The blog has been a bit quiet for the last month because I’ve been in China having a bit of a holiday. Look out for more pictures and posts coming as I get round to it!

I thought I’d share a few snippets of Chinese culture as I come across them from while I was away. Today I’ve got some modern Chinese pop music, wedding customs, and spicy food (not all in one pot, fortunately) for you to digest.

I think it is a fair statement to say that China is completely different in just about every possible way from the UK. Sure cars still have four wheels and a steering wheel, people still have two legs, arms and eyes, and the sun rises in the east (东) and sets in the west (西), but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Food is served and eaten differently, the customs are completely different, and subway stops are so far apart you couldn’t walk it if you wanted to.

So I’ve been using Jolicloud for quite a while on my netbook now, and I like it a lot. It recently got a pretty major upgrade to version 1.1, so rather than write down all my thoughts I thought I would do a Scoble and make a video. Enjoy below!

I have written and talked in the past on the subject of hacking Kinect, and how awesome it would be to hook it up to our robot project at Uni. Well I’m pleased to say that last week we achieved robot arm control with the Kinect sensor, using it to measure arm position and relay it to the arm, which then moved to mirror the action.

Check out the videos below (instructional and cheesy each in their own way) for demos of the Kinect and arm doing its thing.

Credits go to Stefan, Jean-Jacques and Ioannis (my fellow team members), and our supervisor Prof. Harwin for letting us play around with this stuff. If you want the code, it’s all free on Github here and here.

For my birthday, I was lucky enough to receive a Star Trek box set containing the best Borg episodes from all seasons as voted for by Trekkies themselves.

One of the first I watched (resisting the urge to watch chronologically) was an episode called Endgame, the final episode (or 2 if you watched it on TV and they split it up) from the entire Voyager series.

Now I happen to think that this is pretty much the best you’re going to get – an absolutely classic and undoubtedly awesome piece of television which wraps up my favorite Star Trek series of them all. Some would argue it is too abrupt an end, but I think it is a good compromise.

I mentioned Voyager so gratuitous pictures of Seven of Nine are authorised

Anyway, back to the point of the post – after I proclaimed how much I liked the episode, a lot of other people piped in with their suggestions for what they thought constituted the best-ever episode of Star Trek. Here’s a run-down of the suggestions. (It’s well worth reading to the bottom).

The Imagine Cup is a worldwide technology competition aimed at students, where you get to let your creativity and programming skill run wild, and win great prizes while you’re at it!

Check out the video below for more on the Imagine Cup.

If you want to read more on the competition, check out the