roaches

Tap Twitter, control a cockroach

Next time you see a cockroach, don't scurry away faster than it can flee. In fact, if you're a lover of the weirder side of life, the intrusive insect could represent one heck of a science project.

For example, artist Brittany Ransom created Twitter Roach -- a discoid cockroach that can be controlled through tweets that it receives on the popular microblogging service. … Read more

Bumping into Max Roach: my close encounter with a jazz legend

I read the sad news yesterday of the death of jazz drummer Max Roach, he was 83. He played on the first bebop records with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the 1940s and later worked with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and many, many others. He remained active until fairly recently.

I literally bumped into Max Roach at the Tower Records store near Lincoln Center in the early 1980s. We were both deep in browsing mode when we collided; I looked up and immediately recognized him. We each excused ourselves while I tried to remain calm as we … Read more

44-pound roach bot is stuff of nightmares

Here's the perfect answer to your prankster friend and his RC tarantula or that irritating co-worker who won't stop playing with the toy bug bot or "Solar Cricket" on his desk.

Relish the look on their loaf-of-bread faces when you summon all 44 pounds of the "Halluc II" beast-roach. Developed by Japanese scientists, this 32-inch, eight-legged robotic bug runs on Linux software and an 800MHz AMD processor, technology that Engadget says allows it to "walk or roll via a simple rotation of its jointed appendages." What's unclear to us is why … Read more

Roach bots make us reach for the Raid

There's nothing we hate more on the face of the planet than cockroaches--the mere thought of them can send us into a skin-crawling fit. So we think that the geniuses at Bandai Japan who invented the "Hex Bug" should be shot or, better yet, ordered to serve a life sentence in a gigantic Roach Motel.

Just reading Technabob's description of the $16 bug-bots makes us twitch: "The Hex Bug series of miniature insect robots scurry along on six legs, just like real bugs," and will "change direction when you clap in their vicinity.&… Read more

Clock radio for shrinking apartments

Loath as we are to write of yet another alarm clock, we feel that this is something of a public service for all the space-deprived Crave dwellers in New York City and other urban jungles where a janitor's closet can be a decent-sized studio apartment.

This Philips AJ300D clock radio has a 6-watt amp, speaker and dock for an iPod or MP3 player while maintaining a compact footprint, according to Technabob. In addition to waking you two hours after you've gotten home from a good night's clubbing, it'll still leave enough space in the combo bedroom-kitchen … Read more