dave prochnow

If you've ever wanted to strap yourself into one of those modern electric rides from Currie Technologies, now's your chance. A veritable smörgåsbord of surplus motors, gears, and controls is now available from All Electronics. Don't worry about this selection being a bunch of mismatched DIY surplus junk, either. All of these electric vehicle components are genuine Currie Technologies parts.

Would you like to reduce the size of your home security system? Like something on the order of magnitude of motion detectors that can fit on a postage stamp? These tiny rectangular sensors are actually powerful passive infrared (PIR) detectors that can be easily slipped into an area where their larger PIR brethren couldn't even dream of fitting.

Have you ever needed a low-value resistor for a low-voltage battery-powered circuit? Say, something in the range of 10-100 ohms? Finding this value of resistor can be difficult, if not impossible. In cases like this, you might be better off making your own resistor.

Flushed from the success of their first autonomous vehicle competition, SparkFun Electronics (SFE) is now reaching out to wannabe bot builders. Whether you couldn't travel to Colorado and participate in the big event, or you've just always wanted to build your own robot, this bot building tutorial will fill the bill.

Are you torn between two lovers, thinking back lovingly to those simple days of disk-based operating systems that could fit on a 1.44MB disk but remaining steadfastly enamored of a graphical user interface (GUI)? Hold on, Romeo: you can rekindle those passions, and it's only 10MB away.

The countdown is on, my friends. The countdown to the fastest booting OS, that is.

Forget those operating system sloths, Mac OS X and Windows (any flavor). The gauntlet was thrown down when the first mainstream commercial fast-boot OS appeared on a small solid-state drive (SSD) that had been pruned to operate on an ASUS eeePC.

Granted, the fast seek times for data access with the SSD contributed to Xandros's (the eeePC OS) speedy boot time, but users became enamored with the quick, "less than one minute," access to their apps. Thus was born the race to the fastest boot time.

In the previous two installments of this series, we labored through some ornery hardware wrangling and tested our mettle with some serious Objective-C coding, now it's time to deliver our app to the masses.

The third and final installment in this series takes our App to market, err, the App Store.

In the first part of this series, we covered the "nuts and bolts" for assembling a workable iPhone app development platform. Now that our desktop is cluttered with a mess of cables, it's time to roll up our sleeves and start cobbling some code together.