I received this link today, via Oszkar, about a robot developed by Boston Dynamics, called BigDog. As you can see below, this robot has very natural movements, is able not only to keep its balance, but also to regain it in case of abruptly loosing it. Move to second 35 to see what I’m talking about. Or better yet, watch the entire clip to see the whole feature set:

I have to say I’m pretty impressed. That was quite a kick! Robotics have evolved a lot during the last years!

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Broken Windows / Linux or some other OS? I’ve faced this problem at least a dozen times. In these situations my best advice is to completely reinstall the OS.

But first you need to…

• recover data
• check your computer for hardware problems

I’ve just returned from my cousin, where a computer crashed. Because there was some important info she needed to recover, she called me before taking the PC to Service. I had 2 posibilities:

1. take the HDD out, physically mount it in another PC, save data and then place it back, or..
2. boot Linux from a Live CD, mount the needed partition, copy data and good bye!

I’ve selected no. 2 and proceeded as following:

• enter BIOS and select the CD-ROM as primary boot device
• boot Linux from live CD (I used Ubuntu 6.06 LTS)
• mount the selected partition using the terminal command
• copy important data either to
  
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