It’s one of these, a Tux Droid from Kysoh.  Basically it sits next to your computer and Does Things.  Its eyes can blink and glow, its wings flap, it can spin.  It hooks up to your Linux computer via USB, and your system will even see it as a USB sound device, so you can play music through it.  Of course, the sound quality isn’t that good, so its sound card is much more fun when you run a voice synthesizer through it.  In brief, it spins, talks, glows, flaps its wings and moves its beak.  Oh, and it has sound sensors, light sensors, and a number of push buttons on it, so it be more or less interactive as well.  Bring some voice recognition software onto your computer, hook up a microphone, and you can even have a conversation with it.

You program it in Python, which is a programming language I don’t actually know.  Remember how I said that this year I was going to focus more on my geekery?  Well, here’s the perfect opportunity.  I did a little reading and picked up a book and this morning I wrote up a little application that I’ve been intending to build for awhile now: a little timer that tells you to get off your computer for ten minutes every hour.  So it counts down for fifty minutes (during this time you can poke its head button to make sure it’s still awake — it says, "Yes, I am awake, stop hitting me!"), then spins around and flaps its wings and tells you to go play outside.  In ten minutes you get to come back, though during that ten minutes you can press the button on its head to get another five minutes.  It’s a pretty simple program, but for my first Python project, I think it’s pretty cool.  I’ve got some ideas for extending it, too.

At some point I will take a video of it doing a little dance that I programmed, but that requires a little more time, and I’m feeling pretty lazy this morning.