My current dry-erase calendar is collecting dust due to me being too lazy to rewrite the dates every month, so inspired by Forebruary and other perpetual calendars, I created a magnetic dry-erase "Infinity Calendar" that sticks to your refrigerator.
I can think of a few projects that would be useful and fun, i.e. laundry-sorting bot, sandwich-making-bot etc., but they'd all be expensive and difficult to do.
A cheap, robust robot hand/arm would go a long way towards making this kind of robot-hacking accessible, but the bigger obstacle is that the generic computer vision building blocks that you'd need don't really exist yet (OpenCV is a good start)
The problem is that many tasks that seem simple (when you take millions of years of visual system evolution for granted), for example recognizing a sock in a pile of laundry, turn out to be pretty difficult.
I guess I would trust common sense in this case. I mean I've been hit in the shins with a hockey puck while wearing shin pads a few times, they seemed to work. This is anecdotal, but I don't think a double-blind study is needed to show that shin pads protect your shins from hockey pucks.
Good idea - I may add this in the next version. In the current version, if the number you've started to dial matches a number stored in your address book, the full number will pop up which you can tap to select.
I am interested in philosophy, and this is the _reason_ I chose computer engineering. You now have the tools to find the answers to your philosophical questions, in a way that has never before been practical - you can study the nature of the mind by developing models in computational neuroscience; you have enough background in mathematics and logic to study Godel, Turing, Russell, and the meaning of knowledge and truth; you can shed light on the existence free will by developing FMRI analysis tools. Maybe you can look at your ECE degree as the first part of your education.