Not to be outdone by their flying cousins, some less mobile bots are taking on the challenge of juggling. After the break you'll find a pair of vids, including one featuring a creation from the Czech Technical Institute in Prague that can launch five balls between its two "hands" with the aide of a high-speed tracking camera. The other clip stars the "Blind Juggler," a somewhat more impressive machine that has no sensors or cameras. Instead, it relies on mechanical feedback and some fancy math to control the trajectory of the ball and keep it airborne. The Blind Juggler debuted back in 2009, but creators Philipp Reist and Raffaello D'Andrea introduced an interesting wrinkle for version 2.0 by turning the entire thing into a pendulum that passes the ball to itself. Clearly, the next step is face paint and red, foam noses -- bringing our most bed-wetting of night terrors to life.
Pentax's Optio WG-1 GPS point-and-shoot satisfied geotaggers out of the box, but owners of its K-5, K-r and 645D DSLRs have had to make do with third-party taggers like the PhotoTrackr or Eye-Fi. The new hotshoe-mounted O-GPS1 module fixes that oversight by recording latitude, longitude, altitude, Coordinated Universal Time and shooting angle. Everyday snappers might find an extra hotshoe attachment cumbersome, but astro-photography enthusiasts could well be enticed by the device's interesting "ASTROTRACER" function. This helps you take clearer photos of celestial bodies by using the in-built sensors to calculate a star's movement and then employing the camera's shake reduction system to compensate. Sounds clever, but be advised: this module is only for Pentax DSLRs -- and only for very specific models at that. You'll get full functionality with the K-5 and K-r cameras, and geotagging (no ASTROTRACER) with the 645D. Oh, and you'll need to make sure yo
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