
"i'm pretty intrigued by some of the games though"
The zombie one mentioned in the article isn't the one I'd have highlighted. It's the game where you take on the role of a Rover, trying to prevent Number 6 from running away.
Except that one doesn't appear to exist. Missed a trick, there. (Or didn't miss it, but balked at the licensing fees needed, which would probably be understandable.)
""I got a sphero for the wife so she can use it with the cats,"
That (and dogs) was what I first thought of when I saw it."
No no no.Having seen a Terrier happily tearing apart a '1' and subsequent arguments over who was responsible(IMHO the twit who said 'watch this - it will drive him mad') I can say (most) cats probably, most dogs no.
Linus Torvalds has / had a chromebook pixel which he bought for the hires screen and promptly rooted.
The HP chromebook looks very pretty but it has a desperate 16GB drive soldered to the board and an ARM processor. It's probably fine for its intended purpose but I think it would be very cramped for running full blown Linux.
"You've got more chance of having a pint with the pope than getting a PS4 this side of Christmas..."
"No way. He prefers wine."
"And who said that His Holiness doesn't drink *wine* by the pint...?"
The Metric system says so. He stops just before he has a pint, or waaay after he has one.
"Who says only whole litres are sold on the continent?"
Very true. You can generally get:
250ml
330ml
500ml
1000ml (1 litre) [note the correct spelling of litre, for our American friends] ;-)
but you'll have a hell of a job getting a 568.2463ml measure m'boy! (1 pint [UK])
"You've got more chance of having a pint with the pope than getting a PS4 this side of Christmas..."
"No way. He prefers wine."
And who said that His Holiness doesn't drink *wine* by the pint...?
Here's the answer, courtesy of Billy Connolly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKMQKgSnGy8
I was recently recommended a website, bangggood.com, that sells lots of cheap n cheerful Chinese products, everything from mini helicopters, to CREE flashlights, spare parts and consumables for 3D printers to Arduino boards. I haven't used it yet myself, so can't yet recommend it personally, but I intend to cane £20 or so on just it's '99 cent gadgets' section soon.
Reviews of the site on 3rd party websites seem mostly positive, though some people claim that the buyer reviews might be manipulated a bit. Any one have any experience of this site?
I've got one of these, and although it functions fine as a router and access point don't buy it for the USB extras as they are worse than useless. USB storage is shockingly slow and flaky (<10mbps) over the network and doesn't work at all when trying to stream some media file types. I wasted a lot of time trying to get a coherent answer to this from their completely useless support dept., I didn't even expect them to fix the problem, just admit it was the shit firmware and give me an indication of when they expected to fix it. But no, answers ranged from your media player isn't compatible to return the unit to the vendor. (DD-WRT doesn't improve things according to the WRT forum).The USB print server facility is also extremely irritating requiring some TPlink software installed on each endpoint, (which worked when it felt like it).
My recommendation is the Asus RT-N66U, Gb ports, DB Wi-Fi, 2 USB ports (again, slow on transfer), doesn't have ac, just n but we'll not hold that against it. Built in torrent/nzb client to download to HD when you go to bed and it looks awesome.
Now to get BT to hurry up with my Fibre (only been waiting 5 months since they said it was available....) so I can switch from my crappy TG582n as a modem to something a bit faster.
I picked this mostly as a platform for OpenWRT, though of course there are plenty of similarly priced options, depending on the exact functions you require. Raspberry Pi gets all the love at the moment, but for some sorts of projects that need a small Linux system, I feel that you are very probably better off with something like this - even if not this exact model.
"also this TP-Link doesn't do 802.11ac it's dual band but N only"
Well, mine only cost AU$70 so I didn't expect it too. An Asus AC router costs $200 here.
Mine runs Gargoyle flawlessly - shares a printer to all on the network via one usb port and provides 3g access from a modem on the second usb port.
As I don't have any AC enabled hardware, I don't miss it's absence - prefer ethernet anyway.