Anyone who still has any doubts about whether cats are evil might find their mind made up when they hear about the WarKitteh gadget which has recently been in the news. A chap called Gene Bransfield is behind this small Wi-Fi hacking device but it is our feline friends who can do the dirty work for him. Gene is a security engineer and he came up with a cat collar that is jam packed full of technology and can help Wi-Fi hackers find networks with weak security. The unusual pet accessory comes with a Spark Cord board lurking inside it to...
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The idea of cows hooked up to the internet sounds just a little bit silly, doesn’t it? After all, it sounds as though it involves a bunch of heifers looking up bargains on eBay or checking out their field on Google Earth. However, it is a bit more sensible than it sounds, unfortunately. A bunch of Scottish dairy farmers have connected their bovine buddies to the web to see if they can increase milk production in this way. The project has been designed to allow the farmers to check out how healthy their cows are and to quickly identify...
Following hot on the heels of the tale of a Raspberry Pi computer being used to help a teddy bear fall from the sky, we have now discovered that some are being used to track rhinos. It seems that some of our horned friends who live in the Tsvao National Park in Kenya have a troubling habit of wandering off into remote areas of the park. The endangered animals can fall prey to illegal poachers when they are out of sight of the park’s rangers, so some bright spark came up with the idea of using cameras linked to a computer to monitor their...
If you saw a giant robotic dog throwing breeze blocks around the place you would get pretty scared, wouldn’t you? Well, you better stay away from the research centre and testing grounds of Boston Dynamics then. One of the robots they are developing looks kind of like a dog and is quite big, so they cleverly named it BigDog. The development of the device has been backed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and they have been working on it since back in 2005. It is just one of the machines which they are working on a Boston...
How much do you think it costs to train and keep a guide dog for life? You might be surprised to learn it’s a staggering £45,000 on average. But what if you could buy one off the shelf that required no training, no food and no attention? Well, A-level student Tom Ladyman has done just that with his robotic guide dog project. Tom used his time at college wisely, researching current ultrasound and forward facing camera systems. His website explains these systems are expensive and have their limitations. He says “Existing solutions...
Dogs that chew furniture, eat slippers, and bark constantly while their owners are out of the house are natural pessimists according to new research done in the UK. It was initially believed that it was little more than separation anxiety whereby the animal becomes distressed at being apart from their owner but it turns out that the problem is much more deepset than scientists and animal behaviourists believed. Dogs that get upset when left alone believe that their owners aren’t going to return apparently. The RSPCA funded research...
This little gadget has been designed on the basis that you would like to see what your pet has been up to and to see life from their point of view. This little gadget takes and stores pictures on its’ internal memory so you can look at them at the end of the day. It’s big brother for your pet that is actually quite interesting and can have practical uses. Design It is a small, lightweight little thing (5.5cm, x 5.5cm x 3.5 cm) which you clip onto your pet’s collar. When we tried on ‘Allfluff’, our gadget...
Satellite navigation firm Garmin has come up with a suitably high-tech dog collar that will allow owners to keep tabs on their hounds if they ever go astray. Garmin’s Astro DC 40 is available in a garish orange, which is a fairly useful visual aid for dog seeking in itself and the black GPS receiver is attached in a durable manner to one side. Garmin assures potential purchasers that the collar is comfortable for the dog as well as being convenient for the owner. The main application of the tracking collar is for keeping tabs on...
If I told you dogs can talk you probably wouldn’t believe me, at least not if your sane, but now thanks to some very clever chaps at Takara Tomy in Japan they can, sort of. The Bowlingual Voice is a very cool piece of kit which analyzes your dog’s barks and translates them into real human words…. I personally think it’s amazing, Dr Doolittle eat your heart out. A basic model was released seven years ago selling 300,000 units in Japan alone and causing enough of a stir to demand a more technologically advanced evolved version. Focussing...