Tag: POOL

Officials in one Long Island town are cracking down on rogue swimming pool owners by using Google's satellite imaging technology. According to an Associated Press report in The Wall Street Journal, Riverhead, New York's chief building inspector, LeRoy Barnes, Jr., is using Google Earth to locate swimming pools that haven't been registered for a city permit. So far, Barnes and his staff have ...

While many gadgets don't fare well near water, BladeFish's Pool Jet is one that's designed strictly for summertime swimming. This scaled-down water scooter is similar to the larger ones you might have seen divers like Jacques Cousteau holding while they glide through the ocean. However, the $128 Pool Jet scooter is safe enough for kids to use, and is designed to work in the confines of a swimming ...

We already knew that the PR2 robot could fold a mean basket of laundry. But we had no idea it could also play a mean game of billiards. In the matter of a week, the Willow Garage team that developed the PR2 has taught its brainchild how to play pool -- although, as Gizmodo reports, it certainly wasn't easy. Willow Garage had to create a special bridge and grip to enable its bot to hold a cue, ...

There's cheating, and then there's out-thinking the room. Georgia Tech's own Justin Needham and Matthew Straub are clearly headed for great things, as their Digitally Assisted Billiards is reason enough to give these guys a degree in our eyes. Using an array of low-end kit -- just an eBox 2300 embedded computer, Logitech webcam, 4- x 3-foot mirror, a VGA projector, pool table and a few extenders ...

One of the byproducts of extreme computing power is heat. The problem is that all of this heat represents wasted energy, and instead of trying to recapture it, we use even more energy to dissipate that heat with air conditioning. But in the city of Uitikon, Switzerland, the local government, GIB Services, and IBM have come up with a rather unique solution. The IBM-built data center run by GIB ...