IMbot that looks up books…
Great idea – check out Edward Vielmetti’s Superpatronbot – “Another evening’s work produced this working (but buggy!) Google Talk robot that looks things up in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog. Technology used: Jose Nazario’s from Ann Arbor’s DuckyLib library to do the RSS parsing of the AADL’s catalog, and Perry Lorier’s confbot (from Wakaito, New Zealand) to handle all of the Google Jabber stuff.” Thanks Brian! Link. Don’t forget our MAKEbot contest is still going on!
Green is good! – “Network Operations Centers and Help Desks all over monitor their systems and networks with a somewhat open source product called Big Brother. Here’s how to add a traffic light to indicate network status. Big Brother provides a web interface that shows the status of the network, and systems. The web interface allows you to drill down and see the status of any device monitored. It does all this in a very simple and elegant way, by providing color indications, red, yellow, and green to tell you how things are going. Well all of this really can put the idea of traffic lights into your head if you like to “repurpose” consumer electronics like I do. So lets get to task and use our desktop computer, running Java to monitor a BigBrother web page and change a faux traffic light to match the color-status of our network.” Thanks 
News to me, the Digg folks are on it “With all the attention on the new ministore presentation, no one seems to have noticed that iTunes 6.02 enables video-sharing to your local network. Whether it’s intended for an upcoming home media appliance or not I don’t know, but it brings videos up to par with music.” 
Lavere writes “Logitech is selling a great webcam with pan and tilt functions (called “Orbit”, about $120). However, they really dropped the ball with the software: you can’t pan and tilt the cam via the Internet. Enter 
Here’s the first test of a 3D RSS reader “idea” I’m working on – I shot this last week before I left for Macworld so it doesn’t really show what’s possible, or how it works now, but I think it’s easy to get the idea – in the current version you point it toward a real geographic location and using a “lens” (a tablet pc with x,y,z axis tracking) as you point it at something you get the feeds, so let’s say you point it towards Redmond, WA you’d get news about Microsoft or something. For now I need to manually let it know where it is, but I think there’s a way to feed in more real world data. Ok, here’s the video – 
Excellent suggestions on a DIY spam filtering solution on 
We’re testing out an experiment on the MAKEbot (the instant message interface to MAKE Magazine) you can now search MSN and/or Yahoo over instant message with MAKEbot. So, try it out- add the MAKEbot to your buddy list (
