Open Orbific Oratiuncle

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Another week of bouncing from topic to topic. This week included robots, entrepreneurs, OSHW, FPAAs, Ecology and LEDs! Whoo, that’s a lotta stuff!

• Elon Musk is an enviable entrepreneur and engineer. Great video piece on him on Bloomberg.com.
• Google buys the Motorola handset business for $12.5 billion. Chris thought it was for access at first, but it's much more likely for the patent portfolio..
• Robots taking over some high risk jobs at Foxconn. Robots don't care about crappy working conditions, right?
• Dave posted a new video explaining the finer points about open source hardware. Mentioned in the comments of Dave's video, but does using vendor made parts make it not open source? The line needs to be drawn somewhere but we don't think that's where it is...
• The number one link on YouTube for "Open Source Hardware" is a TED Talk about Open Source Ecology. Amazing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEMkvT0DEk

• What, no chip printer in the 50 tools needed to restart a civilization? Chris will settle for a new chip with 1 million programmable gates and > 100 op amps.
• FIRST robotics has some celebrity weight behind it. The ad promoting the event was just a warm up for the actual show, aired last night.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLMOKM4QKcE

• Reminds Dave of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, meant to promote and inspire fitness in Australia and a few other countries.
• Great build quality on a WBR Regenerative Receiver by Dave Richards (AA7EE)! Looks like lots of fun to build!
• Margery Conner writes about how Phillips won the USA L-Prize and have produced a commercial replacement of a 60 Watt lightbulb with LEDs.
• Dave found an old payslip from the early 90s and was bragging about making $11 an hour as an engineer.
• This Day In Nerd History: Leslie Comrie (born Aug 15) was a New Zealand astronomer and pioneer in the application of punched-card machinery to astronomical calculations. He replaced the use of logarithm tables with desk calculators and punched card machines for the production of astronomical and mathematical tables. This made scientific use of these machines, made originally for only business uses.

That's all for this week. Remember to sign up for the open source ecology project, especially if you find yourself saying you don't know what to build.