Alexander Stuart

In the middle of preparations for our house move, this Kamigami robot bug kit arrived yesterday from Dash Robotics. Hudson, our eleven year old son, had contributed to their Kickstarter campaign (and they, very kindly, had contributed to his for the computer game he's creating, called Bunny Quest ).  We had also toured the Dash Robotics' facility in Silicon Valley last year, after meeting the team at Get Geeked in San Francisco. Hudson's Kamigami is one of the first 50 they've shipped! This is the skin for the robot bug: It took Hudson about an hour to put the robot bug together.  And this is Kamigami in action, surprising one of our dogs...and dancing! You may also like to read: Dash Robotics' Bio-Inspired Bugs Lenovo's Amazing Gift to Hudson at getgeeked San Francisco If you enjoyed this post, please follow me on Twitter  @alexanderchow .   And please  subscribe to this blog via email by clicki

The hip young women only mobile app Preggie , which my wife Charong Chow helps run, is currently holding a giveaway of the same wonderful Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro tablet that Lenovo was kind enough to give our eleven year old son, Hudson, at getgeeked in San Francisco because of the many smart questions he'd asked during a series of Q&As.  Among the tablet's many innovative features - designed by Ashton Kutcher - are an inbuilt pico video projector and JBL surround sound speakers . Hudson has loved using the tablet all summer, and now Preggie is offering a lucky mom or mom-to-be a chance to win the Yoga 2 Pro and maybe hold a late-summer backyard movie night with it. The Preggie drawing will be held on September 10th 2015 , so enter now! Win a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro Tablet with Preggi e Only 3 more days until our giveaway drawing! Celebrate the last days of summer with one last big backyard movie night with your family and friends. But you’ll need a  projector

Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. A couple of weeks ago, our family was lucky enough to have a tour of Dash Robotics' facility in Sunnyvale, California, where Nick Kohut and his partners have a young startup designing and manufacturing remarkable little robot bugs that you can control with your smartphone or tablet.  My son, Hudson, and I had first seen these at a tech convention in San Francisco organized by getgeeked  and SVEntrepreneurs . We had been impressed by both the robots' speed and agility - as well as by the fact that you can build the robot's "skin" from a single sheet of plastic, and swap it out later if you want to change the robot's color or design.  Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. Nick Kohut, cofounder of Dash Robotics. Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. Nick, who showed us around the Dash facility himself, met his partners, Andrew Gillies

Our six year old daughter Paradise loves the Keys-To-Go keyboard, too. Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. When our son Hudson and I recently attended the getgeeked event in San Francisco , one of the products that most impressed us was a simple bluetooth keyboard from Logitech, called Keys-To-Go. Slim, light, colorful and with models for both iOS (including Apple TV) and Android, perhaps the best feature of Keys-To-Go is its FabricSkin coating, a pleasing waterproof (or at least water-resistant - not sure you can surf with it) plastic coating that can be wiped clean after any unfortunate spills, and is also great for working in sandy or wilderness environments. The keyboard is surprisingly light and portable. While it's not full-size, it has really comfortable spacing, and despite its ultraslim 6mm depth, the keys actually tap like a "real" keyboard, giving you a satisfying sense that you are actually writing! It's great for an iPad or