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Falling in love with flightless fowl

Tux Droid
Developer: Kysoh
Platform: Linux
Price: $99

Some may think it's impossible, but it could be tethering your Motorola Droid X to your Mac OS X computer without paying for Verizon's expensive Mobile Hotspot, without rooting the Droid X, and without installing any additional Android applications. It does sound impossible, but for some, it may not be. AirDroid for Mac is an extremely useful program for anyone who has different devices. Even if you can't get AirMirror to work, it'll save you a lot of time and frustration. For that we recommend. McDROID is the a fusion Arcade/RTS, the love-child of RTYPE and Dune 2. You take direct control of the modular robot McDROID and protect your shuttle and your crop against various types of mutants and mutations. You can either fight head-on by carrying a weapon or you can deploy weapons and let them do the work, you can even deploy experimentals.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the open-source Linux kernel, was once mauled by a very small penguin while on a trip in Australia. The experience had a lasting impact on him and later inspired him to make a penguin the official Linux mascot. Developer Larry Ewing created the first graphical rendering of the Linux penguin, which countless Linux users around the world know today as Tux.

An electronics company called Kysoh aims to bring the Linux mascot to life with a unique programmable toy. The Kysoh Tux Droid is a robot that wirelessly connects to a Linux computer (no Windows or Mac OS X support yet) and performs actions in response to preprogrammed events. It can flap its wings, turn around in circles, blink, detect light levels, record audio, and even speak. The Tux Droid also comes with an IR remote that can be used to make it do your bidding... until the grim day when it achieves complete autonomy and throws off the shackles of human subjugation, conspiring with the devious Roomba collective in an insidious plot to overthrow humanity.

Tux swims out of the box

The Tux Droid comes with a USB cable, an IR remote, a white firmware update cable, a power adapter, a concise instruction manual, and a 2.4 Ghz wireless dongle shaped like a fish that plugs into a standard USB port on the host computer and facilitates communication between the computer and the robot.

After extricating it from the packaging, a close examination reveals that soft fuzz covers most of its exterior, except for the plastic beak, feet, and eyes; it's approximately eight inches tall and rests steadily on three wheels that come out of the bottom. The build quality is pretty solid, but I don't think it would survive a fall from a high shelf onto a hard floor. The overall appearance is good—it is an unmistakable likeness of Ewing's original Tux rendering, and in person, any Linux enthusiast would recognize it as Tux at a glance.

Setting up Tux

The initial setup process is relatively straightforward. I started by plugging in the Tux Droid and turning it on. It has an internal rechargeable battery and can function on power from a regular wall socket while charging. When the droid activates, it says hello and flaps its wings.

Next, I plugged the fish dongle into the USB port on my keyboard. A blue LED will blink slowly behind its eyes to indicate that it is receiving power and attempting to establish a connection. When the fish finishes connecting with the Tux Droid (this typically doesn't take very long), the LED inside the fish will blink more rapidly and the LEDs behind Tux's eyes will turn solid blue.

The last setup step is installing the software so that Tux can be controlled from the computer. This control software isn't included in the box with the droid, so it has to be downloaded from the Internet... and that's where I ran into my first problem. The Kysoh web site is a bit disorganized, and it took me a few minutes to figure out that the required software is actually available for download from the Tux Droid community site rather than Kysoh's official web site as the instruction manual had indicated. In addition to the software itself, the community site also has a wiki page with more complete installation instructions.

The software is available in a Debian package or a tarball. I chose the Debian package, which can be installed on Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions by double-clicking the package file in a file manager or by using the dpkg command at the command line. I also had to install the text-to-speech voice package in order to get Tux to talk. The voice files are also distributed in both deb and tarball formats, and are available in 11 different languages. The most recent version of the Tux Droid software is 1.2.2, which was released in January.

The control software itself consists of several daemons (one for text-to-speech support and one for enabling interaction with the robot), a few graphical control utilities, and various custom behavior programs called gadgets. After installing the packages, I had to reboot my computer to get the Tux software daemons to start.

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If you own an eyeFi-Card: Install the eyeFi-App on your Android device and new photos will be transferred to your mac when entering the home WLAN.
Or signup for a dropbox account. There you have to move all new taken photos manually to, but you don't need an iPad or eyeFi-Card.

I've been using the awesome android app Cheetahsync, which lets you set up and sync any number of folders between your computer (mac or pc) and your android device, either or both directions, over wifi. The same dev also makes isyncr wifi, which syncs itunes playlists but also has an option to upload new photos and videos from your phone to your computer.
My problem is I haven't been able to get folder actions working consistently in order to automatically import any synced photos automatically into iPhoto. Any advice there would be appreciated!

Or, if you want to store files in Dropbox, use (free) DropSync to sync /mnt/sdcard/DCIM . This has the advantage of backing up your photos (to the cloud) even if you are not in wifi range of your main computer.

Or you could just install the Camera DCIM app from the Android Market.
It's the standard Camera app with proper support for the DCIM standard (which is what makes iPhoto recognize and show the pictures in your digital camera).
Let's be clear here: I am the developer and the app costs 0.99$. Before you think this is spam, however, know that I sent the 'bug fix' to Google long ago and nobody cared to reply. All the source code is available on github and I welcome you to download it, compile it and install it by yourself on your own phone without moving a penny (just remember to enable 'External sources' or you won't be able to install your own apk).
The 0.99$ is just a shortcut if you want it ready at your fingertips.

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Bump also reduces the size of the photos, so if you want full size photos, you will still have to use one of the other methods mentioned in the comments.

It would be neato if Apple would create an 'Add to iPhoto Automatically' folder, like the one they have for iTunes. I have a Mac mini hooked to my HDTV/home theater, and all of the music files that me and the rest of the family collect get copied to the folder that adds to the mini's iTunes automatically (the folder is shared via AFP and SMB). This way, everyone's music is in the home theater system, plus we've got extra copies in case the original files get lost for whatever reason.
We used to just use a generic shared folder as a dumping ground for music, connect to the mini via VNC, and from there drop the audio files into iTunes. The new method is obviously a lot faster. If Apple would implement a similar folder for iPhoto, it would seem to solve a lot of various issues that people have with getting their photos into iPhoto with little manual effort.

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'All you need is an iPad' assumes you have a few hundred bucks handy to solve the problem :)
Is it really that hard to get photos from a Droid into iPhoto? With my Android phone, I just connect the phone to my Mac via USB, it mounts on the desktop, and iPhoto recognises it as a camera and presents me with the Import page. That's actually less hassle than my Kodak point and shoot camera, which I always have to pop the SD card out of and slot into my MBP's card reader before iPhoto will recognise it.

A Droid Story Mac OS