Stompy gets off the ground with a Kickstarter: buy a ride on a 2-ton hexabot

In June we were promised a Kickstarter for Project Hexapod's 10-foot tall, two-ton Stompy. We're happy to report that Gui Cavalcanti and his cohorts (James Whong and Dan Cody) at the Artisan's Asylum weren't kidding. This morning the page went live and you can officially pledge your support for rideable six-legged robots. Now that the chassis is 80 percent through the design phase, the half-scale prototype leg (Gimpy) has proven its mettle, and the full-size prototype leg has been designed and the necessary parts ordered, it's time to start lining up funding for the final project. You know how it works: you pledge a certain amount of money and in return you receive a particular level of reward. Don't have much to offer? For just $5 the team will scale the White Mountains and shout your name from the top, while $10 will get you get you something a bit more tangible -- a bumper sticker that reads "my other car has six legs."

[Source: Engadget - Read the full story here]

Meet the 'bots' that edit Wikipedia

Wikipedia is written and maintained by tens of thousands of volunteers across the world. Those, in turn, are assisted by hundreds of "bots" - autonomous computer programmes that keep the encyclopaedia running.

"Penis is the male sex organ," the Wikipedia page in question read.

While that statement is undeniably true and thus may merit inclusion in Wikipedia, it belongs nowhere in the site's article on national supreme courts and their legal roles.

When an anonymous Wikipedia reader in South Carolina offered that contribution to the globally popular online encyclopaedia last week, it took just seconds for the blemish to be discovered and deleted.

The vandalism was caught not by a reader, but by a simple artificial intelligence programme called a bot - short for robot.

[Source: BBC - Click to read the full story]

Mountain Lion 101: The iCloud Document Library

One of my favorite features of Mountain Lion to demonstrate so far has been the iCloud Document Library. This is a way to store your iWork, TextEdit, and Preview documents in iCloud so that they are immediately accessible from other Macs on the same iCloud account as well as on connected iOS devices.

TUAW blogger and developer Erica Sadun told me the secret behind this on Wednesday. If you go to your Library folder and open the "Mobile Documents" folder, you'll notice that the name of the folder changes to iCloud (see screenshot below). That's where all of those documents are saved, and it's even possible to just drag items into the folder to add them to your iCloud Document Library.

In compatible apps, you'll find that selecting "Open" from the File menu displays a new Finder Open dialog with buttons for iCloud and "On My Mac". Selecting iCloud displays a very iOS-like dialog showing all compatible documents. Drag one document onto another, and you can create a folder -- another iOS feature. Likewise, selecting "Save As" from the File menu gives you the choice of saving a file to your iCloud Document Library.

[Source: TAUW - Click to read the full story]