Mo’ Carbon, Mo’ Problems – Peer Reviewed Rap at Its Finest
Today Baba Brinkman, aka The Peer-Reviewed Rapper, releases his new album, “The Rap Guide to Climate Chaos.”
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Author: Chris Anderson
Building a Real Predator UAV (GeekDad Wayback Machine)
Here’s a semi-scale Predator. Pretty cool, but it’s an Almost-Ready-to-Fly model so I can’t do too much bragging. I just modded an inexpensive ($80) Nitro Models kit with a AXI 2208 brushless motor and added some proper landing gear and …
Continue ReadingIs Home 3D Scanning and Printing Within Reach? (GeekDad Wayback Machine)
[This post first ran in April, 2007. We re-posted it today just to highlight how far we’ve come in this short time.] The New York Times has a good article today that does a hands-on test of some 3D scanning …
Continue ReadingInstalling the Lego Autopilot (GeekDad Wayback Machine)
After my proof of concept of a Lego autopilot a couple weeks ago, the hard work began. First thing was to find an appropriate “avionics platform”, AKA a good-sized R/C airplane. We settled on the Electristar .40-sized trainer, which seemed …
Continue ReadingGeekDad’s 2nd 3rd Anniversary: Why I started GeekDad by Chris Anderson
This picture is why I started GeekDad. It was taken about two years ago on our back patio and shows my then 9-year-old Daniel and me with our Lego UAV, which we had just built together. He was into Lego, …
Continue ReadingFantasy LEGO Mindstorms Sensors Made Real
Christoph Bartneck, an industrial design professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the NetherlandsDenmark, teaches a course I would have killed to take: a master class to create expansion packs for Lego Mindstorms NXT. The students have to make …
Continue ReadingGeekDad’s 2nd Anniversary: Why I started GeekDad
This picture is why I started GeekDad. It was taken about two years ago on our back patio and shows my then 9-year-old Daniel and me with our Lego UAV, which we had just built together. He was into Lego, and I was into robotics. I’d been given a RC plane and had got the […]
Continue ReadingFrom GeekDad project to real business
About two years ago, my then-9-year-old and I worked on a cool project to program Lego Mindstorms to fly a RC plane, which we cheekily called a Lego UAV. (And were then, even more cheekily, accused of "weaponizing Lego"–UAVs are export controlled as weapons!). It worked, amazingly, and was a lot of fun. Then, as […]
Continue ReadingToy Review: Hasbro Lazertag Battle Set
Laser tag has come a long way in the past decade. No more feeble beams that don’t work outside, or over-sensitive sensors that record random hits. Now they’ve got haptic feedback, head-up displays, shotgun mode and even built-in videogames. Well, actually that last one is a bit crap, but Hasbro’s latest Lazertag set (around $70) […]
Continue ReadingToy Review: Nerf Vulcan Machine Gun
Okay, let’s just state the obvious: having a massive Nerf machine gun in your home is just wrong. But also a little bit right? That’s what I set out to discover. Wired got sent a review unit, so I brought it home, warning the kids not to get used to it because it was DEFINITELY […]
Continue ReadingWhen “Green” Means “Worse”
We were recently given a board game called Jakbo, which looked like a fun combination of Tetris and checkers. On the box it showed a rich dark wooden playing board and neatly interlocking pieces. Then we opened it up, and discovered that misdirected environmentalism seems to have ruined the game. Sometime between the shooting of […]
Continue ReadingGeekdad invents the best Lego Sumobots ever
This is what the ill-fated Lego Spybotics should have been. Master Lego Mindstorms builder (and geek dad) Steve Hassenplug has come up with the easiest-to-program sumo bots ever. Use the new Mindstorms RFID sensor, he’s created cards with pre-programmed attack and defense moves on them. The kids just decide which cards they want to use, […]
Continue ReadingAm I a bad dad for letting my kid use the headset in Xbox Live?
Not five minute into my 11-year-old’s first Xbox Live Halo 3 match with a headset he got called "bitch". Then "punk" and then worse. But he got stuck with it, got better, and now he seems to have managed the rare art of being a confident leader in his matches without demeaning others. It’s called […]
Continue ReadingWhen should a kid get an Airsoft gun (if ever)?
My 11-year-old has been bugging me all summer to talk his mother into letting him buy an Airsoft gun (I am, of course, an assumed yes). When I was a kid I had a BB gun, as did most of my friends. We promised to be careful, and then we shot each other in the […]
Continue ReadingMod your kid’s Star Wars toy into an awesome prop/nightlight
Huge respect to geekdad Peter Clute, who bought a Hasbro Millenium Falcon for Pete Jr, and then went to work. End result: an insanely detailed, weathered and fully LED-bedecked toy that looks awesome hanging from the ceiling or, well, anywhere. Loads of pictures like the below in the Gizmodo coverage of this:
Continue ReadingHelp your kids make their own card games
Card games are great fun for kids, but sometimes the standard packs just don’t have enough, well, whatever it is that your kids happen to want that day: orgres, soldiers, knights, princesses, etc. Here’s an easy way to help them make their own cards. I’ve made a Microsoft Word template that looks like this: You […]
Continue ReadingLego BlimpBots that really fly
Last weekend we tested BlimpDuino, which combines an open-source Arduino processor with some Lego Technics part to make a high-performance, super cheap blimp that can fly under RC control or autonomously (with infrared and ultrasonic sensors) in your living room Here’s a video of it in flight, showing both turning (with differential thrusters) and altitude […]
Continue ReadingTurning old Lego Spybotics into fun and easy Battlebots
One of my many failures as a geek dad has been my inability to get the kids interested in robotics, which is my own passion. The simple educational robots (little single-function machines) I’ve brought home are too boring, and real programmable robots are too complicated. But this weekend we had a breakthrough, when the seven-year-old […]
Continue ReadingDIYdrones at Maker Faire
My other side project–DIYdrones–is going to be part of the GeekDad booth at Maker Faire this weekend in San Mateo. It’s booth 166 in the Expo Hall (click on the map for detail), all day Sat and Sun. We’ll be showing: The BlimpDuino The Mindstorms UAV The Basic Stamp UAV The Lego Mindstorms FIRST Tech […]
Continue ReadingWhat our 11-year-old thought were the “best birthday gifts ever”
Daniel turned 11 today, and he’s not really that much of a geekling (just a regular boy), but here are some of the gifts, from us and his friends, that constituted what he described as the "best birthday ever" (aww!). Brickarms (Lego-compatible accessories that Lego would NEVER sell) Special Ops weapons pack (at right) Nerf […]
Continue ReadingReport from the FIRST Robotics Championships
This was my first year at the FIRST Robotics Championships, and I was blown away. More than 20,000 kids and coaches from 1,500 teams from around the world came to Atlanta to compete in the Georgia Dome. They brought more than a 1,000 robots and a dizzying array of team costumes, mascots and pit crews. […]
Continue ReadingLego Designer on the iPhone (almost)!
I can die happy now: A Lego designer program for my iPhone! From the Flashtastic mess of a website: "View, post, build, or edit other LEGO maniacs projects. Create your own LEGO characters in pals, post your LEGO self to represent in share. Play and download different LEGO games or challenge anyone to a […]
Continue ReadingTesting Stop Motion Software for PCs
If you’ve got a Mac, making stop motion movies with your kids is a no-brainer: iStopMotion is great. But if you’ve got a PC, the choice is harder. There are lots of programs available, but each has drawbacks, and getting cameras to work properly is a huge headache. I tested two programs: The PC leader, […]
Continue ReadingGeekDads@TED: My BlimpBot Foiled by Air Conditioning!
[This is a cross-post from my other blog at DIY Drones, where among other things we’ve been developing an under-$100 autonomous blimp for aerial robotics contests for kids] Yesterday my UAV partner Jordi (a 21-year-old embedded programming whiz who just immigrated from Mexico) drove up with the BlimpBot to Monterey, where I was attending […]
Continue ReadingDreadful Science Fair Exhibits
Two things. First, this is the 1,000th post on GeekDad! Go GeekDads! Second: there is nothing more core to the GeekDad experience than science fairs. The ones we did when we were kids. The ones our kids do. "Helping" our kids with their science fair entries. And then, the horrifying consequences of not helping our […]
Continue ReadingGeekDad failures: Wright Brothers “nerdy”?!?
My efforts to raise good geeklings are a litany of failures. Despite my best attempts to get them interested in the techie things that I obsess over, they persist in being regular kids, with no particular signs of sci/tech leanings (videogames and Lego don’t count). I can live with that (just), but last night’s exchange […]
Continue ReadingRock Band’s one huge flaw
Rock Band, as you probably already know, is the ultimate GeekDad inter-generational bonding tool. Even though my kids are really embarassed when I do air kicks ("that doesn’t help, Dad"), they’ve let me join their band, which is kinda awesome. But I’ve now visited three friends’ homes with Rock Band and in each the complaint […]
Continue ReadingDe-scarifying anatomy
Baris Karadogan, a venture capitalist, discovered a great way to get his kids to accept a scary anatomy poster and make it their own. He explains: "Yesterday we were at The Exploratorium, which is a fun museum that teaches children about science. It’s one of my favorite places in San Francisco. While there, I bought […]
Continue ReadingReport from a hardcore LEGO Sumo contest
GeekDad hero Steve Hassenplug, who is perhaps the best LEGO robotics builder in the world, writes in with a guest post, reporting on the Mindstorms contest he hosted at his house near Chicago last week. Over to Steve: "I have lots of cool stuff that goes on in my basement. Just last weekend, I had […]
Continue ReadingDatalogging Disneyland–with LEGO!
This is the geekiest dad thing I’ve seen in ages (from the Makezine blog): On the Lego Mindstorms NXT blog physicist Brian Davis describes how he rigged up a third-party 3-axis accelerometer to his NXT controller brick to create a portable motion datalogger. He datalogged and graphed several Disney World rides complete with annotations. Some […]
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