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BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN | The Verge

2026-04-24T00:11:41-05:00

Software brain is powerful stuff. It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time.

In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats generally. That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good, while more than 80 percent of people were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the technology. Only 35 percent of people were excited about it.

Read the full article at www.theverge.com

The New AtlantisProject Gutenberg

2026-04-20T01:18:46-05:00

THE NEW ATLANTIS

We sailed from Peru, (where we had continued for the space of one whole year) for China and Japan, by the South Sea; taking with us victuals for twelve months; and had good winds from the east, though soft and weak, for five months space, and more. But the wind came about, and settled in the west for many days, so as we could make little or no way, and were sometime in purpose to turn back. But then again there arose strong and great winds from the south, with a point east, which carried us up (for all that we could do) towards the north; by which time our victuals failed us, though we had made good spare of them. So that finding ourselves, in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world, without victuals, we gave ourselves for lost men and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who showeth his wonders in the deep, beseeching him of his mercy, that as in the beginning he discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so he would now discover land to us, that we might not perish.

And it came to pass that the next day about evening we saw within a kenning before us, towards the north, as it were thick clouds, which did put us in some hope of land; knowing how that part of the South Sea was utterly unknown; and might have islands, or continents, that hitherto were not come to light. Wherefore we bent our course thither, where we saw the appearance of land, all that night; and in the dawning of the next day, we might plainly discern that it was a land; flat to our sight, and full of boscage; which made it show the more dark. And after an hour and a half's sailing, we entered into a good haven, being the port of a fair city; not great indeed, but well built, and that gave a pleasant view from the sea: and we thinking every minute long, till we were on land, came close to the shore, and offered to land. But straightways we saw divers of the people, with bastons in their hands (as it were) forbidding us to land; yet without any cries of fierceness, but only as warning us off, by signs that they made. Whereupon being not a little discomforted, we were advising with ourselves, what we should do.

Read the full article at www.gutenberg.org

Francis Bacon and the Scientific Method - IEEE Spectrum

2026-04-20T01:09:01-05:00

In 1627, a year after the death of the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, a short, evocative tale of his was published. The New Atlantis describes how a ship blown off course arrives at an unknown island called Bensalem. At its heart stands Salomon’s House, an institution devoted to “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things” and to “the effecting of all things possible.” The novel captured Bacon’s vision of a science built on skepticism and empiricism and his belief that understanding and creating were one and the same pursuit.

No mere scholar’s study filled with curiosities, Salomon’s House had deep-sunk caves for refrigeration, towering structures for astronomy, sound-houses for acoustics, engine-houses, and optical perspective-houses. Its inhabitants bore titles that still sound futuristic: Merchants of Light, Pioneers, Compilers, and Interpreters of Nature.

Read the full article at spectrum.ieee.org

Google announces Gemma 4 open AI models, switches to Apache 2.0 license - Ars Technica

2026-04-02T18:07:09-05:00

Google’s Gemini AI models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, but you can only use Gemini on Google’s terms. The company’s Gemma open-weight models have provided more freedom, but Gemma 3, which launched over a year ago, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Starting today, developers can start working with Gemma 4, which comes in four sizes optimized for local usage. Google has also acknowledged developer frustrations with AI licensing, so it’s dumping the custom Gemma license.

Like past versions of its open-weight models, Google has designed Gemma 4 to be usable on local machines. That can mean plenty of things, of course. The two large Gemma variants, 26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense, are designed to run unquantized in bfloat16 format on a single 80GB Nvidia H100 GPU. Granted, that’s a $20,000 AI accelerator, but it’s still local hardware. If quantized to run at lower precision, these big models will fit on consumer GPUs.

Google also claims it has focused on reducing latency to really take advantage of Gemma’s local processing. The 26B Mixture of Experts model activates only 3.8 billion of its 26 billion parameters in inference mode, giving it much higher tokens-per-second than similarly sized models. Meanwhile, 31B Dense is more about quality than speed, but Google expects developers to fine-tune it for specific uses.

Read the full article at arstechnica.com

The Complete Cloudflare Wrangler Guide: From Local Development to Global Deployment - Tao's Blog

2026-04-01T17:56:15-05:00

Cloudflare Wrangler is the official command-line interface (CLI) tool designed for building, managing, and deploying applications on Cloudflare’s developer platform. Think of it as the main bridge between your local development environment and Cloudflare’s global network, letting you seamlessly interact with all of Cloudflare’s serverless products. As part of the broader Cloudflare Workers SDK, Wrangler works hand-in-hand with create-cloudflare (C3) project scaffolding tool and Miniflare local simulator to create a complete and efficient development toolchain.

Wrangler isn’t just a deployment tool anymore – it’s evolved into a comprehensive platform CLI. Initially, it was all about managing Cloudflare Workers, but as Cloudflare’s developer platform has grown, so has Wrangler’s capabilities. Today, it can handle the entire suite of serverless products including Cloudflare Pages, D1 databases, R2 object storage, Workers KV key-value storage, Queues messaging, Hyperdrive database accelerator, and Vectorize vector databases.

This evolution reflects Cloudflare’s strategic direction – delivering an integrated, full-stack serverless development experience. When developers master Wrangler, they’re essentially learning how to harness the entire Cloudflare ecosystem, making Wrangler the central entry point for building any application on the Cloudflare platform.

Read the full article at www.ubitools.com

Ollama taps Apple’s MLX framework to make local AI models faster on Macs - The New Stack

2026-04-01T17:53:12-05:00

Running large language models (LLMs) locally has often meant accepting slower speeds and tighter memory limits. Ollama’s latest update, built on Apple’s MLX framework, goes some way toward easing those constraints – especially for developers running AI agents directly on their machines.

In tandem, the release also introduces support for NVIDIA’s NVFP4 format, which targets memory efficiency for larger models.

For context, Ollama is runtime for LLMs with an open core that can be run locally, with a growing catalogue of open-weight models from major AI labs such as Meta, Google, Mistral, and Alibaba, which can be downloaded and run on a developer’s own machine or private infrastructure. It also integrates with coding agents, assistants, and developer tools, allowing those tools to run on locally hosted models instead of relying solely on external APIs.

Local speed gains News emerged in early 2025 that Ollama was developing support for MLX, an open source machine learning framework Apple introduced in 2023 to run models efficiently on Apple Silicon. Its core feature — and that of Apple’s modern hardware — is a shared memory model that allows CPU and GPU workloads to operate on the same data without the usual transfer overhead, reducing latency and improving throughput during inference.

Ollama is now officially plugging directly into that architecture with its latest release. In its announcement on Monday, the company points to improvements in both responsiveness and generation speed, particularly for coding-focused models.

Read the full article at thenewstack.io

5GW Data Center Buildout Requires Novel Engineering - IEEE Spectrum

2026-03-25T23:52:02-05:00

Though the project’s stated 5-GW scale is the largest among its peers, it’s just one of several dozen similar projects now underway. According to Michael Guckes, chief economist at construction-software company ConstructConnect, spending on data centers topped US $27 billion by July of 2025 and, once the full-year figures are tallied, will easily exceed $60 billion. Hyperion alone accounts for about a quarter of that.

For the engineers assigned to bring these projects to life, the mix of challenges involved represent a unique moment. The world’s largest tech companies are opening their wallets to pay for new innovations in compute, cooling, and network technology designed to operate at a scale that would’ve seemed absurd five years ago.

Read the full article at spectrum.ieee.org

Data Center DC Embraces 800V Power Shift - IEEE Spectrum

2026-03-25T23:48:00-05:00

By converting 13.8-kV AC grid power directly to 800 V DC at the data center perimeter, most intermediate conversion steps are eliminated. This reduces the number of fans and power-supply units, and leads to higher system reliability, lower heat dissipation, improved energy efficiency, and a smaller equipment footprint.

“Each power conversion between the electric grid or power source and the silicon chips inside the servers causes some energy loss,” says Fernando.

Switching from 415-V AC to 800-V DC in electrical distribution enables 85 percent more power to be transmitted through the same conductor size. This happens because higher voltage reduces current demand, lowering resistive losses and making power transfer more efficient. Thinner conductors can handle the same load, reducing copper requirements by 45 percent, a 5 percent improvement in efficiency, and 30 percent lower total cost of ownership for gigawatt-scale facilities.

“In a high-voltage DC architecture, power from the grid is converted from medium-voltage AC to roughly 800-V DC and then distributed throughout the facility on a DC bus,” said Vertiv’s Thompson. “At the rack, compact DC-to-DC converters step that voltage down for GPUs and CPUs.”

Read the full article at spectrum.ieee.org

OpenAI drops AI video tool Sora, startling Disney, sources say | Reuters

2026-03-25T15:29:36-05:00

March 24 (Reuters) - On Monday evening, Walt Disney Co (DIS.N), opens new tab and OpenAI teams were working together on a project linked to Sora, OpenAI's AI video tool. Just 30 minutes after that meeting, the Disney ‌team was blindsided with word that OpenAI was dropping the tool altogether, a person familiar with the matter said. OpenAI announced the move publicly on Tuesday. "It was a big rug-pull," according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss the matter. The move is the first big step by the ChatGPT maker to focus its business on potentially more lucrative areas such as coding tools and corporate customers. But the abrupt cancellation of Sora illustrates how messy the streamlining process may become as OpenAI prepares for a stock market debut that could come as early as later this year. The Sora decision means the end of a blockbuster $1 billion ⁠deal between Disney and the ChatGPT maker that was announced a little more than three months ago. As part of the three-year deal, Disney said it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI and lend more than 200 of its iconic characters to be used in short, AI-generated videos. But the transaction between the companies never closed, two other people familiar with the matter said, and no money changed hands. OpenAI executives have been debating Sora's fate for some time. Running the AI video app required significant computational resources, a fourth person with knowledge of the matter said, and left other teams with less firepower.

Read the full article at www.reuters.com

Why Frictionless AI Might Be Harmful - IEEE Spectrum

2026-03-23T02:10:08-05:00

Most people who regularly use AI tools would say they’re making their lives easier. The technology promises to streamline and take over tasks both professionally and personally—whether that’s summarizing documents, drafting deliverables, generating code, or even offering emotional support. But researchers are concerned AI is making some tasks too easy, and that this will come with unexpected costs.

In a commentary titled Against Frictionless AI, published in Communications Psychology on 24 February, psychologists from the University of Toronto discuss what might be lost when AI removes too much effort from human activities. Their argument centers on the idea that friction—difficulty, struggle, and even discomfort—plays an important role in learning, motivation, and meaning. Psychological research has long shown that effortful engagement can deepen understanding and strengthen memory, sometimes described as “desirable difficulties.”

The authors worry that AI systems capable of instantly producing polished answers or highly responsive conversation may bypass these processes of learning and motivation. By prioritizing outcomes over effort, AI could weaken the experiences that help people develop skills, build relationships, and find meaning in their work.

Read the full article at spectrum.ieee.org

Overview · Cloudflare Workers docs

2026-03-22T02:39:28-05:00

Cloudflare Workers A serverless platform for building, deploying, and scaling apps across Cloudflare's global network ↗ with a single command — no infrastructure to manage, no complex configuration With Cloudflare Workers, you can expect to: Deliver fast performance with high reliability anywhere in the world Build full-stack apps with your framework of choice, including React, Vue, Svelte, Next, Astro, React Router, and more Use your preferred language, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Rust, and more Gain deep visibility and insight with built-in observability Get started for free and grow with flexible pricing, affordable at any scale

Read the full article at developers.cloudflare.com

OpenClaw ChatGPT moment sparks concern AI models becoming commodities

2026-03-22T00:21:19-05:00

Three months ago, the tech industry was unaware of a lobster-themed AI coding project built by an under-the-radar Austrian software developer.

OpenClaw, as that creation is known, has enjoyed such a rapid ascent since then that it took center stage this week at GTC, Nvidia’s annual conference, where the leader of the world’s most valuable company called it “the most popular, open-source project in the history of humanity.”

“This is definitely the next ChatGPT,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on the sidelines of the developer event in Santa Clara, California. In his keynote, Huang described OpenClaw as the go-to option for building AI agents that can perform tasks like scouting eBay for deals and then placing bids, and said it “exceeded what Linux did in 30 years” in mere weeks.

The phenomenon is so pivotal to Nvidia that the chipmaker said at GTC that it’s building free accompanying security services — packaged as NemoClaw — intended to help spur more adoption of OpenClaw and get large businesses comfortable with its use.

Huang was validating what the rest of the market has been witnessing. An independent developer, rather than a giant, richly valued lab like OpenAI or Anthropic, came up with the next big thing in AI and, in doing so, exposed a potential major flaw in the investment thesis behind the large language models: They may be getting commoditized.

Read the full article at www.cnbc.com

Hello Again Phaser

2026-03-22T00:00:00-05:00

Welcome Embeded Hello Phaser! A quick demo of embeding the full Phaser project into a blog post. Now with mouse tracking demo.

New method could increase LLM training efficiency | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2026-03-21T02:33:24-05:00

By leveraging idle computing time, researchers can double the speed of model training while preserving accuracy.

Read the full article at news.mit.edu

Nvidia's Open-Source Gambit Reveals Cracks in Chip Dominance | The Tech Buzz

2026-03-21T01:24:21-05:00

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is making a calculated bet that might surprise the tech world - embracing open-source AI not as a gift to developers, but as a survival strategy. According to a new CNBC column, the GPU giant's shift toward openness signals something deeper: the company's traditional hardware moat is under siege, and Huang knows it. The move marks a pivotal moment for the $2 trillion chip maker as competitors circle and customers grow restless.

Read the full article at www.techbuzz.ai

GTC: What are NVIDIA's New Open Models ? | AI Magazine

2026-03-20T22:46:06-05:00

NVIDIA released a series of open models to advance science, including Nemotron for agentic AI, BioNemo for biomedical applications & Cosmos for physical AI “Open models are essential to advancing innovation at global scale,” NVIDIA notes, as the tech giant unveiled a major expansion of its open model ecosystem at GTC. With building intelligent systems as the goal and empowering developers and scientists as the means, the release of NVIDIA open models signals a push to accelerate the next generation of agentic, physical and healthcare AI. “Open source AI has become a global force for innovation,” says Kari Briski, Vice President of Generative AI Software at NVIDIA.

Read the full article at aimagazine.com

OpenScholar - Academic Paper Search

2026-02-05T00:19:37-06:00

OpenScholar .ai Search millions of academic papers and research articles

Read the full article at openscholar.ai

OpenAlex: The open catalog to the global research system | OpenAlex

2026-02-05T00:18:48-06:00

All the world's research, connected and open. Inspired by the Library of Alexandria, we catalog 474 million scholarly works, linking them to authors, institutions, funders, and more—all fully open.

Read the full article at openalex.org

16 open source projects transforming AI and machine learning | InfoWorld

2026-01-27T17:41:24-06:00

For several decades now, the most innovative software has always emerged from the world of open source software. It’s no different with machine learning and large language models. If anything, the open source ecosystem has grown richer and more complex, because now there are open source models to complement the open source code.

For this article, we’ve pulled together some of the most intriguing and useful projects for AI and machine learning. Many of these are foundation projects, nurturing their own niche ecology of open source plugins and extensions. Once you’ve started with the basic project, you can keep adding more parts.

Most of these projects offer demonstration code, so you can start up a running version that already tackles a basic task. Additionally, the companies that build and maintain these projects often sell a service alongside them. In some cases, they’ll deploy the code for you and save you the hassle of keeping it running. In others, they’ll sell custom add-ons and modifications. The code itself is still open, so there’s no vendor lock in. The services simply make it easier to adopt the code by paying someone to help. Here are 16 open source projects that developers can use to unlock the potential in machine learning and large language models of any size—from small to large, and even extra large.

Read the full article at www.infoworld.com

mifi/lossless-cut: The swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing

2026-01-23T16:35:01-06:00

LosslessCut aims to be the ultimate cross platform FFmpeg GUI for extremely fast and lossless operations on video, audio, subtitle and other related media files. The main feature is lossless trimming and cutting of video and audio files, which is great for saving space by rough-cutting your large video files taken from a video camera, GoPro, drone, etc. It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data without doing a slow re-encode and thereby losing quality. There are also many more use cases. Everything is extremely fast because it does an almost direct data copy, fueled by the awesome FFmpeg which does all the grunt work.

Read the full article at github.com

Deploying AI-Based Models? Use Hugging Face Spaces And Render - Open Source For You

2026-01-20T15:41:34-06:00

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the buzzword today with AI-based applications demonstrating great performance, speed, and accuracy. Their deployment is widespread in domains like healthcare, finance, retail, automotive, manufacturing, logistics, education, agriculture, telecom, travel, insurance, etc (the list includes almost every major field of work).

AI-based models are being trained with datasets and used for predictive analytics, data engineering and many high-performance applications. These include health diagnostics, finance fraud detection, recommendation systems, autonomous cars, smart grids, route optimisation, crop monitoring, network optimisation, customer segmentation, price prediction, threat detection, chatbots, risk assessment, gaming, data analysis, and many other real world applications.

Read the full article at www.opensourceforu.com

Ollama's documentation - Ollama

2026-01-18T03:02:34-06:00

Ollama is the easiest way to get up and running with large language models such as gpt-oss, Gemma 3, DeepSeek-R1, Qwen3 and more. Quickstart Get up and running with your first model Download Ollama Download Ollama on macOS, Windows or Linux Cloud Ollama’s cloud models offer larger models with better performance. API reference View Ollama’s API reference

Read the full article at docs.ollama.com

🏡 Home | Open WebUI

2026-01-18T03:01:25-06:00

Open WebUI is an extensible, feature-rich, and user-friendly self-hosted AI platform designed to operate entirely offline. It is built around universal standards, supporting Ollama and OpenAI-compatible Protocols (specifically Chat Completions). This protocol-first approach makes it a powerful, provider-agnostic AI deployment solution for both local and cloud-based models.

Read the full article at docs.openwebui.com

After ChatGPT Translate, Google Releases Multiple Open-Source Translation Models | Technology News

2026-01-18T00:13:11-06:00

Google's aggressive artificial intelligence (AI) push has not slowed down in 2026. The company has already announced a partnership with Apple, released new shopping tools and a protocol, introduced Personal Intelligence in Gemini and added the chatbot to its Trends website. Now, the company has shifted its focus towards the open community with the release of TranslateGemma models. These multilingual AI models are designed to support translation between a large number of languages across text and image (input only) modalities.

TranslateGemma Models Released In a blog post, the Mountain View-based tech giant released three different variants of the TranslateGemma AI models. These models are available to download on Google's Hugging Face listing and Kaggle's website. Additionally, developers and enterprises can also access them via Vertex AI, the company's cloud-based AI hub. These models are available with a permissive licence allowing both academic and commercial use cases.

TranslateGemma is available in 4B, 12B, and 27B sizes (where 4B refers to four billion parameters). The smallest model is said to be optimised for mobile and edge deployment, and the 12B variant is designed for consumer laptops. The largest 27B model offers maximum fidelity and can be run locally on a single Nvidia H100 GPU or TPU.

Read the full article at www.gadgets360.com

Gemma 3 model card | Google AI for Developers

2026-01-15T21:42:14-06:00

Gemma is a family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models from Google, built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models. Gemma 3 models are multimodal, handling text and image input and generating text output, with open weights for both pre-trained variants and instruction-tuned variants. Gemma 3 has a large, 128K context window, multilingual support in over 140 languages, and is available in more sizes than previous versions. Gemma 3 models are well-suited for a variety of text generation and image understanding tasks, including question answering, summarization, and reasoning. Their relatively small size makes it possible to deploy them in environments with limited resources such as laptops, desktops or your own cloud infrastructure, democratizing access to state of the art AI models and helping foster innovation for everyone.

Read the full article at ai.google.dev

WikiFlix

2026-01-07T19:26:27-06:00

Moves that are in the public domain - including: It's a Wonderful Life, Metropolis, All Quiet not he Western Front, The Gold Rush, A Streetcar Named Desire,

Read the full article at wikiflix.toolforge.org

LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. But what’s a parameter? | MIT Technology Review

2026-01-07T18:17:02-06:00

A large language model’s parameters are often said to be the dials and levers that control how it behaves. Think of a planet-size pinball machine that sends its balls pinging from one end to the other via billions of paddles and bumpers set just so. Tweak those settings and the balls will behave in a different way.

OpenAI’s GPT-3, released in 2020, had 175 billion parameters. Google DeepMind’s latest LLM, Gemini 3, may have at least a trillion—some think it’s probably more like 7 trillion—but the company isn’t saying. (With competition now fierce, AI firms no longer share information about how their models are built.)

Read the full article at www.technologyreview.com

Ollama Tutorial: How to Run Local AI Models with Ollama / Habr

2026-01-05T00:18:36-06:00

What is Ollama? Ollama is an open-source platform for running and managing large-language-model (LLM) packages entirely on your local machine. It bundles model weights, configuration, and data into a single Modelfile package. Ollama offers a command-line interface (CLI), a REST API, and a Python/JavaScript SDK, allowing users to download models, run them offline, and even call user-defined functions. Running models locally gives users privacy, removes network latency, and keeps data on the user’s device. Install Ollama Visit the official website to download Ollama https://ollama.com/. It’s available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Read the full article at habr.com

NeatoCal is a tiny JavaScript app that outputs a printable c...

2026-01-02T22:19:47-06:00

NeatoCal is a tiny JavaScript app that outputs a printable calendar with a full year on a single page. I love the view where all the weekends line up.

Read the full article at kottke.org

The 10 Best AI Models Of 2025, Ranked By What They Actually Do

2025-12-30T15:09:15-06:00

We aren’t just using these AI tools as assistant anymore; they’re fixing code bugs on their own, making full movies from a sentence, and staying focused for days without forgetting the plan. We went from having helpful assistants to creating actual digital coworkers in less than a year.

The biggest thing that happened in 2025? Specialisation. The big tech companies finally stopped pretending one “super brain” could do everything perfectly and started building specialists instead. It’s way better this way because now picking a model is just like hiring a pro: you don’t hire a plumber to do your taxes.

Whether you need a poet, a mathematician, or a filmmaker, the question isn’t “which AI is smartest” anymore—it’s just about picking the right tool for the specific mess you’re trying to clean up.

Here are the best AI models of 2025 categorised based on what they do:

Read the full article at www.techloy.com

PassMark Software - CPU Benchmark Charts

2025-12-24T21:55:54-06:00

3,000,000+ Systems Tested and 5,700 + CPU Models PassMark Software has delved into the millions of benchmark results that PerformanceTest users have posted to its web site and produced a comprehensive range of CPU charts to help compare the relative speeds of different processors from Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm and others.

Included in these lists are CPUs designed for servers and workstations (such as Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors), desktop CPUs (Intel Core Series and AMD Ryzen), in addition to ARM processors (Apple M1 and Qualcomm Snapdragon) and mobile CPUs.

Read the full article at www.cpubenchmark.net

PassMark Software - Video Card (GPU) Benchmarks - High End Video Cards

2025-12-24T21:55:20-06:00

This chart made up of millions of PerformanceTest benchmark results and is updated daily with new graphics card benchmarks. This high end chart contains high performance video cards typically found in premium gaming PCs. Recently introduced AMD video cards and nVidia graphics cards using the PCI-Express (or PCI-E) standard are common in our high end video card charts.

Read the full article at www.videocardbenchmark.net

NVIDIA Debuts Nemotron 3 Family of Open Models | NVIDIA Newsroom

2025-12-16T03:52:15-06:00

NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA Nemotron™ 3 family of open models, data and libraries designed to power transparent, efficient and specialized agentic AI development across industries.

The Nemotron 3 models — with Nano, Super and Ultra sizes — introduce a breakthrough hybrid latent mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture that helps developers build and deploy reliable multi-agent systems at scale.

As organizations shift from single-model chatbots to collaborative multi-agent AI systems, developers face mounting challenges, including communication overhead, context drift and high inference costs. In addition, developers require transparency to trust the models that will automate their complex workflows. Nemotron 3 directly addresses these challenges, delivering the performance and openness customers need to build specialized, agentic AI.

“Open innovation is the foundation of AI progress,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With Nemotron, we’re transforming advanced AI into an open platform that gives developers the transparency and efficiency they need to build agentic systems at scale.”

NVIDIA Nemotron supports NVIDIA’s broader sovereign AI efforts, with organizations from Europe to South Korea adopting open, transparent and efficient models that allow them to build AI systems aligned to their own data, regulations and values.

Early adopters, including Accenture, Cadence, CrowdStrike, Cursor, Deloitte, EY, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Palantir, Perplexity, ServiceNow, Siemens, Synopsys and Zoom, are integrating models from the Nemotron family to power AI workflows across manufacturing, cybersecurity, software development, media, communications and other industries.

“NVIDIA and ServiceNow have been shaping the future of AI for years, and the best is yet to come,” Bill McDermott, chairman and CEO of ServiceNow. “Today, we’re taking a major step forward in empowering leaders across all industries to fast-track their agentic AI strategy. ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow automation combined with NVIDIA Nemotron 3 will continue to define the standard with unmatched efficiency, speed and accuracy.”

As multi-agent AI systems expand, developers are increasingly relying on proprietary models for state-of-the-art reasoning while using more efficient and customizable open models to drive down costs. Routing tasks between frontier-level models and Nemotron in a single workflow gives agents the most intelligence while optimizing tokenomics.

Read the full article at nvidianews.nvidia.com

Beginner's Guide To Local LLMs - How To Get Started In 2025 - Tech Tactician

2025-12-14T16:53:05-06:00

Here you will quickly learn all about local LLM hardware, software & models to try out first. There are many reasons why one might try to get into local large language models. One is wanting to own a local and fully private, personal AI assistant. Another is a need for a capable roleplay companion or story writing helper. Whatever your goal is, this guide will walk you through the basics of local LLMs including hardware requirements, inference software options, and lightweight models to start with. Enjoy!

Read the full article at techtactician.com

Daring Fireball: The Real Problem of Humanity

2025-12-10T18:30:50-06:00

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.

Read the full article at daringfireball.net

The NPU in your phone keeps improving—why isn’t that making AI better? - Ars Technica

2025-12-04T20:00:12-06:00

Almost every technological innovation of the past several years has been laser-focused on one thing: generative AI. Many of these supposedly revolutionary systems run on big, expensive servers in a data center somewhere, but at the same time, chipmakers are crowing about the power of the neural processing units (NPU) they have brought to consumer devices. Every few months, it’s the same thing: This new NPU is 30 or 40 percent faster than the last one. That’s supposed to let you do something important, but no one really gets around to explaining what that is.

Experts envision a future of secure, personal AI tools with on-device intelligence, but does that match the reality of the AI boom? AI on the “edge” sounds great, but almost every AI tool of consequence is running in the cloud. So what’s that chip in your phone even doing?

What is an NPU?

Companies launching a new product often get bogged down in superlatives and vague marketing speak, so they do a poor job of explaining technical details. It’s not clear to most people buying a phone why they need the hardware to run AI workloads, and the supposed benefits are largely theoretical.

Many of today’s flagship consumer processors are systems-on-a-chip (SoC) because they incorporate multiple computing elements—like CPU cores, GPUs, and imaging controllers—on a single piece of silicon. This is true of mobile parts like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Google’s Tensor, as well as PC components like the Intel Core Ultra.

Read the full article at arstechnica.com

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares 'code red' to improve ChatGPT amid rising competition | AP News

2025-12-04T15:34:16-06:00

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has set off a “code red” alert to employees to improve its flagship product, ChatGPT, and delay other product developments, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper reported that Altman sent an internal memo to staff Monday saying more work was needed to enhance the artificial intelligence chatbot’s speed, reliability and personalization features.

This week marks three years since OpenAI first released ChatGPT, sparking global fascination and a commercial boom in generative AI technology and giving the San Francisco-based startup an early lead. But the company faces increased competition with rivals, including Google, which last month unleashed Gemini 3, the latest version of its own AI assistant.

Read the full article at apnews.com

Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead | The Verge

2025-12-04T15:21:34-06:00

Micron is retiring the Crucial brand, marking the end of its line of budget-friendly solid-state drives (SSDs) and RAM kits, as reported earlier by VideoCardz. In an announcement on Wednesday, Micron says winding down its consumer-focused business will “improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments” — a.k.a. AI companies.

Read the full article at www.theverge.com

OpenSeadragon

2025-11-10T16:43:42-06:00

Read the full article at openseadragon.github.io

Byte - a visual archive

2025-11-10T16:41:27-06:00

Read the full article at byte.tsundoku.io

Nike is trying to sell you ‘mind-body’ shoes | The Verge

2025-10-25T17:51:46-05:00

Nike’s new “neuroscience-based footwear” is designed to activate an athlete’s brain before and after a big game. The two shoes, a mule (the $95 Mind 001) and a lace-up sneaker (the $145 Mind 002), feature a distinctive array of 22 orange foam nodes embedded in each sole. Nike says the nodes each move up and down independently, like “pistons and gimbals,” as the athlete walks, mimicking the feeling of walking on the ground in a way that is “scientifically shown” to stimulate the foot and thus activate the brain’s sensory areas.

Read the full article at www.theverge.com

Explore Offline Wikipedia and Educational Content with Kiwix- Kiwix

2025-09-03T03:40:00-05:00

Kiwix is an offline reader for online content like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access. The software as well as the content is free to use for anyone.

Read the full article at kiwix.org

Soundiiz - Transfer playlists and favorites between streaming services

2025-08-26T00:57:10-05:00

TRANSFER YOUR PLAYLISTS AND FAVORITES The most reliable and fast solution to recreate your music collection across music services.

Read the full article at soundiiz.com

WikiProjectMed:Internet-in-a-Box - WikiProjectMed

2025-08-21T22:50:22-05:00

This is cool: Internet-in-a-Box. “Up to 32 users who are within about 100m of the hotspot can connect to the device and access or download the content that exists on the device: Wikipedia slices, medical knowledge, videos, and books.”

Read the full article at mdwiki.org

Trickle AI - Turn your ideas into live apps and websites with AI.

2025-08-21T00:25:20-05:00

Fun & simple little browser game: Dodge This. “Move to dodge the bullets. How long can you survive?”

Read the full article at trickle.so

Parachute Backup– Backup Utility for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos

2025-08-12T00:15:07-05:00

Parachute is a set-and-forget backup companion for iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive. It automatically syncs your memories—photos, videos, and documents—to your own storage, giving you peace of mind and full control.

Read the full article at www.parachuteapps.com

Chinese universities want students to use more AI, not less | MIT Technology Review

2025-07-29T02:54:13-05:00

Liu recommends that students use generative AI to write literature reviews, draft abstracts, generate charts, and organize thoughts. She’s created slides that lay out detailed examples of good and bad prompts, along with one core principle: AI can’t replace human judgment. “Only high-quality input and smart prompting can lead to good results,” she says.

Read the full article at www.technologyreview.com

Circle Game

2025-05-26T00:00:00-05:00

Here’s a small demo game built with Phaser, used to test how Phaser games can be embedded directly in blog posts.

In this simple game, you click the cirlce and it shows how fast your response time is. No bells and whistles — just a quick test to prove the concept.

Go ahead and give it a try! It opens in a new tab for a cleaner, full-page experience.

Circle Game (opens in new browser tab)

Demo: Embedding a Phaser Game in a Blog Post

2025-05-25T00:00:00-05:00

Here’s a small demo game built with Phaser, used to test how Phaser games can be embedded directly in blog posts.

In this simple game, you control a car using only the left and right arrow keys. The goal? Navigate to the end of the road without crashing. No bells and whistles — just a quick test to prove the concept.

Go ahead and give it a try! It opens in a new tab for a cleaner, full-page experience.

Car Game (opens in new browser tab)

Hello Phaser

2025-05-25T00:00:00-05:00

Welcome Embeded Hello Phaser!

Future of Agentic Readers

2025-05-24T19:05:45-05:00

Interview: The Future of Read-It-Later Tools in the Age of Agentic AI

Q: With Mozilla announcing the shutdown of Pocket, many users are left wondering where to turn. Are there any competitors stepping in to fill the gap?

A: Yes, absolutely. A number of tools are emerging or growing in popularity as Pocket winds down. Notable alternatives include Instapaper, Raindrop.io, Omnivore, Matter, and Readwise Reader. Each of these services offers slightly different takes on the "read-it-later" model—some focusing on minimalism, others on tagging, highlighting, or integration with reading workflows.

Q: Does Pinboard still play a role in this ecosystem?

A: Pinboard is more of an archival bookmarking service than a full-fledged reader, but it certainly still serves a dedicated audience. It's known for its simplicity, speed, and long-term data retention, but lacks a modern interface and advanced parsing features. You won’t get the same kind of clean reading experience that Pocket or Instapaper users expect.

Q: Are there any services that combine features like saving bookmarks, full-article parsing, and providing an RSS feed of saved content?

A: Yes. Omnivore, Raindrop.io, and Readwise Reader stand out in this area. Many of them allow you to save content via browser extensions or email, and then expose that saved content via RSS so you can read it in clients like NetNewsWire. Readwise Reader goes a step further by integrating highlighting, annotation, and syncing to Readwise's spaced repetition system.

Q: How does the reading experience compare across services?

A: Services like Readwise Reader, Instapaper, and Matter shine when it comes to readability. They don’t just bookmark a link; they scrape the content, extract the main article body, and present it in a clean, distraction-free format. NetNewsWire, as a traditional RSS reader, does a good job with full-text feeds, but doesn’t parse or clean articles itself.

Q: So these platforms essentially bypass the ads and junk of most websites?

A: Exactly. They pull just the main content and ignore ads, pop-ups, sidebars, and other clutter. This is a massive win for readers, though obviously not so great for publishers who rely on ad revenue or subscriptions.

Q: Speaking of subscriptions, how do these tools work with paywalled sites like the New York Times?

A: It varies. Some services can fetch content behind soft paywalls, but hard paywalls—like those requiring logins—are tougher. Readwise Reader, for example, won’t access subscriber-only content unless it’s publicly available or lightly restricted. Some tools allow you to paste in article text manually if needed.

Q: Are any readers trying to log in on behalf of the user to fetch restricted content?

A: Not widely, at least not yet. Logging in on behalf of a user and scraping subscription content introduces legal and ethical complexities. But we might see more sophisticated options in the future that offer secure credential management for premium content access.

Q: Do you think this will change with the rise of agentic AI?

A: Absolutely. The future points toward agentic AI systems that act on behalf of users—fetching, parsing, and even summarizing or annotating reading material proactively. Imagine a system that knows your interests, monitors your preferred sites or feeds, logs in when necessary, and delivers relevant, cleaned content to you daily. That's where we're heading, and it’s going to fundamentally reshape how we consume written information.

Conclusion

As tools like Pocket fade into history, a new era of intelligent, agent-driven readers is emerging. These systems don’t just store links; they work on the user’s behalf—retrieving, formatting, and delivering the written word in the cleanest, most accessible way possible. The read-it-later experience is rapidly evolving from a simple bookmarking function into a sophisticated, AI-enhanced reading concierge. And as agentic AI becomes more capable, the future of information consumption looks more streamlined.

References

Pushover: Simple Notifications for Android, iPhone, iPad, and Desktops

2025-05-24T19:05:45-05:00

Simple Notifications

Pushover makes it easy to get real-time notifications on your Android, iPhone, iPad, and Desktop (Android Wear and Apple Watch, too!)

Powered by Pushover

With our Android, iPhone & iPad, and Desktop Browser clients, you can receive unlimited push notifications on all of your devices from dozens of websites, services, and applications that already integrate with Pushover. Just supply your Pushover User Key or your Pushover e-mail address and you'll be getting push notifications in an instant.

Pushover for Teams

Pushover for Teams is a monthly service offering for organizations sending messages to multiple users and includes a number of extra features such as user management and automated onboarding. Pricing is per month, per user, and more information can be found on our Teams page.

Pushover for Everyone

Individuals and organizations not needing our Team features can use Pushover for Android, iOS, and Desktop with no subscription and just a simple one-time in-app purchase on each platform where you need it, after a 30-day free trial.

Simple Integration

For developers, system administrators, and everyone with just some technical savvy, our API makes it easy to integrate Pushover into your web app, network monitor, shell script, and anything else you can think of to send notifications to yourself or thousands of users. Pushing messages is as easy as using the HTTP libraries available in nearly every programming language with no custom modules required.

Read the full article at pushover.net

Alerty

2025-05-24T18:37:43-05:00

Send yourself native notifications from your apps and servers. Free to try, $5/month for unlimited.

Read the full article at alerty.dev

Hypercritical: Hyperspace

2025-05-24T14:05:53-05:00

My interest in file systems started when I discovered how type and creator codes1 and resource forks contributed to the fantastic user interface on my original Macintosh in 1984. In the late 1990s, when it looked like Apple might buy Be Inc. to solve its operating system problems, the Be File System was the part I was most excited about. When Apple bought NeXT instead and (eventually) created Mac OS X, I was extremely enthusiastic about the possibility of ZFS becoming the new file system for the Mac. But that didn’t happen either.

Finally, at WWDC 2017, Apple announced Apple File System (APFS) for macOS (after secretly test-converting everyone’s iPhones to APFS and then reverting them back to HFS+ as part of an earlier iOS 10.x update in one of the most audacious technological gambits in history).

APFS wasn’t ZFS, but it was still a huge leap over HFS+. Two of its most important features are point-in-time snapshots and copy-on-write clones. Snapshots allow for more reliable and efficient Time Machine backups. Copy-on-write clones are based on the same underlying architectural features that enable snapshots: a flexible arrangement between directory entries and their corresponding file contents.

Today, most Mac users don’t even notice that using the “Duplicate” command in the Finder to make a copy of a file doesn’t actually copy the file’s contents. Instead, it makes a “clone” file that shares its data with the original file. That’s why duplicating a file in the Finder is nearly instant, no matter how large the file is.

Read the full article at hypercritical.co

What in the world are Jony Ive and Sam Altman building? | The Verge

2025-05-23T14:26:30-05:00

The last 48 hours have been a wild rollercoaster ride for AI hardware. On Tuesday, Google ended its I/O keynote — a roughly two-hour event with copious references to AI — with its vision for Android XR glasses. That included flashy partnerships with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, as well as the first hands-on opportunity with its prototype glasses for the developers and the majority of tech media alike. On the ground, it was among the buzziest things to come out of Google I/O — a glimpse of what Big Tech thinks is the winning AI hardware formula.

A day later, Jony Ive and Sam Altman kicked down the door and told Google, “Hold my beer.”

If you’ve somehow missed the headlines, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the company was buying Ive’s AI hardware startup for $6.5 billion. That alone was enough to set the tech media sphere ablaze. After all, Ive is the legendary figure behind the iPhone and Apple Watch’s iconic design, revered for his relationship to Steve Jobs. Altman is not only the most recognizable figure in this new AI era, he’s also frequently compared to Jobs himself. It’s a narrative that writes itself. But for gadget nerds, the real nugget was the tidbit that Altman had seen an actual prototype from Ive. They coyly dropped hints that this mystery gadget would be to AI what the iPhone was to mobile computing. It was, they implied, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. That in turn set everyone hunting for clues and leaks about what this device could possibly be.

Read the full article at www.theverge.com

Tech CEOs are using AI to replace themselves | The Verge

2025-05-23T14:22:09-05:00

Buy-now-pay-later company Klarna featured the AI version of CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski in an 83-second video about its Q1 2025 results, as reported by TechCrunch. The video’s description says that his “AI avatar” is presenting the results, and the AI avatar kicks off the video by saying that “it’s me, or rather, my AI avatar.”

Read the full article at www.theverge.com

Bell Labs’ CMOS chip changed microprocessor design - IEEE Spectrum

2025-05-22T20:21:54-05:00

In the late 1970s, a time when 8-bit processors were state of the art and CMOS was the underdog of semiconductor technology, engineers at AT&T’s Bell Labs took a bold leap into the future. They made a high-stakes bet to outpace IBM, Intel, andother competitors in chip performance by combining cutting-edge 3.5-micron CMOS fabrication with a novel 32-bit processor architecture.

Although their creation—the Bellmac-32 microprocessor—never achieved the commercial fame of earlier ones such as Intel’s 4004 (released in 1971), its influence has proven far more enduring. Virtually every chip in smartphones, laptops, and tablets today relies on the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor principles that the Bellmac-32 pioneered.

As the 1980s approached, AT&T was grappling with transformation. For decades, the telecom giant—nicknamed “Ma Bell”—had dominated American voice communications, with its Western Electric subsidiary manufacturing nearly every telephone found in U.S. homes and offices. The U.S. federal government was pressing for antitrust-driven divestiture, but AT&T was granted an opening to expand into computing.

With computing firms already entrenched in the market, AT&T couldn’t afford to play catch-up; its strategy was to leap ahead, and the Bellmac-32 was its springboard.

The Bellmac-32 chip series has now been honored with an IEEE Milestone. Dedication ceremonies are slated to be held this year at the Nokia Bell Labs’ campus in Murray Hill, N.J., and at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Read the full article at spectrum.ieee.org

The Agentic Web and Original Sin – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

2025-05-20T18:16:56-05:00

One aspect of this vision of the agentic web was Microsoft’s commitment to the Model Context Protocol created by Anthropic; Scott told Nilay Patel in an excellent interview in The Verge that while MCP wasn’t exactly what he would have designed from scratch, ubiquity is more important than semantic differences, particularly when you’re trying to create HTTP for AI agents. The second part of Scott’s vision was something Microsoft created called NLWeb, a natural language interface for websites that makes them more directly accessible for agents:

Continue reading on stratechery.com

Create a fully custom About window for a Mac app in SwiftUI

2025-05-05T21:00:01-05:00

Mac apps typically include an About window that displays basic app information such as the version number and other details. Every macOS app project comes with a default About window accessible from the main app menu. This built-in panel shows the app icon, name, version, and build number.

Continue reading on nilcoalescing.com

Top 10 ways to monitor Linux in the console | Jeff Geerling

2025-01-15T23:13:30-06:00

Top 10 ways to monitor Linux in the console

Continue reading on www.jeffgeerling.com

Rules for Writing Software Tutorials · Refactoring English

2025-01-03T21:29:35-06:00

Most software tutorials are tragically flawed.

Tutorials often forget to mention some key detail, preventing readers from replicating the author’s process. Other times, the author brings in hidden assumptions that don’t match their readers’ expectations.

The good news is that it’s easier than you think to write an exceptional software tutorial. You can stand out in a sea of mediocre guides by following a few simple rules.

Continue reading on refactoringenglish.com

How to Monitor Linux Server Stats in Home Assistant - Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

2025-01-01T15:52:08-06:00

I’m a long-time Home Assistant user, and have found it an incredible way to control and monitor a wide variety of devices. Home Assistant just keeps getting better at displaying information in a friendly format, and I’ve been using it to show dashboards for everything from office lighting to server stats. The latter is the focus for this blog post: Monitoring Linux servers over MQTT using Home Assistant dashboards!

Continue reading on blog.fosketts.net

k4m4/terminals-are-sexy: 💥 A curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins & resources for CLI lovers.

2024-12-13T00:42:09-06:00

A curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins & resources for CLI lovers.

Continue reading on github.com

0nn0/terminal-mac-cheatsheet: List of my most used commands and shortcuts in the terminal for Mac

2024-12-13T00:37:48-06:00

Terminal Cheatsheet for Mac (Basics)

Continue reading on github.com

Writing down (and searching through) every UUID · eieio.games

2024-12-11T00:28:44-06:00

But having 5,316,911,983,139,663,491,615,228,241,121,378,304 2 possible values made it way harder than it needed to be to write them all down. I’m not sure why the authors of the UUID spec wanted to include so many bits!

Continue reading on eieio.games

Intel’s Death and Potential Revival – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

2024-12-09T17:37:04-06:00

In 1980 IBM, under pressure from its customers to provide computers for personal use, not just mainframes, set out to create the IBM PC; given the project’s low internal priority but high external demand they decided to outsource two critical components: Microsoft would provide the DOS operating system, which would run on the Intel 8088 processor.

Continue reading on stratechery.com

KEØOG’s Reference Station | Ham Radio Answers

2024-12-09T16:59:30-06:00

A reference design is exactly that: a design that can be used as a reference for building your own. Not mandatory design, nor for that matter a suggested design. The amateur radio station components listed here will provide you with a working station. I am purchasing these too, so that my tutorial and demonstration videos will use the reference station.

I’ve been asked many times, “What HF rig should I buy.” I used to answer, “Well, it depends.” No more. Now I say, “Buy what’s in the reference station: an Icom IC-7300.” I will try in every case to make a recommendation for something you can purchase, and minimize the number of things you must build.

Your circumstances will be different from mine. Perhaps you already have a radio in your station, and don’t want to change. No problem! Adapt the reference station to your needs. Note that my own station has capabilities, like a hex beam, that won’t be in the reference design. But the reference design can be a useful guide as you build out your station from the ground up, or if you’re upgrading it.

Continue reading on dcasler.com

Experimental Gatherings

2024-11-21T22:44:53-06:00

Welcome! Here you'll find a sampling of tools for connecting online including delightful musical collaboration sites, collaborative drawing sites, online galleries, weird experiments, corporate video-meeting tools, and office tools repurposed as spaces for gathering together.

What these tools have in common

Invite people to reach each other over the internet through typing, voice, video, drawing, music, or any expression that feels meaningful Priority to tools accessed for free through a browser Priority to the experimental, weird, home-made, simple, or barely working (anything with any interesting features is welcome)

Continue reading on marieflanagan.com

Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone | SSOReady

2024-11-03T16:02:38-06:00

The standard trope when talking about timezones is to rattle off falsehoods programmers believe about them. These lists are only somewhat enlightening – it’s really hard to figure out what truth is just from the contours of falsehood.

So here’s an alternative approach. I’m gonna show you some weird timezones. In fact, the weirdest timezones. They’re each about as weird as timezones are allowed to get in some way.

Asia/Kathmandu has a weird offset from UTC Africa/Casablanca doesn’t fit into the timezone model cleanly, so it’s hard-coded America/Nuuk does daylight savings at -01:00 (yes, with a negative) and Africa/Cairo and America/Santiago do it at 24 o’clock (not 0 o’clock) Australia/Lord_Howe, population 382 and some notable stick bugs, has the weirdest daylight savings rule To learn how their weirdness is represented in software, we’ll look at the raw timezone files that all software ultimately relies on. From there, two things will become clear:

Yeah, this stuff is weird But only finitely so, because ultimately a computer’s gotta implement them But first, an aside on the calendar.

Continue reading on ssoready.com

Clock

2024-10-28T01:43:36.345000+00:00

Clock

Want to know what time it is at the location of this server?

The Wes Cook Archive

2024-10-13T20:19:17-05:00

Hi, I’m Cabel. I was driving to Seattle and got hungry, so I stopped at a McDonalds in Centralia, WA. And when I went inside, I saw something incredible.

Continue reading on wescook.art

PATH tips

2024-09-27T15:35:40-05:00

Always great to get another Julia Evans * wizard zines * comic. This one is on the Linux Path command.

Continue reading on wizardzines.com

George Clooney and Brad Pitt Are Hollywood’s BFFs | GQ

2024-09-02T17:51:26-05:00

Pitt and Clooney—they are used to living like this. Surrounded by beauty. In majestic isolation. They have been friends for nearly a quarter-century, in part because of what they share: an understanding of where the road that every young actor dreams of walking—that road that represents some intoxicating combination of money and attention and success—ends up. It ends up here. In a place a regular human could barely describe (trust me, I’m trying), let alone relate to. What else can you do but laugh?

Continue reading on www.gq.com

Crazy Charlie’s Window – Rands in Repose

2024-09-01T17:00:47-05:00

The lab technician role was among the lowest rungs on the Social Science ladder. My boss was a tenured professor who was somehow protecting grant money by hiring a minimum-wage lab technician. Her description of the role during the interview versus what she described on my first day had little intersection.

Continue reading on randsinrepose.com

Regexes Got Good: The History And Future Of Regular Expressions In JavaScript — Smashing Magazine

2024-08-22T19:19:23-05:00

Modern JavaScript regular expressions have come a long way compared to what you might be familiar with. Regexes can be an amazing tool for searching and replacing text, but they have a longstanding reputation (perhaps outdated, as I’ll show) for being difficult to write and understand.

Continue reading on www.smashingmagazine.com

Top Programming Languages 2024 - IEEE Spectrum

2024-08-22T18:47:44-05:00

Welcome to IEEE Spectrum’s 11th annual rankings of the most popular programming languages. As always, we combine multiple metrics from different sources to create three meta rankings. The “Spectrum” ranking is weighted towards the profile of the typical IEEE member, the “Trending” ranking seeks to spot languages that are in the zeitgeist, and the “Jobs” ranking measures what employers are looking for.

Continue reading on spectrum.ieee.org

Top Programming Languages Methodology 2024 - IEEE Spectrum

2024-08-22T18:46:41-05:00

In our goal of trying to estimate a programming language’s popularity, we realized that no one can look over the shoulder of every person writing code, whether that be a child writing a Java script for a personal Minecraft server, a mobile app developer hoping to hit it big, or an aerospace engineer writing mission-critical code for a voyage to Mars. Our Top Programming Languages interactive tries to tackle the problem of estimating a language’s popularity by looking for proxy signals.

Continue reading on spectrum.ieee.org

Taking command of the Context Menu in macOS ⌘I Get Info

2024-08-01T23:12:51-05:00

ContextMenu

Many years ago I found ContextMenu ($4.99) which solves all of the issues I have with the Automator approach. There’s also a free version, ContextMenu Lite, that supports up to 3 actions to give you a taste of the good stuff.

Submenu is optional Apply to multiple types (files or directories; can be as granular as file extension) Show output (sometimes you want to see the results of the command) Confirmation before running (if it’s a potentially dangerous operation)

Continue reading on blog.gingerbeardman.com

trs80gp - A TRS-80 Model 1,2,3,4,12,16,6000,MC-10,Color Computer,DT-1,Videotex Emulator

2024-07-19T22:49:12-05:00

The year was 1978 and I was mowing lawns and doing odd jobs around my neighborhood to earn enough money to buy the coolest thing I had ever seen, a TRS-80 Model 1 computer at my local Radio Shack. It was awesome and changed the direction of the rest of my life. I spent all my free trime working with it and doing even more odd jobs to buy all the expansion options. I totally speced it out with a monitor, casset tape drive and eventually the expansion kit with a parallel printer. It started a life long hobby and a carreer that took me all over the county. Such great memories!

trs80gp primarily emulates the "gray" line of TRS-80 computers made by Tandy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They are known as the Model I, Model II, Model III, Model 4, Model 4P, Model 4D, Model 12, Model 16 and Model 6000. It is generally easier to use ordinary digits for the Model 1, Model 2 and Model 3. The Model 1, 3 and 4 are a line of compatible computers as is the Model 2, 12, 16 and 6000.

Continue reading on 48k.ca

Setting up an SSH Honeypot on the Raspberry Pi with sshesame - Pi My Life Up

2024-07-19T22:22:04-05:00

An SSH honeypot is a fake SSH server that you can run on your Raspberry Pi to capture bad actors. A user or bot attempting to access your network would get stuck in the honeypot.

Continue reading on pimylifeup.com

Bambu Lab releases a brand new Filament Guide – All About Bambu

2024-07-14T16:32:20-05:00

With all the different types of filament available, it can be hard to keep track and know which one is best suited for your project. Bambu Lab thinks so and has released a new interactive guide to help you choose.

Continue reading on www.allaboutbambu.com

MacStadium Releases Free Orka Desktop macOS Virtualization Software - MacRumors

2024-07-12T21:26:39-05:00

Mac cloud services provider MacStadium today unveiled Orka Desktop, a free virtualization tool that allows Mac users to create and manage macOS virtual machines locally via an easy-to-use admin panel.

Continue reading on www.macrumors.com

monkeymademe/picamera2-WebUI: This is a VERY basic WebUI for the Picamera2 Library for the Raspberry Pi

2024-07-06T21:40:22-05:00

Picamera2 WebUI is a lightweight web interface for the Raspberry Pi camera module, built on the Picamera2 Python library and using Flask. This project provides a user interface to configure camera settings, capture photos, and manage images in a basic gallery.

Continue reading on github.com

Calculating Empires

2024-06-25T00:34:52-05:00

How can we understand the operations of technology and power in our era? Our technological systems are increasingly complex, interconnected, automated and opaque. Social institutions, from schools to prisons, are becoming data industries, incorporating pervasive forms of capture and analysis. Even places that were once off-limits to capital, from our emotional expressions to outer space, are now subject to computational control and extraction. Meanwhile, the industrial transformations in AI are

Continue reading on calculatingempires.net

MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

2024-06-21T20:24:56-05:00

A microcontroller Macintosh

This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building a simple desktop/GUI for it. I’d made a comment along the lines of “or, just run some old OS”, and it got me thinking about the original Macintosh.

Continue reading on axio.ms

Career Advice from Jim Donovan – Espresso Insight

2024-05-10T00:05:51-05:00

Career Advice from Jim Donovan I stumbled upon “The Making of an Investment Banker”, a talk given by Jim Donovan to the UVA school of law, which was posted to their YouTube channel. I found the advice to be quite good, regardless of your chosen career path, investment banker or otherwise. 3 pieces of advice before starting your career / job: Read the Wall Street Journal every day, no matter what. You should read 3 articles: one macro article, such as related to what the Fed is doing with interest rates, for example. one on a specific company that recently released earnings, or a specific transaction / acquisition. one op-ed

Continue reading on espressoinsight.com

Hydrogen Is Coming to the Rescue - IEEE Spectrum

2024-04-16T19:31:18-05:00

A consortium of U.S. federal agencies has pooled their funds and wide array of expertise to reinvent the emergency vehicle. The hybrid electric box truck they’ve come up with is carbon neutral. And in the aftermath of a natural disaster like a tornado or wildfire, the vehicle, called H2Rescue, can supply electric power and potable water to survivors while acting as a temperature-controlled command center for rescue personnel.

Continue reading on spectrum.ieee.org

And it can also do that | Seth's Blog

2024-04-06T15:35:46-05:00

If you were around when the Model T was first announced, you could have built the organizations that became Disney, McDonald’s and Holiday Inn, all of which were powered by cheap, plentiful cars. You could have become a major developer of suburbs, mortgage banking and even pop music record labels (car radios changed the way music was consumed).

AI is here now, and the pace is astonishing. So far, I haven’t seen many freelancers or small businesspeople choosing to make an impact by understanding what it can do and selling processes and services to bigger organizations in ways that dramatically change how they do business.

Continue reading on seths.blog

Jevons paradox is not surprising | Seth's Blog

2024-04-06T15:34:54-05:00

When a resource can be used more efficiently, we end up using more of the thing, not less.

So, when cars get better gas mileage, people drive more, and consumption can actually go up.

When AI learns to write computer code, the demand for programmers goes up, because more efficient code is more attractive, and we want more of it.

Household appliances that are designed to save time and trouble end up being used for more than simply maintaining the previous level of tidiness. Because it’s easier, we raise our standards for tidy and use them more as they get easier to use.

We rarely consider the fact that human beings have invented 6 billion jobs in my lifetime.

My hunch is that AI is going to produce far more opportunities than it destroys.

Continue reading on seths.blog

Use These Simple Strategies to Retain Everything You Read

2024-04-01T13:49:38-05:00

When you first start with a blank sheet, you’re forced to search your memory and put on paper what you know (or what you think you know) about a subject. As you read, you see that understanding grow as you add new knowledge to the foundation.

Not only will you add new knowledge, but equally valuable, you’ll remove things you thought you knew that turned out not to be so.

Continue reading on fs.blog

Use inxi to Get All Kind of System Information in Linux

2024-03-08T21:28:22-06:00

inxi is a handy script that provides you with the system hardware and software information about the Linux system it is executed on. Learn more about using it.

Continue reading on itsfoss.com

Great American Eclipse

2024-02-25T05:05:38-06:00

This animation of the Moon’s shadow across North America simulates the view from a spacecraft 125 miles high chasing the shadow! On April 8, 2024, everyone inside the shadow will experience the breathtaking sight of the Sun’s corona during the total solar eclipse. Totality races from Mazatlan to Newfoundland.

Continue reading on www.greatamericaneclipse.com

Reading Too Much into Pong Wars - TidBITS

2024-02-08T00:16:13-06:00

Jason Kottke recently said he could spend all day watching Koen van Gilst’s Pong Wars, a JavaScript-based mashup of Pong and Breakout (designed by Steve Wozniak with help from Steve Jobs) that feels like a hyperactive digital lava lamp. Pong Wars features two balls, Day and Night, that bounce according to the physics of those games. The Day ball travels through light areas and turns dark blocks light, whereas the Night ball does the reverse, turning light blocks dark.

Continue reading on tidbits.com

Answering a few early Vision Pro questions – Six Colors

2024-02-04T00:35:40-06:00

Like pretty much any Apple device, you can directly connect a Vision Pro to external pointing devices—at least, you can connect the Magic Trackpad and some Bluetooth keyboards. I was able to get a Magic Keyboard connected to it simply by opening the Bluetooth area of the Settings app and selecting the Magic Keyboard. It really couldn’t have been easier.

Continue reading on sixcolors.com

iFixit Shares Apple Vision Pro Teardown - MacRumors

2024-02-04T00:33:11-06:00

iFixit's disassembly of the Vision Pro reveals several internal components, including an array of cameras and sensors, fans, lens motors, and more. Unsurprisingly, it appears that opening and repairing the headset will be difficult.

Continue reading on www.macrumors.com

Engineers Need Art

2024-02-03T23:39:19-06:00

Read the full article at www.engineersneedart.com

Maybe you know about the early (first?) 6502-based computer, the KIM-1 from 1976. I recently built a replica (the PAL-1) and wanted to flip through some of the original documentation. Fortunately archive.org has quite a bit of early KIM-1 texts.

I pulled down the KIM-1 Users Manual as a PDF but after printing it out and comb-binding it, I decided I would rather have a more polished softbound version so I created a book project on Lulu.

The PDF was suprisingly clean, only the cover was a let-down. So I used my favorite vector-based drawing app, Affinity Designer, and recreated the front and back covers.

Shipping is such a factor in the cost that I went ahead and had Lulu print up eight extras. I went ahead and set up a Tindie site to sell the extra copies.

How-build-computer-controlled-robot #6502

2024-02-03T03:56:47-06:00

Read the full article at www.amazon.com

The book that started it all for me. Sometime around 1979 #kim1 #6502 #robot #diy #developer

Pushover: Simple Notifications for Android, iPhone, iPad, and Desktop

2023-12-03T19:38:01-06:00

Powered by Pushover

With our Android, iPhone & iPad, and Desktop Browser clients, you can receive unlimited push notifications on all of your devices from dozens of websites, services, and applications that already integrate with Pushover. Just supply your Pushover User Key or your Pushover e-mail address and you'll be getting push notifications in an instant.

Pushover for Teams

Pushover for Teams is a monthly service offering for organizations sending messages to multiple users and includes a number of extra features such as user management and failover SMS message delivery. Pricing is per month, per user, and more information can be found on our Teams page.

Pushover for Everyone

Individuals and organizations not needing our Team features can use Pushover for Android, iOS, and Desktop for a simple one-time in-app purchase on each platform where you need it, after a 30-day free trial. Individuals can use Pushover with no subscription fees.

Simple Integration

For developers, system administrators, and everyone with just some technical savvy, our API makes it easy to integrate Pushover into your web app, network monitor, shell script, and anything else you can think of to send notifications to yourself or thousands of users. Pushing messages is as easy as using the HTTP libraries available in nearly every programming language with no custom modules required.

Read the full article at pushover.net

Brickception

2023-11-28T05:19:10-06:00

Read the full article at brickception.xyz

rickception is a fun take on the classic breakout game with popup windows!

Enable popup windows to play this game. Two popup windows are launched - the main game window and the paddle window. (Sorry, you cannot play this game where popups are not supported, e.g., mobile devices)

Paddle window has a nested game! You need to win in both the windows.

Moving the paddle window moves the paddle. The ball of the main window bounces off the top of the paddle window.

thefantasyreviews.com

2023-11-27T04:35:18-06:00

Read the full article at thefantasyreviews.com

The 6 Most Captivating and Addictive Space Opera Book Series of Modern Science Fiction

Michael Tsai - Blog - Ducklet 1.0.1

2023-11-22T21:43:49-06:00

Read the full article at mjtsai.com

Overall, I like Base and Core Data Lab better, but Base has been giving me a lot of internal errors lately, and I’m unsure whether it’s still under development. However, Ducklet looks promising, so I purchased it on sale.

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft | The New Yorker

2023-11-17T03:59:27-06:00

Read the full article at www.newyorker.com

Artificial intelligence still can’t beat a human when it comes to programming. But it’s only a matter of time.

DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs – cabel.com

2023-11-12T02:53:28-06:00

Read the full article at cabel.com

The cover’s hero image draws you in. What is that beautiful-looking tape deck? (And wow, even today, that thing is pretty awesome.) Once you open it up, you’re greeted with a daisywheel printed just-for-you welcome message from a guy named Drew Alan Kaplan. That’s right, the D.A.K. himself.

HTML DOM with JavaScript — Phuoc Nguyen

2023-11-07T20:35:43-06:00

Read the full article at phuoc.ng

Web development moves at lightning speed. I still remember when I first started using libraries like jQuery, Prototype, script.aculo.us, Zepto, and many more. Even with modern tools like Angular, VueJS, React, Solid and Svelte, we still have to deal with the Document Object Model (DOM). While these frameworks encapsulate and hide direct DOM management, they still give us access to work with the DOM via refs and event handlers. Whether you're developing or using a web component in any framework, you need to work with the DOM at a certain level. Knowing the browser DOM APIs and how to use them is crucial to web development. A website that introduces the APIs, highlights common problems, and provides answers to popular questions can be incredibly useful. That's why I've put together this collection of resources: No external libraries, just native browser APIs Small, easy-to-understand examples Live demos Tips and best practices included Real-life use cases Works with modern browsers and even supports Internet Explorer Get ready to master DOM manipulation with vanilla JavaScript.

The Pizza Principle | Seth's Blog

2023-10-14T14:46:53-05:00

Read the full article at seths.blog

Good pizza is rare, even though the method to create it is well known.

Any efforts to make it more convenient, cheaper or easier will almost always make it worse.

If you think this post is about pizza, I’m afraid that we’re already stuck.

B612 – The font family

2023-09-21T03:49:57-05:00

Read the full article at b612-font.com

In 2010, Airbus initiated a research collaboration with ENAC and Université de Toulouse III on a prospective study to define and validate an “Aeronautical Font”: the challenge was to improve the display of information on the cockpit screens, in particular in terms of legibility and comfort of reading, and to optimize the overall homogeneity of the cockpit.

2 years later, Airbus came to find Intactile DESIGN to work on the design of the eight typographic variants of the font. This one, baptized B612 in reference to the imaginary asteroid of the aviator Saint‑Exupéry, benefited from a complete hinting on all the characters.

AddyOsmani.com - Beyond the comfort zone is where all magic happens.⁠

2023-09-10T18:17:32-05:00

Read the full article at addyosmani.com

Ah, the comfort zone—a snug emotional space where stress is scarce and predictability prevails. While it’s not all bad, staying there too long can effectively serve as a straightjacket for your potential. Let's peel back the layers and dissect the interplay between your comfort zone, personal growth, and the 'magic' that happens when you dare to stretch your boundaries.

Shoelace: A forward-thinking library of web components.

2023-08-13T23:51:23-05:00

Read the full article at shoelace.style

Shoelace: A forward-thinking library of web components. Works with all frameworks 🧩 Works with CDNs 🚛 Fully customizable with CSS 🎨 Includes a dark theme 🌛 Built with accessibility in mind ♿️ First-class React support ⚛️ Built-in localization 💬 Open source 😸 More awesome than ever

Behind "Hello World" on Linux

2023-08-06T15:38:24-05:00

Read the full article at jvns.ca

But behind the scenes, there’s a lot more going on. I’ll describe some of what happens, and (much much more importantly!) explain some tools you can use to see what’s going on behind the scenes yourself. We’ll use readelf, strace, ldd, debugfs, /proc, ltrace, dd, and stat. I won’t talk about the Python-specific parts at all – just what happens when you run any dynamically linked executable.

3-2-1: On designing your life, and the value of doing hard things - James Clear

2023-07-26T22:14:30-05:00

Read the full article at jamesclear.com

“The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.

Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be.

If you can run marathons or throw double your body weight over your head, the sleep deprivation from a newborn is only a mild irritant. If you can excel at organic chemistry or econometrics, onboarding for a new finance job will be a breeze.

But if we avoid hard things, anything mildly challenging will seem insurmountable. We’ll cry into TikTok over an errant period at the end of a text message. We’ll see ourselves as incapable of learning new skills, taking on new careers, and escaping bad situations.

The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself.”

Garry Knight: "Using AirPods as a Hearing Aid…" - Toot.Cat

2023-07-25T15:40:04-05:00

Read the original article at toot.cat

I got a pair of AirPod Pro earbuds and set them up for my personal hearing needs. Later that day I went for a walk in my local woods and literally gasped out loud at hearing the birds I'd been missing for some years!

The way you set them up is buried deep in the Settings, so it's not surprising that not many people know about it. Here's where you need to go. You need to have the AirPods connected to your iPhone or iPad.

Settings Accessibility AirPods Audio Accessibility Settings Headphone Accommodations Custom Audio Setup Headphone Audio Customisation

How NASA Writes Space-Proof Code

2023-06-28T05:30:56-05:00

Read the original article at kottke.org

When you write some code and put it on a spacecraft headed into the far reaches of space, you need to it work, no matter what. Mistakes can mean loss of mission or even loss of life. In 2006, Gerard Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software wrote a paper called The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code. The rules focus on testability, readability, and predictability:

Avoid complex flow constructs, such as goto and recursion. All loops must have fixed bounds. This prevents runaway code. Avoid heap memory allocation. Restrict functions to a single printed page. Use a minimum of two runtime assertions per function. Restrict the scope of data to the smallest possible. Check the return value of all non-void functions, or cast to void to indicate the return value is useless. Use the preprocessor sparingly. Limit pointer use to a single dereference, and do not use function pointers. Compile with all possible warnings active; all warnings should then be addressed before release of the software.

UnsuckJS

2023-06-23T00:58:35-05:00

Read the original article at unsuckjs.com

Progressively enhance HTML with lightweight JavaScript libraries. No build tools, no compilers, and no hassle.

Living in hyperbole | Seth's Blog

2023-06-17T17:30:58-05:00

Read the original article at seths.blog

In the pre-media world, we bumped into fables, or news from across the village, but mostly, our role models and experiences were based on reality.

Now, when it’s not unusual to spend eight hours a day surrounded by media fueled by greatest hits (worst offender, breaking news, richest investor, evillest husband, funniest line of all the movies ever made) we start to imagine that only hyperbole matters.

Greatest hits, by their nature, are unusual. And if the media you’re absorbing is selected from a billion possible clips, don’t be surprised if you start to believe that the unusual is normal.

It’s not.

Folding phones are the stuff of science fiction - The Verge

2023-06-15T04:53:22-05:00

Read the original article at www.theverge.com

In the process, they've given us vivid examples of why folding phones could be more than the latest gadget gimmick or another screen to scratch. They could actually be useful. According to these fictional futures, three primary reasons stand out:

You can finally carry a tiny phone again without sacrificing your large screen Screens you’d never comfortably carry (because they’re huge) are finally within reach You could always have the perfect size screen for whatever you need

Apollo Remastered

2023-06-14T19:54:31-05:00

Read the original article at kottke.org

NASA keeps the original film negatives from the Apollo program sealed in a frozen vault in Houston, TX and rarely grants access to them. As a result, nearly all of the photos we see of those historic missions were made decades ago or are copies of copies. Recently, the film was cleaned and digitally scanned at "an unprecedented resolution".

Using these new high-res scans, image specialist Andy Saunders remastered each of the 35,000 photographs, resulting in this incredible-looking book, Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record. From the book's website:

The photographs from the lunar surface are as close as we can get to standing on the Moon ourselves, and for the first time, we were able to look back at Earth from afar, experiencing the "overview effect" — the cognitive shift that elicits an intense emotional experience upon seeing our home planet from space for the first time. The "Blue Marble" photograph, taken as Apollo 17 set course for the Moon, depicts the whole sunlit Earth, and is the most reproduced photograph of all time. Along with Apollo 8's "Earthrise," which depicts Earth above the lunar horizon, it was a catalyst for the environmental movement that continues today.

Saunders is also selling prints of some of these remastered photos, which look absolutely stunning.

Some blogging myths

2023-06-12T22:10:50-05:00

Read the original article at jvns.ca

A few years ago I gave a short talk (slides) about myths that discourage people from blogging. I was chatting with a friend about blogging the other day and it made me want to write up that talk as a blog post.

here are the myths:

myth: you need to be original

myth: you need to be an expert

myth: posts need to be 100% correct

myth: writing boring posts is bad

myth: you need to explain every concept

myth: page views matter

myth: more material is always better

myth: everyone should blog

Apple Vision – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

2023-06-07T20:18:11-05:00

Read the whole story at stratechery.com

It really is one of the best product names in Apple history: Vision is a description of a product, it is an aspiration for a use case, and it is a critique on the sort of society we are building, behind Apple’s leadership more than anyone else.

I am speaking, of course, about Apple’s new mixed reality headset that was announced at yesterday’s WWDC, with a planned ship date of early 2024, and a price of $3,499. I had the good fortune of using an Apple Vision in the context of a controlled demo — which is an important grain of salt, to be sure — and I found the experience extraordinary.

First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good. | TechCrunch

2023-06-06T03:02:06-05:00

Read the whole story at techcrunch.com

But, I’ve used essentially every major VR headset and AR device since 2013’s Oculus DK1 right up through the latest generations of Quest and Vive headsets. I’ve tried all of the experiences and stabs at making fetch happen when it comes to XR. I’ve been awed and re-awed as developers of the hardware and software of those devices and their marquee apps have continued to chew away at the “conundrum of the killer app” — trying to find something that would get real purchase with the broader public.

tldr InBrowser.App

2023-06-04T21:22:32-05:00

Read the whole story at tldr.inbrowser.app

tldr InBrowser.App is an offline-capable PWA for tldr-pages. Fully runs in your browser. Zero API latency.

Implement DNS in a weekend

2023-05-13T03:39:01-05:00

[implement-dns.wizardzines.com]

Implement DNS in a weekend

Hello! Our goal here is to implement a toy DNS resolver.

What’s a DNS resolver? It’s a program that knows how to figure out what the IP address for a domain is. Here’s what the command line interface of the resolver we’re going to write looks like:

$ python3 resolve.py example.com 93.184.216.34

The whole thing is about 200 lines of Python, including implementing all of the binary DNS parsing from scratch.

This project is a fun way to learn:

How to parse a binary network protocol like DNS How DNS works under the hood (what’s happening behind the scenes when you make a DNS query?) There are also some bonus exercises if you want to implement a few more of the features a real DNS resolver would have.

Everything is in a Jupyter notebook, which you can download and run. You can download all the code here:

Meet Mr. Internet: Vint Cerf - IEEE Spectrum

2023-04-30T16:04:44-05:00

[spectrum.ieee.org]

Vint Cerf is the recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor “for cocreating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society’s critical infrastructure.” PETER ADAMS

It was June 1973. For the past three months, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had been working together on a problem Kahn had been pondering for some time: how to connect ground-based military computers seamlessly to communications satellites and mobile radios.

The ARPANET and the way it handled communications was already well established. But extending it to handle multiple networks—whose reliability couldn’t be taken for granted—was a different story.

The two had been exchanging ideas in person and via email and reviewing the work of others who were trying to solve similar issues. But now, Cerf sat alone in the lobby of San Francisco’s Jack Tar Hotel, on a break from a computing conference. And the problem was on his mind.

Passkeys: Using FIDO for Secure and Easy Authentication

2023-03-29T02:53:24-05:00

[www.windley.com]

Summary Passkeys, the popular name for FIDO, are not only easy, they offer better protection against phishing than other forms of multi-factor authentication. This is how they work.

Passkeys.io – A Passkey Authentication Demo

2023-03-29T02:32:59-05:00

[www.passkeys.io]

What is a passkey? A passkey is a new way to sign in that works completely without passwords. By using the security capabilities of your devices like Touch ID and Face ID, passkeys are way more secure and are easier to use than both passwords and all current 2-factor authentication methods.

Apple’s File Provider Forces Mac Cloud Storage Changes - TidBITS

2023-03-13T19:29:21-05:00

[tidbits.com]

Over the last year, cloud storage services Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive—and probably others—have migrated from custom kernel extensions to Apple’s new-ish File Provider extension. It provides an Apple-approved framework for integrating remote files into macOS and displaying them in the Finder. I touched on this move a year ago in “Cloud Storage Forecast Unsettled, with Possible Storms” (4 February 2022).

Writing Javascript without a build system

2023-02-17T17:59:52-06:00

[jvns.ca]

Writing Javascript without a build system Hello! I’ve been writing some Javascript this week, and as always when I start a new frontend project, I was faced with the question: should I use a build system?

I want to talk about what’s appealing to me about build systems, why I (usually) still don’t use them, and why I find it frustrating that some frontend Javascript libraries require that you use a build system.

I’m writing this because most of the writing I see about JS assumes that you’re using a build system, and it can be hard to navigate for folks like me who write very simple small Javascript projects that don’t require a build system.

Application Holotypes: A Guide to Architecture Decisions - JASON Format

2023-01-31T16:36:38-06:00

[jasonformat.com]

Analyzing the characteristics of real-world applications is difficult. We often make generalizations about applications we see in the wild, both anecdotal and statistical: "Single-Page Applications are slower than multipage" or "apps with low TTI loaded fast". However, the extent to which these generalizations hold for the performance and architectural characteristics we care about varies. I believe one of the primary determinants of this variability are a product's features and design constraints, and classifying applications based on their features & constraints can enable more targeted and impactful solutions to the problems faced by each.

hexbin - hexagon sticker repository

2023-01-24T20:08:04-06:00

[hexb.in]

Community hexagon stickers

Examples of problems with integers

2023-01-19T06:07:52-06:00

[jvns.ca]

Hello! A few days back we talked about problems with floating point numbers.

This got me thinking – but what about integers? Of course integers have all kinds of problems too – anytime you represent a number in a small fixed amount of space (like 8/16/32/64 bits), you’re going to run into problems.

So I asked on Mastodon again for examples of integer problems and got all kinds of great responses again. Here’s a table of contents.

AddyOsmani.com - Prioritizing tasks using the Eisenhower matrix

2023-01-16T18:23:21-06:00

[addyosmani.com]

The Eisenhower matrix is a popular time management tool that can help you prioritize your tasks and make the most of your time.

The matrix, named after former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is a tool that helps you evaluate the importance and urgency of your tasks. By categorizing tasks into four quadrants, you can quickly identify which tasks are the most important and should be done first.

11 Intriguing Engineering Milestones to Look for in 2023

2023-01-01T03:03:19-06:00

[spectrum.ieee.org]

The initial segment of what will be the first underwater fiber-optic link to skirt the North Pole, connecting Japan and Europe, will light up in early 2023. This stretch, called Iris, will link Iceland to Ireland. In subsequent years, the Far North Fiber project will lay down a cable through the Northwest Passage, connecting Iceland to Greenland, then Canada, Alaska, and finally Japan. Far North Fiber will help increase the geographic diversity of the world’s fiber-optic network; currently, submarine cables are laid along a few well-trodden routes, leaving the network vulnerable to local hazards, like ship anchors, earthquakes, or fiber-eating sea monsters.

terminal - List of ANSI color escape sequences - Stack Overflow

2022-12-26T18:23:49-06:00

[stackoverflow.com]

The ANSI escape sequences you're looking for are the Select Graphic Rendition subset. All of these have the form

\033[XXXm where XXX is a series of semicolon-separated parameters.

To say, make text red, bold, and underlined (we'll discuss many other options below) in C you might write:

printf("\033[31;1;4mHello\033[0m");

Michael Tsai - Blog - C xor C++ Programming

2022-12-17T23:34:04-06:00

[mjtsai.com]

It is not uncommon to hear about C/C++ programming as a shorthand for “C and C++” programming. This implies that C and C++ are similar, but distinct, programming languages with the obvious interpretation being that C++ is a proper superset of C. However, this does not accurately describe the situation. The C++ programming language is inspired by the C programming language and supports much of the syntax and semantics of C, but is not a superset that is built on top of C. Despite sharing a historical relationship to one another, the languages have evolved independently and are specified in separate language standards. Due to this separation of the two specifications, incompatibilities have crept into the shared space of code that can be compiled by either a C compiler or a C++ compiler.

The really tiny RISC-V emulator: But, can it run Doom? #RISCV #Emulation @cnlohr « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

2022-12-07T03:40:25-06:00

Last week, we blogged about the making a very small RISC-V emulator. Folks asked the author the next logical question after finding out that the emulator works: Can it run Doom?

The original Doom is considered one of the first pioneering first-person shooter games, introducing to IBM-compatible computers features such as 3D graphics, third-dimension spatiality, networked multiplayer gameplay, and support for player-created modifications with the Doom WAD format. Over 10 million copies of games in the Doom series have been sold; the series has spawned numerous sequels, novels, comic books, board games, and film adaptations. The author fortunately had made a port of doom for small memory constrained systems and used that for tests.

Link to the original article

Does WWW still belong in URLs? | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

2022-12-05T23:24:27-06:00

For years, a small pedantry war has been raging in our address bars. In one corner are brands like Google, Instagram, and Facebook. This group has chosen to redirect example.com to www.example.com. In the opposite corner: GitHub, DuckDuckGo, and Discord. This group has chosen to do the reverse and redirect www.example.com to example.com.

Does “WWW” belong in a URL? Some developers hold strong opinions on the subject. We’ll explore arguments for and against it after a bit of history.

Link to the original article

The Transistor at 75 - IEEE Spectrum

2022-12-02T04:42:51-06:00

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS is a long time. It’s so long that most of us don’t remember a time before the transistor, and long enough for many engineers to have devoted entire careers to its use and development. In honor of this most important of technological achievements, this issue’s package of articles explores the transistor’s historical journey and potential future.

In “The First Transistor and How it Worked,” Glenn Zorpette dives deep into how the point-contact transistor came to be. Then, in “The Ultimate Transistor Timeline,” Stephen Cass lays out the device’s evolution, from the flurry of successors to the point-contact transistor to the complex devices in today’s laboratories that might one day go commercial. The transistor would never have become so useful and so ubiquitous if the semiconductor industry had not succeeded in making it small and cheap. We try to give you a sense of that scale in “The State of the Transistor.”

Link to the original article

APIs for Personal Weather Station Contributors - Google Docs

2022-12-02T00:54:23-06:00

APIs for Personal Weather Station Contributors

The Weather Company Data APIs are served from our Enterprise Data Platform built upon the latest, most robust and globally distributed cloud technologies leveraging the core competence of our weather systems and next-generation globally distributed, highly available, low latency platforms. The Enterprise Data Platform has been architected from the beginning with extreme scale and performance as key factors of success and is automatically scaled to deliver tens of Billions average daily requests with extremely low latency.

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My pickup truck is faster than your Ferrari | Seth's Blog

2022-11-30T16:38:13-06:00

Culture shifts. But it’s held in place by norms, and those are driven by status and affiliation.

No one actually needs a car that can accelerate one second faster than most other cars. But having one confers status in some circles. But what happens when a new generation of technology makes that previously fast car not the fastest anymore? Is it still a luxury good?

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Waiting for Superbatteries - IEEE Spectrum

2022-11-30T05:00:33-06:00

IF GRAIN MUST be dragged to market on an oxcart, how far can it go before the oxen eat up all the cargo? This, in brief, is the problem faced by any transportation system in which the vehicle must carry its own fuel. The key value is the density of energy, expressed with respect to either mass or volume.

The era of large steam-powered ocean liners began during the latter half of the 19th century, when wood was still the world’s dominant fuel. But no liners fired their boilers with wood: There would have been too little space left for passengers and cargo. Soft wood, such as spruce or pine, packs less than 10 megajoules per liter, whereas bituminous coal has 2.5 times as much energy by volume and at least twice as much by mass. By comparison, gasoline has 34 MJ/L and diesel about 38 MJ/L.

But in a world that aspires to leave behind all fuels (except hydrogen or maybe ammonia) and to electrify everything, the preferred measure of stored energy density is watt-hours per liter. By this metric, air-dried wood contains about 3,500 Wh/L, good steam coal around 6,500, gasoline 9,600, aviation kerosene 10,300, and natural gas (methane) merely 9.7—less than 1/1,000 the density of kerosene.

How do batteries compare with the fuels they are to displace?

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MicroPython on Unicorn

2022-11-29T01:50:08-06:00

Welcome to MicroPython on Unicorn!

The terminal beside this is no ordinary REPL.

It utilizes the Unicorn CPU emulator converted

to Javascript by Unicorn.js in order to run MicroPython

"bare metal" on an ARM CPU emulation.

MicroPython on Unicorn is completely open source so

make sure to report bugs to the issue tracker!.

Source: https://github.com/micropython/micropython-unicorn

The user and reset buttons along with the LEDs and pins

on the pyboard below are fully functional. Unfortunately

that's not quite the case for the clock speed approximation

when delayed.

Try to write a script, paste some code or run a demo!

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Overview | Quick-Start the Pico W WiFi with CircuitPython | Adafruit Learning System

2022-11-26T17:46:30-06:00

Raspberry Pi Pico W brings WiFi to the Pico platform while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling, and now as of CircuitPython 8.0.0-beta.2, there is CircuitPython WiFi support for the Pico W! This guide includes examples for testing your WiFi connection, using requests to pull JSON feeds, ping API's and log sensor data for IoT projects; all using CircuitPython! Status Bar As of CircuitPython 8.0.0, if you have a smart terminal program like Thonny, tio or Screen, you will see the status of your CircuitPython board in the header bar of the terminal.

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LINUX Unplugged 396: How Linux Got to Mars

2022-11-23T20:00:01-06:00

LINUX Unplugged 396: How Linux Got to Mars

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$1 POV Display - Hackster.io

2022-11-23T00:42:26-06:00

Persistence-of-vision, or POV, displays work on the principle that if a light blinks in front of your eye, you perceive it for some amount of time after it’s gone. Blink lights in sequence when moving, and you can create what looks like a static image. “Programmer with a soldering iron” B45i found a deal on ATtiny13 microcontrollers for roughly $.30 each, and was able to create a POV display with one for less than a dollar.

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An Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS

2022-11-22T20:49:10-06:00

In this blog post, I want to refine your mental model for Flexbox. We'll build an intuition for how the Flexbox algorithm works, by learning about each of these properties. Whether you're a CSS beginner, or you've been using Flexbox for years, I bet you'll learn quite a bit!

Let's do this!

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How to use a Raspberry Pi in kiosk mode - Raspberry Pi

2022-11-18T16:36:01-06:00

Kiosks are designed to offer users specific information or a specific experience, while preventing access to any other activities on the device. They are often found in airports, shops, hospitals, cafes, and museums — any location where people need easy access to information or services like timetables, waiting times, product information, directions, self check-in machines, and so on.

Kiosk mode on your Raspberry Pi allows you to boot straight into a full-screen web page or an application without using the desktop environment. It’s the foundation for many different projects where you want to display information for a dedicated interaction with a user.

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Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster: Search Words by First Known Use Date

2022-11-13T03:43:31-06:00

When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year. To learn more about First Known Use dates, click here.

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Stunning 4K POV Footage of a Swiss Mountain Coaster

2022-11-12T18:18:10-06:00

Dutch daredevil Mark of The Flying Dutchmen shared stunning 4K POV footage of a coaster ride down a mountain into the Oeschinen Valley in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland.

The mountain coasters is located next to the gondola ! Oeschinensee is one of the most beautiful lake in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland region. It is located 4 km east of Kandersteg in the Oeschinen valley.

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Pathfinding Visualizer

2022-11-07T20:17:07-06:00

Pathfinding Visualizer Step 1: Select a maze algorithm from the maze dropdown or draw your own boundaries by clicking and holding on the tiles Step 2: Select an pathfinding algorithm from the pathfinding dropdown Step 3: Click the play button to see the pathfinding visualizer in action !

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I wish my web server were in the corner of my room (Interconnected)

2022-11-05T23:50:53-05:00

Back in college I used to run part of my website from a Linux box in my room. I made it into a speech synthesiser, and people could connect to the machine to talk into my flat.

(Retrospective apologies to my flatmates.)

This is way back in 2000 so before smartphones, and before texting, and before always-on internet (college was an exception), and before camera phones or being able to reliably email photos let alone video. Decent text-to-speech still felt novel. We had a friend who was travelling in Australia at the time and he would visit internet cafes and type in messages to talk to us. Of course there was no way of talking back. It felt impossibly magical.

But what I remember feeling most magical was the idea that there was somebody visiting that server on my desk. There was somebody coming from a long way away and going inside. An electronic homunculus.

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Pong Was Boring—And People Loved It - IEEE Spectrum

2022-10-31T01:53:49-05:00

NOVEMBER MARKS THE 50th anniversary of Pong. Why should we care?

For starters, Pong is the first video game that millions of people welcomed into their homes to play on their own televisions. Pong kick-started a global video-game industry that is now worth upwards of US $300 billion. And Pong still has a place in active research, for training AI algorithms, strengthening neural networks, and developing the brain-machine interface called Neuralink, among other things.

And yet as a Gen-Xer born too late to have enjoyed Pong as a child, I have trouble fathoming how anyone could sit in front of a TV watching a square dot—not even a round ball—bounce back and forth across the dark, featureless screen. Was this really fun? To celebrate the half-century persistence of Pong, I set out to discover why so many people love the most boring video game of all time.

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A Plant That Swings A Machete

2022-10-28T20:04:51-05:00

This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real-time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete. In this way, the movements of the machete are determined based on input from the plant. Essentially the plant is the brain of the robot controlling the machete determining how it swings, jabs, slices and interacts in space.

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The outrageous electric Audi S1 Hoonitron stars in new Ken Block video | Ars Technica

2022-10-28T00:24:59-05:00

Now, you don't just go hooning any old EV around the strip, at least not if you're Ken Block. In this case, his ride is a stunning one-off electric Audi, the S1 Hoonitron, inspired by the 1987 Audi Sport quattro S1 Pikes Peak car.

"Developing a fully electric prototype for the unique requirements of our partner Ken Block was a big and exciting challenge to which the whole team rose with flying colors. It is great to see how ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ is presented in an all-new environment," said Oliver Hoffman, Audi's board member for technical development.

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Running Lego Engines with Air - YouTube

2022-10-26T16:43:52-05:00

Building and testing different types of Lego Pneumatic Engines that run on compressed air.

Chapters:

00:00 Concept 02:13 Starter Motor 02:35 Modifying Parts 03:20 Sliders 04:00 i2 05:06 Crank Radius 06:00 i3 07:15 i4 08:00 V6 09:27 V8 10:24 R12 11:26 Experiments 11:55 Montage

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Students broke the world record for 0-60 mph acceleration in an electric vehicle

2022-10-25T14:14:08-05:00

A university group named the GreenTeam, from the University of Stuttgart set the Guinness World Record for the fastest 0-62 mph (0-100 kph) electric vehicle acceleration in a 1.461-sec 0-62 mph run.

For almost a year, the 20 members of the GreenTeam have been preparing for the world record.

The GreenTeam E0711 is a genuinely powerful device. The carbon fiber racer has in-house-built motors that drive all four wheels and combine to produce 180 kW (242 horsepower) when powered by the new high-voltage battery pack.

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Manage your Raspberry Pi fleet with Ansible | Opensource.com

2022-10-25T03:55:36-05:00

Whether they are used for powering information displays, automating testing, controlling machinery, monitoring an environment, or doing other tasks, enterprises see Raspberry Pis as serious devices for doing serious tasks. Each model has a long product lifecycle—even the older models (1B+, 2B, 3A+, 3B, and 3B+) will remain in production until at least January 2026. There is little risk that they will go obsolete, so you can maintain a sufficiently large stock and treat them as modular components that you replace rather than fix.

Stable hardware vs. changing software

While you can rely on the hardware to remain constant, the same is not true for the software. The Raspberry Pi's official supported operating system is Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Raspbian), and it should be updated regularly to get the latest security and bug fixes.

This presents a problem. Because Raspberry Pis provide a bridge between the physical and virtual worlds, they are often installed in difficult-to-reach locations. They also tend to be installed by hardware folks, typically electricians for plants and assembly technicians for products. You do not want to waste their time by requiring them to connect a keyboard and monitor, log in to run raspi-config, install software with apt-get, and then configure the software.

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GitHub Next | Visualizing a Codebase

2022-10-24T16:33:37-05:00

How can we “fingerprint” a codebase to see its structure at a glance? Let’s explore ways to automatically visualize a GitHub repo, and how that could be useful.

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Why do the spikes that shoot out of stars form perfect crosses? | Science Questions with Surprising Answers

2022-10-24T16:18:17-05:00

The crossed spikes that you see in some images of stars are not actually parts of the stars. They are imaging artifacts that are created by the telescope itself and are called diffraction spikes. Certain telescopes have a large primary mirror that focuses the incoming beam of light onto a secondary mirror or a sensor that is held over the primary mirror. The secondary mirror diverts the light out of the telescope so it can be seen or further processed. Or, alternately, a sensor held above the primary mirror converts the image to an electrical signal that is delivered to a computer.

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Git - Book

2022-10-24T15:55:53-05:00

The entire Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress, is available here. All content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license. Print versions of the book are available on Amazon.com.

The version found here has been updated with corrections and additions from hundreds of contributors. If you see an error or have a suggestion, patches and issues are welcome in its GitHub repository.

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When life gives you lemons, write better error messages | by Jenni Nadler | Sep, 2022 | Wix UX

2022-10-24T15:45:26-05:00

When life gives you lemons, write better error messages When it comes to error handling, it truly is a team sport Error messages are part of our daily lives online. Every time a server is down or we don’t have internet, or we forget to add some info in a form, we get an error message. “Something went wrong” is the classic. But what went wrong? What happened? And, most importantly, how can I fix it?

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List of SOC Occupations

2022-10-24T03:33:55-05:00

May 2021 Occupation Profiles Major groups 00-0000 All Occupations 11-0000 Management Occupations 13-0000 Business and Financial Operations Occupations 15-0000 Computer and Mathematical Occupations 17-0000 Architecture and Engineering Occupations 19-0000 Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations 21-0000 Community and Social Service Occupations 23-0000 Legal Occupations 25-0000 Educational Instruction and Library Occupations 27-0000 Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations 29-0000 Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations 31-0000 Healthcare Support Occupations 33-0000 Protective Service Occupations 35-0000 Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations 37-0000 Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations 39-0000 Personal Care and Service Occupations 41-0000 Sales and Related Occupations 43-0000 Office and Administrative Support Occupations 45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations 47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations 49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations 51-0000 Production Occupations 53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations

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s l o w r o a d s

2022-10-23T17:24:07-05:00

Slow Roads - Endless Driving

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Transferable skills - Chris Coyier

2022-10-20T23:01:47-05:00

At a macro level, you learn programming concepts that are largely transferable regardless of language. The syntax may differ, but the core ideas are still the same. This can include things like: data-structures (arrays, objects, modules, hashes), algorithms (searching, sorting), architecture (design patterns, state management) and even performance optimizations (e.g. eager vs lazy evaluation, memoization, caching, lazy-loading etc). These are concepts you’ll use so frequently that knowing them backwards can have a lot of value.

At a micro level, you learn the implementation of those concepts. This can include things like: the language you use (JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc), the frameworks you use (e.g. React, Angular, Vue etc), the backend you use (e.g. Django, Rails, etc), and the tech stack you use (e.g. Google App Engine, Google Cloud Platform, etc). There involve details that can be valuable to gain expertise in to be effective, but are not always transferable.

Software Engineering – The Soft Parts

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JSON Feed

2022-10-21T01:43:36.345000+00:00

JSON Feed

I ran across this today and liked the idea so I added it to this Pelican site thanks to Andrew Heiss and his JSONFeed Pelican plug-in. GitHub - andrewheiss/pelican_json_feed: Pelican plugin to add a JSON Feed file to your site

Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs.

So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON. It reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds.

JSON Feed

Python - Multithreaded Programming

2022-10-17T20:48:13-05:00

The Threading Module The newer threading module included with Python 2.4 provides much more powerful, high-level support for threads than the thread module discussed in the previous section.

The threading module exposes all the methods of the thread module and provides some additional methods −

threading.activeCount() − Returns the number of thread objects that are active. threading.currentThread() − Returns the number of thread objects in the caller's thread control. threading.enumerate() − Returns a list of all thread objects that are currently active. In addition to the methods, the threading module has the Thread class that implements threading. The methods provided by the Thread class are as follows −

run() − The run() method is the entry point for a thread. start() − The start() method starts a thread by calling the run method. join([time]) − The join() waits for threads to terminate. isAlive() − The isAlive() method checks whether a thread is still executing. getName() − The getName() method returns the name of a thread. setName() − The setName() method sets the name of a thread. Creating Thread Using Threading Module To implement a new thread using the threading module, you have to do the following −

Define a new subclass of the Thread class. Override the init(self [,args]) method to add additional arguments. Then, override the run(self [,args]) method to implement what the thread should do when started. Once you have created the new Thread subclass, you can create an instance of it and then start a new thread by invoking the start(), which in turn calls run() method.

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How to import local modules with Python - Quentin Fortier

2022-10-14T18:17:13-05:00

1st solution: add root to sys.path

We can add the path to the root of the project:

from pathlib import Path import sys path_root = Path(file).parents[2] sys.path.append(str(path_root)) print(sys.path)

import src.c.d view raw

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OpenWonderLabs/SwitchBotAPI: SwitchBot Open API Documents

2022-10-14T04:59:54-05:00

Open Token and Secret Key

Note: You must update the app to the latest version, V6.14 or later, in order to get the secret key.

In SwitchBot API v1.1, the authentication method has been improved. In order to gain access to private data through the API, you must generate a unique signature using a token and a secret key. When you make a request, the Authorization token and signature will be validated simultaneously.

You as a developer will then be able to add, delete, edit, and look up your data including profile data and data associated with the devices that have been added to your SwitchBot account.

To continue to use SwitchBot API v1.0, refer to the legacy document.

How to Sign?

We have attached a python script for you to quickly generate a sign. If you prefer to write your own script or routine, here is the procedure.

Print the 13 digit timestamp and concatenate it with your token Create a signature using your secret and the string produced in the previous step Convert the signature to upper case

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switchbot-client · PyPI

2022-10-14T04:32:28-05:00

An unofficial Python client implementation of the SwitchBot API.

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Python 3 - Command Line Arguments

2022-10-10T17:18:36-05:00

Python provides a getopt module that helps you parse command-line options and arguments.

$ python test.py arg1 arg2 arg3 The Python sys module provides access to any command-line arguments via the sys.argv. This serves two purposes −

sys.argv is the list of command-line arguments. len(sys.argv) is the number of command-line arguments. Here sys.argv[0] is the program ie. the script name.

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Markdown Preview Github Styling - Visual Studio Marketplace

2022-10-10T00:04:08-05:00

Features

Preview what your markdown will look like rendered on GitHub. Extends VS Code's built-in markdown preview. Includes both light or dark Github themes. Customize styling using your own markdown.styles css

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Peek — The Ultimate macOS Quick Look Extension

2022-10-10T00:02:55-05:00

Peek — The Ultimate Quick Look Extension Accelerate your workflow with the Quick Look conveniences that only Peek can deliver (for macOS 10.15+): copying, searching, jumping, scroll restoring, syntax highlighting, & more.

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geerlingguy/ansible-for-devops: Ansible for DevOps examples.

2022-10-03T03:15:17-05:00

This repository contains Ansible examples developed to support different sections of Ansible for DevOps, a book on Ansible by Jeff Geerling.

Most of the examples are full-fledged VM examples, which use Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Ansible to boot and configure VMs on your local workstation. Not all playbooks follow all of Ansible's best practices, as they illustrate particular Ansible features in an instructive manner.

For more interesting examples of what you can do with Ansible, please see the Ansible Vagrant Examples repository, and browse through some of geerlingguy's roles on Ansible Galaxy.

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Makefile Tutorial By Example

2022-10-03T03:12:17-05:00

Why do Makefiles exist? Makefiles are used to help decide which parts of a large program need to be recompiled. In the vast majority of cases, C or C++ files are compiled. Other languages typically have their own tools that serve a similar purpose as Make. Make can also be used beyond compilation too, when you need a series of instructions to run depending on what files have changed. This tutorial will focus on the C/C++ compilation use case. Here's an example dependency graph that you might build with Make. If any file's dependencies changes, then the file will get recompiled:

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How to install Ansible on Ubuntu Server 22.04 | TechRepublic

2022-10-01T01:55:31-05:00

How to install Ansible

Because Ansible is found in the standard repositories, the installation is as simple as logging in to your controller node and issuing the command:

sudo apt-get install ansible -y

The installation will pick up a large number of dependencies and will take anywhere from 2-10 minutes to complete.

We’ll also need to install a second piece of software, called SSHpass, which is a non-interactive password provider — otherwise you’d have trouble with SSH authentication. Install SSHPass with:

sudo apt-get install sshpass -y

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Make your first open source contribution - Marko Denic - Web Developer

2022-09-30T05:23:40-05:00

By doing open source contributions, you will learn a lot. It allows you to become a part of the open-source community. It can be hard at the beginning, but it’s definitely worth it. How do you make a pull request? How to ask the maintainers to merge it? Let’s start!

First of all, you should know the basics of git. You’ll need a GitHub account as well. If you don’t have one, you can create it here. Step 1: Find a project you want to contribute to.

If you want to practice a little bit first, you can use this demo repository. Don’t worry, I created it for this purpose.

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"Markdown cheat sheet by GitHub https://t.co/S7eJwKssFT" / Twitter

2022-09-20T16:58:39-05:00

GitHub uses a syntax called Markdown to format text. As many Python folks use GitHub, here’s a handy reference to how Markdown encodes the typical document formats including bold/italic/lists and much more – Twitter (open for full two page reference).

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Markdown Cheat Sheets

2022-09-20T16:58:39+00:00

Concise information about GitHub markdown

Markdown Cheat Sheet for GitHub on Twitter

Running Virtual Machines Under Vagrant on the New Mac M1 | by James Cundle | Better Programming

2022-09-16T02:38:23-05:00

Running Virtual Machines Under Vagrant on the New Mac M1 Finding a working VM alternative when VirtualBox no longer works

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Monitor your Internet with a Raspberry Pi | Jeff Geerling

2022-09-15T02:23:38-05:00

The Internet Pi runs Pi-hole for DNS privacy and ad-blocking, and Prometheus and Grafana to provide Internet connection monitoring dashboards.

Having a Pi monitoring my Internet continuously makes it easy to see trends over time, or confirm outages. If you just spot check by running a Speedtest every now and then, you don't have much data to go on.

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Raspberry Pi DNS Settings: How to Change the DNS - Pi My Life Up

2022-09-13T15:35:02-05:00

The process of changing the DNS server on your Raspberry Pi is a pretty simple process and involves modifying a single file. In addition to showing you what file you will need to edit, we will also walk you through a couple of methods of ensuring your Raspberry Pi is using your newly set DNS.

There are many reasons why you might want to utilize a different DNS server to your ISP’s default. One of the top reasons being performance. Many ISP provided DNS servers can be incredibly slow at lookups and sometimes can take ages to update and add domains.

There is also the privacy factor to be considered, typically your ISP’s DNS server will leak your IP address as well as cache details about what websites you are visiting. Alternatives like Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 offer increased privacy by not logging any identifiable data and offering HTTPS over DNS.

If you’re looking to set up a dynamic DNS for accessing your Raspberry Pi then our tutorial on port forwarding and setting up Dynamic DNS will help you out. This tutorial simply goes into the steps of changing the way your Pi resolves domain names.

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Paste URL - VS Code Extension

2022-09-06T16:41:00-05:00

VS Code Plugin

Paste URL handy VS Code extension that formats URLs pasted into md documents as correct md links.

The developer website is found at GitHub - kukushi/PasteURL

For more information check out their extension on the Marketplace

Special Features

If you highlight text before pasting the text becomes the link text.
If you just paste, then it will fetch the title text of the linked page.

Recommendation

Update the VS Code keyboard shortcuts key-binding for quick URL pasting experience. I use cmd-b.

Paste Image - VS Code Extension

2022-09-06T15:41:00-05:00

VS Code Plugin

Paste Image is a VS Code plugin that allows you to paste images into md documents. It's currently on version 1.0.4 with over 226,000 downloads.

The developer website is found at GitHub

For complete details visit the VS Code marketplace.

The only downside is it was last updated on 01/23/2019.

Ideas on how to setup

settings --> pasteimage
- for setting path and filename options
- pastes image into current_document_folder/images
- prepends documentname_ to image name
- pastes formatted md url at cursor in current
change the keyboard shortcut
- I use ctrl-v to paste image from clipboard

Python in Visual Studio Code – August 2022 Release - Python

2022-09-02T15:30:04-05:00

Microsoft announces the availability of the Python and Jupyter extensions for Visual Studio @Code - August 2022. Updates include a new Python Tools extension template, Web app debug setups that are automatically generated and more. #Python #Jupyter

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SFTP - Visual Studio Marketplace

2022-09-01T15:04:22-05:00

sftp sync extension for VS Code

New version by @Natizyskunk that just work 😀 (This was originally a fork from liximomo's SFTP plugin)

VS Code marketplace : https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Natizyskunk.sftp VSIX release : https://github.com/Natizyskunk/vscode-sftp/releases/ Syncs your local directory with a remote server directory. Allows you to optionally edit upload a file to the remote directory after it saves locally. This allows you to edit more or less directly on the server similar to WinScp or other similar programs.

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Setting Up a Developer Environment Using Docker

2022-08-31T05:01:42-05:00

A Docker-based Dev Environment The dev environment I wish to build will be based on Linux. Frequently, I wish to quickly spin up a Linux environment for fun and dev. Although a VM is awesome, I want something lighter, something that spins up instantly at almost zero cost. And I want something that, if I left it running, I wouldn't even notice.

Docker images always start from a base image. The reason I picked Linux is because Linux comes with the most stripped-down bare-bones starter image. This means that all of the images I build on top of it will be light too, and I get to pick exactly what I want.

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"Docker-composing" a Python 3 Flask App Line-by-Line | by Luis Ferrer-Labarca | BitCraft | Medium

2022-08-24T02:24:23-05:00

"Docker-composing" a Python 3 Flask App Line-by-Line This is a continuation of our article: “Dockerizing a Python 3 Flask App Line-by-Line”. In this article I will assume you have some basic knowledge on Docker, so make sure to read that first if Docker is completely new to you.

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Getting Started - IOTstack

2022-08-23T02:02:46-05:00

New installation¶

automatic (recommended)¶

Install curl:

$ sudo apt install -y curl Run the following command:

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SensorsIot/IOTstack/master/install.sh | bash Run the menu and choose your containers:

$ cd ~/IOTstack $ ./menu.sh Bring up your stack:

$ cd ~/IOTstack $ docker-compose up -d

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How to Upgrade Raspberry Pi OS to the Latest Version? (2022) – RaspberryTips

2022-08-22T18:23:09-05:00

Debian versionCode nameRelease date Debian 8JessieSeptember 2015 Debian 9StretchAugust 2017 Debian 10BusterJune 2019 Debian 11BullseyeNovember 2021 Debian 12BookwormNot released yet, probably in 2023 🙂

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Purple Air API · PyPI

2022-08-20T04:29:51-05:00

Welcome to the PurpleAir API PurpleAir was founded on principles of openness, sharing, and community. It is to strengthen these principles and ensure the success of our entire community that we put together updated terms of service, data license, and data attribution requirements when using PurpleAir data and this API. Please take a moment to review them and note the attribution guide and data license agreement. If you have any questions or need more information, we have an excellent resource at https://community.purpleair.com/c/data/api/.

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Lingon - Peter Borg Apps

2022-08-20T02:54:06-05:00

Lingon X 8 released! Run whatever you want, whenever you want Lingon can start an app, run a script or a command whenever you want. You can schedule it to run at a specific time, regularly or when something special happens.

It can also make sure that an app or a script automatically restarts if it crashes.

Lingon is very easy to use yet extremely powerful. It is a fully featured launchd editor and has also many advanced features like running jobs as root and see the log for each job.

It can also monitor all jobs in the background and show a notification when something changes.

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Link aggregation - Wikipedia

2022-08-14T23:13:08-05:00

In computer networking, link aggregation is the combining (aggregating) of multiple network connections in parallel by any of several methods, in order to increase throughput beyond what a single connection could sustain, to provide redundancy in case one of the links should fail, or both. A link aggregation group (LAG) is the combined collection of physical ports.

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Review the new Pimoroni Enviro range of sensors

2022-08-14T20:59:55-05:00

Join me in an hour as we review the new @pimoroni Enviro range of sensors, all of which have the @Raspberry_Pi Pico W aboard. It's a hot one today, so this seemed an appropriate show! #sensors #micropython #raspberrypi #picow #influxdb #nodered #grafana

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Link Aggregation | DSM - Synology Knowledge Center

2022-08-12T05:23:18-05:00

Synology NAS supports multi-LAN, allowing you to combine those LAN interfaces using the Link Aggregation technology. Link Aggregation increases the bandwidth of your Synology NAS by aggregating multiple network interfaces and provides traffic failover to maintain network connection in case the connection is down. After your LAN interfaces are combined, you will see a new interface named Bond at Control Panel > Network > Network Interface, which could be configured as you would with other interfaces (such as LAN or PPPoE).

Link to the original article

HOW TO CONFIGURE LINK AGGREGATION ON NAS SYNOLOGY. – Techbast

2022-08-12T05:08:19-05:00

Adaptive Load Balancing: This mode optimizes the network traffic received and sent by Synology NAS devices regardless of whether Link Aggregation is enabled or not. To avoid unexpected circumstances, do not enable Link Aggregation even though it is supported. IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation: This mode optimizes network traffic received and sent by Synology NAS devices, which requires IEEE 802.3ad (Dynamic) Link Aggregation (LACP, 802.1AX) to be enabled on the Switch , and if multiple switches are used, they must be properly stacked and configured. Balance XOR: This mode will balance the network traffic received and sent by Synology NAS devices, this mode requires Static Link Aggregation to be enabled on the Switch. If multiple switches are used, they must be properly stacked and configured. If the switch does not support Link Aggregation, the traffic by the Synology NAS device is still balanced. With this mode. disconnection can be identified but not the cause (For example, when an Ethernet cable is not connected or the switch has a configuration error). Active / Standby: This mode will provide error correction, that is, when one network connection is disconnected or the connection is unstable, the other one will take charge as the main connection. You can choose this configuration whether or not the switch configuration supports IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation.

Link to the original article

How to Set Up Link Aggregation on a Synology NAS (LACP) in 2022

2022-08-11T23:54:26-05:00

Link Aggregation (LACP) will allow you to increase the bandwidth TO and FROM your Synology NAS. In summary, this will allow more clients to send data to and from your NAS without decreased performance. To be clear, this will not double the network speed for a single client.

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UniFi Comparison Charts — McCann Tech

2022-08-10T05:09:49-05:00

UniFi Comparison Charts

These charts compare all available UniFi Routers, Switches and Wireless Access Points. They are available as Images, PDFs, CSVs, Excel, and Google Sheets on Google Drive. For PtP and PtMP Radios, see my Ubiquiti PtP and PtMP Comparison Charts. For EdgeMAX, EdgePoint, and UISP, see my Ubiquiti EdgeMAX Comparison Charts. For all of my other posts about Ubiquiti, see my Ubiquiti Guide.

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Maker Resources | Compliant Mechanisms

2022-08-04T00:32:21-05:00

3d resources to 3d print these compliant mechanisms

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(31) Why Machines That Bend Are Better - YouTube

2022-08-04T00:26:12-05:00

I visited the Compliant Mechanisms Research group at Brigham Young University and spoke to Professor Larry Howell: https://www.compliantmechanisms.byu.edu

At the above link, you can download 3D-print files to make some of the objects in the video, plus learn more about compliant mechanisms.

What I learned about compliant mechanisms I summarize in the 8 P's of compliant mechanisms:

Part count (reduced by having flexible parts instead of springs, hinges)

Productions processes (many, new, different enabled by compliant designs)

Price (reduced by fewer parts and different production processes)

Precise Motion (no backlash, less wear, friction)

Performance (no outgassing, doesn't require lubricant)

Proportions (reduced through different production processes)

Portability (lightweight due to simpler, reduced part count designs)

Predictability (devices are reliable over a long period of time)

Special thanks to Patreon supporters: Donal Botkin, James M Nicholson, Michael Krugman, Nathan Hansen, Ron Neal, Stan Presolski, Terrance Shepherd

Animation by Alan Chamberlain

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(31) The kg is dead, long live the kg - YouTube

2022-08-04T00:19:26-05:00

The kilogram, mole, kelvin, and ampere will be redefined by physical constants

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Radio Shack Catalog Archive (1939-2011)

2022-07-30T01:29:33-05:00

RadioShackCatalogs.com is primarily an archive of old RadioShack catalogs from 1939-2011.

A brief history... RadioShack has been in business since 1921 (over 100 years) as a world retailer of innovative technology products and services including personal, mobile, and home technology. For 65 of those years, RadioShack had produced outstanding catalogs which included a wide range of products from leading national brands, to exclusive private brands like Tandy, Realistic, TRS-80, Micronta, Archer, Optimus, Clarinette, Nova, Patrolman, Enercell, and Science Fair.

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GitHub - formatc1702/WireViz: Easily document cables and wiring harnesses

2022-07-30T00:04:18-05:00

Summary

WireViz is a tool for easily documenting cables, wiring harnesses and connector pinouts. It takes plain text, YAML-formatted files as input and produces beautiful graphical output (SVG, PNG, ...) thanks to GraphViz. It handles automatic BOM (Bill of Materials) creation and has a lot of extra features.

Features

WireViz input files are fully text based No special editor required Human readable Easy version control YAML syntax UTF-8 input and output files for special character support

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We’re going to need a lot of solar panels – Casey Handmer's blog

2022-07-25T20:13:11-05:00

Casey Handmer's plan to refill the Colorado River from the Pacific with just 15GW of power.

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Custom PC magazine Issue 228 - Build a tiny killer gaming PC

2022-07-22T13:52:01-05:00

Custom PC

Articles Issues Books Subscribe Buy now

Custom PC issue 228

Issue 228 shows you how to build a killer gaming PC in a tiny package, complete with a full-size graphics card. Not only are there reviews of ten mini-ITX boards, covering both AMD and Intel sockets, but there’s also a full feature that tells you all you need to know about choosing your case, airflow considerations and building your final mini system.

Buy now Subscribe Download Free PDF

Be Wary of Modular Fans 9 days ago. While they cut down on cable clutter, Anthony Leather warns against the performance pitfalls of clip-together fans.

Asus ROG Swift PG279QM Gaming Monitor Review 10 days ago. Edward Chester scopes out this cutting-edge, yet pricey, 240Hz gaming monitor from Asus.

NZXT Lift Mouse Review 14 days ago. We found it hard to find something not to like about NZXT's debut gaming mouse.

Intel’s Arc desktop GPUs launch, but you still can’t buy them 16 days ago. After all the hype, Richard Swinburne is mightily disappointed by the real-world availability of Intel’s Arc GPUs

Ikigai - PC Mod Inspired by Japanese Kumiko Woodworking 17 days ago. Inspired by Japanese Kumiko woodworking, Nick Falzone made this exquisite wooden scratch-build with a custom hard-tube water-cooling system.

Win a Fractal Design Torrent Nano RGB Case 18 days ago. Enter now to be in with a chance of winning an award-winning mini-ITX chassis from Fractal Design.

See more articles What is Custom PC magazine?

Custom PC is the UK’s best-selling magazine for PC hardware, overclocking, gaming and modding. Every month, Custom PC is packed with in-depth hardware reviews, step-by-step photo guides and informative features, all with a focus on tinkering with your computer’s insides. Along the way you’ll also find hard-hitting tech opinion, game reviews and all manner of computer hobbyism goodness, from small Pi projects to extreme PC mods.

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Amazing DALLE-2 photos

2022-07-04T23:48:49-05:00

I went with Flickr. It turns out I already had an account… since 2005. Heh.

Amazing DALLE-2 photos.

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RTX 3060 vs RTX 3060 Ti Game Performance Benchmarks (Core i9-10900K vs Core i9-10900K) - GPUCheck United States / USA

2022-07-04T03:47:25-05:00

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57 Raspberry Pi Commands that Everyone Should Know – RaspberryTips

2022-07-01T22:24:13-05:00

useful linux commands

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15 Best Operating Systems for Raspberry Pi (with pictures) – RaspberryTips

2022-06-28T22:43:48-05:00

The Raspberry Pi is not limited to Raspberry Pi OS. It’s the official distribution, but is far from being the only one. Depending on the model you use, your goals, and your personal preferences, it might be a good idea to examine other options. I tested all of the other options and share my favorites in this post, which should be a great starting point for you.

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Compared: 16-inch MacBook Pro vs Razer Blade 15 Advanced | AppleInsider

2022-05-10T15:48:09-05:00

Apple used the Razer Blade 15 Advanced as a point of comparison for the performance of the M1 Max chip. Here's how the rest of the notebook compares against the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

As part of Apple's promotion of its new M1-series MacBook Pro system-on-chip options, it made claims comparing the performance of the SoCs against existing on-the-market notebooks.

One comparison of the M1 Max with the 32-core GPU option claimed it offered "graphics performance comparable to that in a high-end compact PC pro laptop using up to 40% less power." A closer inspection of the press release has Apple saying that compact notebook was the Razer Blade 15 Advanced, complete with the model number, RZ09-0409CE53-R3U1.

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Compared: 14-inch MacBook Pro vs 2022 Razer Blade 14 | AppleInsider

2022-05-10T15:45:51-05:00

The Razer Blade 14 has been updated for 2022 to make it more powerful, but it has to fight with the 14-inch MacBook Pro as a creator's choice notebook. Here's how the two laptops compare.

Of all of the gaming brands on the market, it's arguable that Razer is the most Apple-like. It has cultivated a cool brand, a distinctive style, and impressive hardware to match.

Out of the entire collection of products, the Blade notebook range is probably the closest to an Apple-style product. They are gaming notebooks that attempt to provide considerable performance to users, while offering a MacBook Pro-style thin design and portability instead of a hefty notebook that swamps a desk.

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Mechanical Watch – Bartosz Ciechanowski

2022-05-09T23:13:46-05:00

Mechanical Watch In the world of modern portable devices, it may be hard to believe that merely a few decades ago the most convenient way to keep track of time was a mechanical watch. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components. Over the course of this article I’ll explain the workings of the mechanism seen in the demonstration below. You can drag the device around to change your viewing angle, and you can use the slider to peek at what’s going on inside:

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Static Site Generators

2022-05-02T18:30:00-05:00

The process of building a website has two parts: you provide the content, and then your CMS — WordPress, or whatever you choose to use — takes that content, combines it with your chosen theme and your chosen templates, and makes a website from it for your customers or your readers to read.

But those two parts don’t have to be done together: they can be separated from one another, and that’s what a static site generator (SSG) does.

Check this out...

Read the article at websitesetup.org

AFS, AFF and AFC Focus Modes Explained - Graham's Photography Blog & Technical Reviews

2022-04-17T23:54:02-05:00

Autofocus Variations Can Ruin Your Focus Accuracy Whilst the autofocus has been improved with successive generations of the camera is still relies upon contrast detection to set the focus point. So the camera moves the lens to the point of maximum contrast and then steps forwards and backwards to get the precise point. Because of mechanical tolerances in the focus mechanism sometimes the repeatability of the focus point is questionable. I noticed some of my shots were not exactly sharp at the pinpoint area that I knew I had set the camera to when I took the shot. So I set up my DSLR focus chart used to correct the optical viewfinder to sensor calibration and shot a series of 10 images in AF single area and smallest target size. There was a noticeable shift in a lot of the images as you can see from the resulting images. Compare that to the same target where I manually set the focus point.

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Impressive Drone Fly-Through Video of a New Tesla Factory

2022-04-04T16:16:01-05:00

This drone fly-through of Tesla's new factory in Berlin is amazing. I've never seen anything quite like this – the drone flies through cars being assembled and machinery in between cycles of stamping out parts.

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Archive - The Mad Ned Memo

2022-02-25T05:05:51-06:00

The Mad Ned Memo covers the development of computer technology over the past 40 years to the present day, from someone who has been there through it all. Stories and commentary on the early years of the microprocessor and home computer, the gaming revolution from arcade to mobile platform, hardware and software hacking adventures, and the titanic and sometimes strange shifts in technology that we’ve seen in our lives.

Link to the original article

iPhone Screen Sizes

2022-02-23T16:44:54-06:00

resolution screen sizes for iPhone

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Raspberry Pi Imager Secret Menu

2022-02-17T17:23:00-06:00

The Raspberry Pi Imager is a great piece of software for preparing your SD cards for use with Raspberry Pis. However, if you’re setting up a number of Raspberry Pis you will find that you still need to connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse to them to complete the setup, to:

update the wifi ssid and password
change the hostname and default password
change localization settings

There is another, better alternative to doing those 3 steps - use the Raspberry Pi Imager secret menu.

For complete instructions

Inside look at modern web browser (part 1)

2022-02-12T12:19:45+00:00

Take a deep dive into modern web browsers and see how it all works!

Inside look at modern web browser (part 1)

Rsync (Remote Sync): 20 Helpful Examples in Linux

2022-01-27T05:03:08-06:00

Rsync, or Remote Sync, is a free command-line tool that lets you transfer files and directories to local and remote destinations. Rsync is used for mirroring, performing backups, or migrating data to other servers.

This tool is fast and efficient, copying only the changes from the source and offering customization options.

Follow this tutorial to learn how to use rsync with 20 command examples to cover most use-cases in Linux.

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How bad is the air out there? – Six Colors

2022-01-21T20:07:43-06:00

Use Scriptable app to run javascript in a widget on your iOS device.

Right now, several parts of the state of California are on fire. This isn’t the usual early-fall fire season where dry offshore winds fan the flames—that’s yet to come, oh boy! This is a weirder set of fires started by lightning from a rare set of thunderstorms that passed through a few weeks ago.

In any event, when there are fires burning within a few hundred miles of where you live, the air quality can be really bad and highly variable. Just yesterday, we awoke to clean air. Then the wind shifted and the Air Quality Index (AQI) went rapidly from green to red. It was hazy and ugly outside, and smelled like a barbecue. A couple of hours later, the air was back in healthy territory and I went for a run.

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How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? - Edu News | NASA/JPL Edu

2022-01-21T02:59:34-06:00

How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? 3.141592653589793. That’s it. For the whole visible universe!

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The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

2022-01-18T14:31:35-06:00

The Intel Split

It appears that Intel's partnership with TSMC is much larger than it first seemed; the implications for Intel as whole are massive.

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Obsidian Community Plugins

2022-01-16T20:37:00-06:00

There are several Community Plugins used to create the 64Zbit.com website. Here are a list of the ones I'm currently using.

* Obsidian Shell Command

It's not bad to open a shell command and execute the make prod command, but it's even better to hit a hotkey within Obsidian to do the same thing.

More info on GitHub

This plugin allows you to execute a shell command from within Obsidian.

It also allows you to execute that command from the Obsidian command pallet. Which allows you to execute the command from a hotkey.

Example bash script to copy all files to remote web server

If you want to manually upload the files then here is a good use of the scp command.

scp -r /Users/doug/OneDrive/www_root/pelican/projects/64zbit/output/* user@64zbit.com:/home/pi/dev_volumes/public_html/apache/new/

* Customizable Page Header

Add a button to the page header area of Obsidian to run an Obsidian command. Such as the afore mentioned Shell Command to publish the Pelican website to the production server.

More info on GitHub

* Paste URL Into Selection

A super helpful utility that detects when there is a URL in the clipboard and then pastes it in the correct format into Obsidian. Detects images too.

More info on GitHub

Google Fonts Blog: Flow and Redacted

2022-01-14T05:05:41+00:00

When you need to hide something, but still want them to be able to see it later. Of course, they could just look at the source.

Pretty nice looking fonts. Check out the details here:

Google Fonts Blog: Flow and Redacted: Check out these new options for wireframes and other early-stage designs

Moxie Marlinspike 'My First Impressions of Web3'

2022-01-10T12:32:00-06:00

Moxie Marlinspike 'My First Impressions of Web3'

Read the full article on moxie.org

I think these market forces will likely continue, and in my mind the question of how long it continues is a question of whether the vast amounts of accumulated cryptocurrency are ultimately inside an engine or a leaky bucket. If the money flowing through NFTs ends up channeled back into crypto space, it could continue to accelerate forever (regardless of whether or not it’s just web2x2). If it churns out, then this will be a blip. Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going, and this won’t just be a blip. If that’s the case, it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency.

It's worse than I thought. Web3 is already a mess.

Wordle

2022-01-09T16:47:00-06:00

Wordle is a fun free word of the day game where you have six tries to find the five letter word.

It was tough today.

Wordle 204 6/6

Whew!

Play today's Wordle

Using Pelican

2022-01-07T14:41:00-06:00

Publish with Obsidian

Caps-P - publish

Caps-T - select template

Pelican Site Generator

Make prod - publish to production server

start localhost:8000 dev server and reload on changes

pelican --autoreload --listen

First Robotics Rapid React

2022-01-07T18:25:27+00:00

First Robotics Rapid React
https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc/kickoff

pelican-plugins/jinja2content: Use Jinja2 template code within post content

2022-01-07T00:18:47-06:00

This plugin allows the use of Jinja2 directives inside your Pelican articles and pages.

In this approach, your content is first rendered by the Jinja template engine. The result is then passed to the normal Pelican reader as usual. There are two consequences for usage. First, this means the Pelican context and Jinja variables usually visible to your article or page template are not available at rendering time. Second, it means that if any of your input content could be parsed as Jinja directives, they will be rendered as such. This is unlikely to happen accidentally, but it’s good to be aware of.

All input that needs Pelican variables such as article, category, etc., should be put inside your theme’s templating. As such, the main use of this plugin is to automatically generate parts of your articles or pages.

Markdown, reStructured Text, and HTML input are all supported. Note that by enabling this plugin, all input files of these file types will be pre-processed with the Jinja renderer. It is not currently supported to selectively enable or disable jinja2content for only some of these input sources.

Link to the original article

Feeds

2022-01-06T13:40:00-06:00

Syndicated Feeds

Just click and then register with your favorite RSS reader, like NetNewsWire

Atom Feeds Same as RSS but better

Subscribe to the main feed
All Articles
If that's too much here are more specific feeds
Tech Articles
Life Articles
Play Articles

Json Feeds Same but in JSON format

Subscribe to the main feed
All Articles
If that's too much here are more specific feeds
Tech Articles
Life Articles
Play Articles

Images with Obsidian and Pelican

2022-01-05T19:46:00-06:00

A short article on how to work with images so they display correctly in Obsidian and when published with Pelican.

Native

This default Obsidian format, with drag and drop into the document, works in Obsidian, but not Pelican.

Obsidian Native: (doesn't work on this site)

![Obsidian](CleanShot%202022-01-05%20at%2019.30.59@2x.png)

Path

Obsidian knows where to find the image, whereas Pelican needs a path added to find the image. In this case /images/

Added Path:

![Added Path](/images/CleanShot%202022-01-05%20at%2019.30.59@2x.png)

Img Tag

But the images are 2x based on the image format and the Retina display it was captured from. It needs to be resized to 50% to display properly. There is not a size option available in Obsidian markdown. You can revert to a standard img html tag to make this work. However, the image will not display in Obsidian.

Use <img> tag:

<img src="/images/CleanShot%202022-01-05%20at%2019.30.59@2x.png" alt="alt text" title="image Title" width="50%"/>

1x with Path

The solution is to use images that are 1x sized. Or, set your screen capture tool to 1x, non Retina. This way the images will display correctly in Obsidian and when published with Pelican, with only the path being added manually to the file name.

1x with path added:

![](/images/CleanShot%202022-01-05%20at%2019.59.47.png)

Automation

What automation tools are available in Pelican to automatically reformat and resize the images?

To be continued....

Raspberry Pi as a Flask Server

2022-01-05T18:30:00-06:00

I created an Air Quality Index gadget made from a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a tiny OLED screen from Adafruit. It shows the AQI from my local PurpleAir sensor.

I created a Flask web server on the Pi so I could remotely see the AQI and change the PurpleAir sensor ID.

print("The triple-colon syntax will *not* show line numbers.")

from flask import Flask, render_template, request, jsonify, make_response
import os
import logging
import datastore
import aqistore

# DotMap is a dot-access dictionary subclass
# https://pypi.org/project/dotmap/
# https://github.com/drgrib/dotmap
from dotmap import DotMap

# logging configuration
# debug, info, warning, error, critical
logging.basicConfig(filename='./instance/aqi.log',
                    level=logging.DEBUG, format='%(asctime)s %(message)s')
logging.info('Started')
logging.info('running server.py')

# Example ajax code from
# https://github.com/caseydunham/ajax-flask-demo

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config.from_mapping(
    SECRET_KEY='dev',
    DATABASE=os.path.join(app.instance_path, 'aqi.sqlite'),
    LOGGER=os.path.join(app.instance_path, 'aqi.log'),
)

# ensure the instance folder exists
try:
    os.makedirs(app.instance_path)
    logging.info('server - created instance folder.')
except OSError:
    pass

# default sensor_id for PurpleAir sensor Forest Park
sensor_id = 104402


@app.route('/')
def index():
    return render_template('index.html')


@app.route('/pi')
def pi():
    return 'Raspberry Pie!'


@app.route('/sensor')
def sensor_index():
    return render_template('sensor.html')


@app.route('/aqi')
def aqi_index():
    resp = make_response(render_template('aqi.html'))
    resp.set_cookie('aqi', 'aqi')
    return resp


@app.route('/api/sensor', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def get_sensor_post():
    logging.info('**************** starting sensor ')
    # logging.info('request user_agent: ', request.)
    out = get_sensor_proc()
    r = out.toDict()
    return jsonify(result=r, status=200)


def get_sensor_proc():
    error = None
    out = DotMap()
    sensor_id = 0
    try:
        sensor_id = datastore.get_sensor_id()
    except Exception as e:
        error = e
        logging.warning(e)
    out.sensor_id = sensor_id
    out.error = error
    logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG, format='%(asctime)s %(message)s')
    logging.info('get_sensor_proc - sensor_id from db.', out.toDict())
    return out


@app.route('/api/aqi', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def aqi_post():
    logging.info('**************** starting aqi ')
    # logging.info('request user_agent: ', request.)
    out = aqi_proc()
    r = out.toDict()
    return jsonify(result=r, status=200)


def aqi_proc():
    error = None
    aqi = 0
    aqiColor = 0
    try:
        out = aqistore.purpleAir()
    except Exception as e:
        error = e
        logging.warning(e)
    out.error = error
    logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG, format='%(asctime)s %(message)s')
    logging.info('aqi_proc - data from purpleAir.', out.toDict())
    return out


@app.route('/api/sensor_post', methods=['POST'])
def sensor_post():
    json = request.get_json()
    msg = DotMap(json)
    out = sensor_proc(msg)
    r = out.toDict()
    return jsonify(result=r, status=200)


def sensor_proc(msg):
    sensor_id = msg.sensor_id
    logging.info('server - updating db sensor_id: ' + str(sensor_id))
    error = None

    if not sensor_id:
        error = 'Sensor_id is required.'
        logging.warning(error)

    if error is None:
        error = datastore.set_sensor_id(sensor_id)
    out = DotMap()
    out.sensor_id = sensor_id
    out.error = error
    return out


@app.route('/api/say_name', methods=['POST'])
def say_name_post():
    json = request.get_json()
    msg = DotMap(json)
    out = say_name_proc(msg)
    r = out.toDict()
    return jsonify(result=r, status=200)

# process say_name message


def say_name_proc(msg):
    datastore.get_db()
    first_name = msg.first_name
    last_name = msg.last_name
    day_week = msg.day_week

    out = DotMap()
    out.first_name = first_name
    out.last_name = last_name
    out.day_week = day_week
    datastore.close_db()
    return out


@app.route('/init')
def init():
    datastore.init_db()
    return 'Database initialized'

# dynamic route


@app.route('/<name>')
def print_name(name):
    return 'Hi, {}'.format(name)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True, host='0.0.0.0', port=5000)

New Pelican based Website

2022-01-05T15:40:00-06:00

It's been in the works for awhile, but today I updated my production server settings to show the new website based on the Pelican static site generator.

I tried to follow the same look and feel of the Ghost based server but with a fully customizable template. With Ghost I was limited to using their default template and never wanted to learn how to change it. With the new Pelican based site it is super easy to make all the modifications I want.

Favicon Generator for perfect icons on all browsers

2022-01-04T22:45:08-06:00

Why RealFaviconGenerator No hard decision With so many platforms and icons, it's hard to know exactly what you should do. What are the dimensions of favicon.ico? How many Touch icons do I need? RealFaviconGenerator did the reseach and testing for you.

Done in 5 minutes You spent hours on design, colors, graphics... How much time left for the favicon? Probably not much. But no worries, you only need a few minutes to tackle this task.

Compelling design, a platform at a time Each platform comes with its own design requirements. You can't just use the same picture everywhere. RealFaviconGenerator knows this and lets you craft your icons platform per platform.

Instant feedback How will Android display my icon? How will iOS round my Touch icon? No more guesswork. RealFaviconGenerator instantly shows you how your icons will look like.

Link to the original article

iPhone Device Resolutions

2022-01-02T09:57:00-06:00

source:paintcodeapp.com

pelican-plugins/search: Pelican plugin that adds site search capability

2021-12-31T00:53:14-06:00

This plugin generates an index for searching content on a Pelican-powered site.

Why would you want this?

Static sites are, well, static… and thus usually don’t have an application server component that could be used to power site search functionality. Rather than give up control (and privacy) to third-party search engine corporations, this plugin adds elegant and self-hosted site search capability to your site. Last but not least, searches are really fast. 🚀

Want to see just how fast? Try it out for yourself. Following are some sites that use this plugin:

Link to the original article

Publish Pelican To Remote Web server

2021-12-24T14:14:00-06:00

Makefile

When you install Pelican be sure to install the Makefile too. This allows you to use the make command to build your static website. It takes a bit of configuration for your specific server details, but it's easy to setup.

All the details are handled in these three files:

pelicanconf.py
publishconf.py
Makefile

The command I ended up using is: make ssh_upload

This creates a production build and uploads all the files to the server.

I actually renamed ssh_upload in the Makefile to prod, so now I use the command: make prod

Obsidian Shell Command

It's not bad to open a shell command and execute the make prod command, but it's even better to hit a hotkey within Obsidian to do the same thing.

Install the Obsidian ShellCommands Plugin

This plugin allows you to execute a shell command from within Obsidian.

It also allows you to execute that command from the Obsidian command pallet.

Which allows you to execute the command from a hotkey.

Copy all files to remote web server

If you want to manually upload the files then here is a good use of the scp command.

scp -r /Users/doug/OneDrive/www_root/pelican/projects/64zbit/output/* user@64zbit.com:/home/pi/dev_volumes/public_html/apache/new/

Deep Thoughts

2021-12-22T10:57:00-06:00

Thoughts

— 2021/12/04 We shall go into the land so our children can always hold us and will never be alone. — The wheel of time S1E4

It is like swimming. If you can’t swim, you won’t be having any fun at all. Swimming sucks if all you do is float (or even sink) and fight the water. But boy, if you figure out the technique and glide through the water, it is incredible. But you don’t learn swimming by aiming for ease and fun. You learn to swim by aiming to be fast and graceful.

In the end we only regret the chances we didn’t take
If we all do all that we can do then great things will happen
Quote John S. - “I’m experiencing a narrowing of the possibility space due to aging.”

School Success

I think kids’ school success comes down to this in this order:

Homelife
Sleep
Diet
Exercise
Teachers
Tech
School Year Length
Homework

What many seem to think:

School Year Length
Homework
Teachers
Tech
Homelife
Exercise
Sleep
Diet

pelican-plugins

2021-12-21T06:31:26-06:00

Current list of Pelican plug-ins on GitHub

Link to the original article

European civilization is built on ham and cheese,

2021-09-06T15:59:25-05:00

European civilization is built on ham and cheese, which allowed protein to be stored throughout the icy winters.

Without this, urban societies in most of central Europe would simply not have been possible.

This is also why we have hardback books. Here's why. 1/

Link to the original article

SQLite with Python - Chris Ostrouchov

2021-08-21T23:16:03-05:00

SQLite is a commonly misunderstood database. I myself first heard of the database when I was experimenting with android app development. My thoughts were that since the database was a single file and its name had lite in it, that it could not be taken seriously. But I could not have been more wrong. Now I love sqlite and use it for much of my scientific research. Sqlite is everywhere. It is on every android phone, airplanes, and the storage for many computer applications. The sqlite website details when using sqlite would be appropriate to use and can be summarized with these three questions.

Link to the original article

It's going to be okay. - The Oatmeal

2021-08-19T22:20:06-05:00

And if you haven't seen this, well then. Let's fix that right now. Via @Oatmeal.

Link to the original article

Install Mini PiTFT | Pi Hole Ad Blocker with Pi Zero W | Adafruit Learning System

2021-08-05T17:16:06-05:00

Raspberry Pi Zero W We've updated our popular PiOLED script for use with the Mini PiTFT, a 135x240 Color TFT add-on for your Raspberry Pi. This cute little display has two tactile buttons on GPIO pins that we'll use to make a simple user-interface display for your Pi-Hole.

Link to the original article

The Expanse UI Design — HUDS+GUIS

2021-05-28T22:28:10-05:00

The Expanse UI Design Here’s a look at the various FUI designs from the sci-fi series The Expanse.

Special thanks to Brian Benton who suggested this and provided some great links as well! A lot of the images have been collected from this massive image dump from drainsmith and further below we have some insights and images provided by Rhys Yorke who worked on The Expanse (Season 3 & 5) as a motion graphics designer.

Link to the original article

Ping network monitor

2021-03-08T22:38:00-06:00

The ping command is a built in linux and macOS command that shows the performance of the network connection to a remote server. It can be used to log network performance issues over time. The default ping command displays the results to standard output (the shell window). Used with the following options it routes the output to a file that you can look at later.

The ping command will ping the remote server every second until you manually kill the process. This will create 86,400 pings per day in the output file. It's not something you want to forget about and let it run forever. It could create a very large file that fills up your drive space and crashes your system. I run my ping network monitor on a Raspberry Pi 4 so that it will run 24 hours per day in low power and uninterupted environment.

Ping directed to a file

You would normally just run the ping command interactivly and then stop it when you are done. But, that's not what we are doing today. We are looking for an intermident bug that may happen anytime in the future. For this we need to run the command for weeks at a time and be able to look at the results after a network error has been detected.

Here is the ping command, running in the background, with the output directed to a file called "network.log".
Copy and paste this text to your command line.

ping google.com 2>&1 | while read pong; do date "+%c: $pong"; done >network.log &

Here are the details of what this command does

ping // the ping command to run
google.com // name of the remote server
2>&1 // routes stderr to stdout
| while read pong; do date "+%c: $pong"; done // pipe the ping results and add the current date and time
>network.log // routes output to file network.log
& // at end means to run in background

The pipe command, represented by the vertical bar | takes the output of the first command and routes it into the second command. In this case it takes the output of the ping command and routes it into a command that prepends the current date and then uses the > command to route everthing to a file instead of standard out (stdout).

The & at the end of the line makes this command run in the background. This frees up your terminal so you can run other commands. It will continue running even when you exit your terminal and logout. The commands below show you how to find the background command later and control it.

Jobs and Processes

The jobs command only works for jobs you have started in the current shell. If you exit the shell and open a new one then this command will not display your jobs. You will need to use the other commands listed below to work with system level processes.

Fun fact: jobs are started by a user, processes are started and managed by the system. A users job is also a system process.

Process Id

Every command running on the computer is assigned a unique process id (PID). You can use this PID to interact with background processes.

The terms Command, Job, and Process are basically the same thing. They are programs running on your computer.

Type top into your shell to see a list of the top processes running on your current computer. Notice the PID column listed on the far left. Type q to exit this view. For a fun day of reading type man top to read all the details of the top command.

Use the jobs command to see running background jobs, -l shows the process id (PID). (That’s a lowercase L)

jobs -l

Viewing your ping log

Use the cat command to view contents of the output file, use the | more option to show a page at a time. This could take awhile, you are getting 86,400 lines per day and paging through them a few lines at a time will get tedious.

cat network.log 
or
cat network.log | more

Look at the output

If all goes well you should see a time= value at the end of each line. This tells you the ping completed successfully and you have a good connection to the server.

When the connection goes down you will receive error messages. These will be helpful in determining what went wrong.

Example showing a request timout error

Use grep to find interesting data

The grep command will help you find interesting data in your output file.

cat network.log | grep -v time

The -v option tells grep to "invert match", so any line that does not contain the "time" string.

This command will search the network.log for any line that does not contain the string "time". So for any ping command that returns anything other than a normal ping time will be displayed. This includes any error messages that you should look at.

Example showing an unreachable server

Find your running ping command

Use the pgrep command to find running ping jobs and return the process id (PID). Pgrep is included in many Linux distributions.

pgrep ping

pgrep returns the process id (PID) where the string matches. In this case the PID = 24895. Warning: Don't use this PID, use the PID you find on your own system.

Stopping the ping command

Use the kill command to stop a running job. Be careful, you can kill the wrong job and crash your system. Make sure you enter the correct process id (PID) you found above.

kill PID

Here's nother command to find the running ping processes. Use ps if your distribution doesn’t include the pgrep command. The ps command displays the current process status for all running processes. It's a long list and you can use grep to show you just what you want.

ps -aux | grep ping

The process id on this distribution is in the second column from the left. In this case the PID = 24895.

Removing the network.log

When you are done with your analysis you can remove the network.log file with the rm command. Becareful not to remove the wrong file, this can crash your system.

rm network.log

References

More info about the Jobs Command
https://www.computerhope.com/unix/ujobs.htm

Date logic from
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10679807/how-do-i-timestamp-every-ping-result

Use the linux manual pages to learn more about each command.
man kill
man ps
man grep
man pgrep
man ping
man cat
man more
man jobs
man date
man top
man rm

You can search for the linux pipe command too.

Save Text Snippets to DayOne using Better Touch Tool

2021-02-26T17:45:00-06:00

For a long time I've wanted a quick way to save text snippets in a timestamped, quickly searchabe form. Today I created a Better Touch Tool keyboad shortcut to save text snippets to a specific DayOne journal.

Here are the details on github so that you too can enjoy this amazing automation feature.

dougpark/dayone

Better Touch Tool create a DayOne journal entry. Contribute to dougpark/dayone development by creating an account on GitHub.

dougparkGitHub

How-build-computer-controlled-robot

2020-11-28T03:56:47-06:00

Read the full article at www.amazon.com

The book that started it all for me. Sometime around 1979 #kim1 #6502 #robot #diy #developer

Raspberry Pi USB boot

2020-10-29T01:42:00-05:00

How to install Ubuntu Desktop on Raspberry Pi 4 | Ubuntu

Ubuntu is an open source software operating system that runs from the desktop, to the cloud, to all your internet connected things.

Install Ubuntu Desktop on Raspberry Pi 4

Covers the basics of updating your Pi 4 to USB boot.

Pluto Attacks

2020-10-26T00:10:00-05:00

Html5, Phaser 2, Action packed arcade game

Pluto Attacks was previously hosted at povingames.com

Play Now

"The Plutonians are not happy with us calling their home a 'dwarf' planet. So when they discovered a trick in the space time continuum they sent an infinite number of drones to attack Earth. We created an energy weapon that can siphon off the energy from the drones weapons. This powers the Earths vessel and creates a powerful energy shield. Remember, don't let even one alien escape!"

Poving Games released this intense shooter based on the classic Phaser Invaders example and then taken it into complete overdrive! You don't have to shoot, that is done automatically. You just move left and right and blast away the plutonains. It all starts quite calmly and you'll no doubt do a perfect clearance of the first few levels.

How To Play

You can start at Normal level 1 if you want to see how it all began. Typical space game with normal dodge and shoot action. You can even level up to the 20’s and still play a dodge and shoot game. However, it will drive you crazy and you will get bored.

The fun begins at about Fun level 20. Everything is faster and you quickly realize there is more to the game then just dodge and shoot. In fact dodging is no longer possible. There are explosions, lots and lots of explosions.

Plutonians are not happy with the reclassification of their home world to Dwarf Planet. So when they discovered a trick in the space time continuum they send an infinite number of drones to attack Earth. Earth learned just enough about their technology to use it to their own advantage. We created an energy weapon that can siphon off the energy from the drones weapons. This powers the Earth vessel and creates a powerful energy shield.

For desktop just press the space bar to start and then left and right arrows to move. That’s it.

For mobile just tap to start and then use your finger to move back and forth. It’s actually easier and more fun on mobile.

Levels go by pretty quickly. Hey, it’s a game with only two buttons and you can master it in 60 seconds. By level 20 it’s moving right along and by level 30 it’s actually pretty good. Have Fun!

Tip: Don’t let any aliens escape!

Future Projects

2020-10-23T22:20:00-05:00

I've been doing this for decades and now I want to be an HTML5 game devloper. I'm starting with a server! Well, I have very little experience with game development, graphics, animation, sound, so it's going to be a fun journey.

Stories in the pipeline:

VSCode Remote
Installing Docker, Docker-Compose
Nodejs with socket.io
Nodemon sounds like Pokemon, yep!
SSL and Letsencrypt certificates
Working with Apache, MySQL and PHP
Hosting your own VPS backend with Linode for $5 a month
HTML5 games and AJAX are best buds
HTML5 games and socket.io are even better buds

macOS - BitBar - Get Wi-Fi SSID with shell script

2020-10-18T00:14:00-05:00

So, Jason Snell got me hooked on BitBar (BitBar (by Mat Ryer - @matryer) lets you put the output from any script/program in your Mac OS X Menu Bar.) and I've been working on a plugin ever since. Here's a quick way to get your current Wi-Fi SSID.

function display-ssid {
    echo "---"
ssid=$(/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport -I  | awk -F' SSID: '  '/ SSID: / {print $2}') 
    echo "Wi-Fi: $ssid | terminal=false bash='$0' param1=copy param2=$ssid"

}

Get wireless SSID through shell script on Mac OS X

Is there any way to get the SSID of the current wireless network through a shell script on Mac OS X?

Mark SzymanskiStack Overflow

SSID with shell script

How to answer questions in a helpful way

2020-10-18T00:11:00-05:00

We all work together. I always try to assume the other person is asking a serious question. Depending on how tired I am I may not answer in the best way. Here are some tips to stay on track.

How to answer questions in a helpful way

Answer Questions Well by Julia Evans

How to think like a programmer — lessons in problem solving

2020-10-17T22:02:00-05:00

How to think like a programmer — lessons in problem solving

by Richard Reis How to think like a programmer — lessons in problem solvingBy Richard Reis [https://twitter.com/richardreeze]If you’re interested inprogramming, you may well have seen this quote before: > “Everyone in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teachesyou to thi…

How to think like a programmer

The Gateless Gate

2020-10-16T01:05:00-05:00

"This classic Zen Buddhist collection of 49 koans with commentary by Mumon was originally published in 1934, and later included in Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki's popular anthology Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Due to non-renewal it is currently in the public domain in the US (although other parts of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones are not)." source link

I was playing with CSS and Html and made a nice little web app.

Check out my project and read all 49 koans

Hyperlegible Typeface

2020-10-15T16:28:00-05:00

I love this and will need it sooner than I expect.

"Atkinson Hyperlegible font is named after Braille Institute founder, Robert J. Atkinson. What makes it different from traditional typography design is that it focuses on letterform distinction to increase character recognition, ultimately improving readability."

https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont

A Free Hyperlegible Typeface from the Braille Institute

Atkinson Hyperlegible is a free typeface developed by the Braille Institute and Applied Design Works that makes text more readab

Jason Kottkekottke.org

Hyperlegible Typeface

Get the most from Siri music

2020-10-12T18:03:00-05:00

I'm terrible a playing music, this helps.

Hey Siri, Play Some Music: All the Music Commands (and more …)

How to play Music by Activity and Mood

Apple Music has a couple of not so obvious activities and moods, which you can use to specify what to play:

*Hey Siri play (some) music for *
*Hey Siri play music*

Here is a list of some *moods* we have tested, we’ve added the station they will trigger:

*Peaceful / Meditation / Meditate / Bedtime / Sleeping* -> station Meditation
*Happy / Cheerful / Whimsical* -> station Happy Music
*Wild / Party / Fun* -> station Partying
*Stimulating / Exciting / Motivate(d) / Waking Up / Upbeat* -> station Motivated Music
*Angry* -> station Angry music
*Calm / Sad / Blue / Somber* -> station sad music
*Intimate / Erotic / Baby Making* -> station Getting it on
*Mellow / Chill / Soothing* -> station chill music
*Love / Passion / Tender / Romance / Romantic* -> station Romantic and Love Music

Here we go with some *activities*, which we’ve tested (musically =):

*Seperate / Split(ing) / Break(ing) Up* -> station Breaking Up
*Exercise / Cardio / Work(ing) Out* -> station Working Out
*Dinner Party / Cooking / Entertaining* -> station Entertaining
*Dance / Dancing* -> station Dance
*Focus(ing) / Study(ing) / Concentrate / Concentration* -> station Focusing
*Family Time / Safe for Kids* -> station Family Time
*Family / Kids* -> station Disney

Nodemon for Docker

2020-10-08T21:04:00-05:00

I just installed Nodemon in my development Docker container. Here are the details.

Game developers need a quick and easy server solution. Docker, nodejs, mysql, sqlite, socket.io are working great for me. This is part of my upcoming series on how to make it all work. Its way, WAY easier than you might think.

Use Prism for Syntax Highlighting in Ghost

2020-10-05T03:00:00-05:00

Configure Ghost and Prism to provide code syntax highlighting for all popular formats including javascript, php, html, css, markdown and more.

Ghost is a great CMS and it's easy to add a code syntax highlighter such as Prism.

Versions

Ghost version 3.3
Prism version 1.21

Prism

There are two ways to use Prism: 1) download and serve from your website or 2) serve from a Content Delivery network (CDN). The CDN option is actually easier and better for your viewers. There is a chance that many sites use Prism and once your browser has it in its local cache it won't need to download it again, which makes it faster and uses less bandwidth. So, that's what you will learn about today.

Step 1 - Go to the Prism website and learn a little about it. Look at the Theme bubbles down the right-side of the page. Find a theme that you like and want to use on your Ghost powered blog. I use the "Okaidia" theme on this website. Also, notice that there are many, many language features supported. If you will always just use a few languages then you can hard code them into your setting and only use them. However, if like me there is no telling which language you will post about next then you should use the autoloader feature.

Take note of the latest Prism version. As of this writting I'm using version 1.21.0. You will want to use the most current version.

CDN

Step 2 - Find a CDN that hosts Prism. I chose cdnjs.com to serve the Prism files. It's free, easy to use and fast. I recommend you go to cdnjs.com and search for Prism. You will see that there are a lot of options. You don't need all of those, just the ones you are interested in.

Step 3 - There are 3 main parts of Prism you need to make this work. The first part is the CSS. To load this from cdnjs.com looks like this.

Part 1: Choose your theme:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.21.0/themes/prism-okaidia.min.css">

Link to Prism okaidia theme

Notice this version contains the word okaidia which means it has the color scheme for the Theme I like. You should search for the Theme that you chose in step 1.

Part 2: Find the core js file:

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.21.0/components/prism-core.min.js"></script>

Link to Prism core library

It contains the core of the Prism library.

Part 3: Find the language modules you want to use, or find the autoloader version.

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.21.0/plugins/autoloader/prism-autoloader.min.js"></script>

Link to Prism autoloader

These are the 3 minimum components needed to use Prism with Ghost.

Now that you have identified the 3 main components and their links to the CDN, it's time to put them into your Ghost blog.

Code Injection

Ghost makes this very easy to do with the Code injection feature on their admin page.

Step 4 - Go to your ghost admin page, it is defaulted to site.tld/ghost, and login with your admin account.

Click on the Code injection menu option on the left. You should see two main sections "Site Header" and "Site Footer".

Part 1 - Place the CSS link in the Site Header section. It should look something like this:

Site Header portion of Code injection

That's all there is, just copy and paste the above CSS link into the Site Header section.

Part 2 - The Site Footer works the same, just copy and paste the core link and the autoloader link. If you decided to go with language specific options this is where you would load them instead of the autoloader link.

Remember these links are loaded on every page of your blog even if you don't use them on that page, so keep it simple, small and fast.

Site Footer portion of Code injection

Configuration Complete

That's all there is to configuring Ghost to use Prism. The next portion will show you how to use them on your blog.

Step 1 - Create a new post in Ghost and press the + icon to add a new section to your page, and then immediately type ``` that's 3 back-tick special characters under the ~ symbol on the top left of your keyboard. They are not single quotes ' or double quotes ".

This puts Ghost into the code entry mode. You can copy and paste your code in here.

Step 2 - Notice on the right hand side of the code entry box there is a place for language. This is where you type in the language for this code snippet. Ghost has done some of the work for you. You don't have to prepend the language type with language- or lang- as talked about in the Prism documentation, just put in what you are working with. Such as: js, javascript, html, php, json, css, etc..

Sample html script with language type shown in top-right corner

That's it! You code snippets will now be syntax highlighted with Prism.

Examples

Here are a few examples to look at.

function createBoard(team) {

    let out = "";
    out += "<div class='text-center'>";
    for (col = 1; col <= 10; col++) {
        for (row = 1; row <= 10; row++) {
            let calcId = team + "-" + zeroPad(row, 2) + zeroPad(col, 2);
            let link = ` '${team}', ${row}, ${col}, '${calcId}'`;
            out += `  <a class='m-0 p-1 btn btn-dark' href="javascript:fire(${link});" role='button'>`
            out += "   <span class='title'>";
            out += "    <span id='" + calcId + "' class='badge badge-dark oi' data-glyph='target'>" + " " + "</span>";
            out += "   </span>";
            out += "  </a>";
        }
        out += " <br> ";
    }
    out += "</div>";

    $('#board-' + team).html(out);

}

Sample Javascript code

@import "ios.css";
/* @import "darkMode.css"; */
@import "toggleSwitch.css";

@font-face {
    font-family: Revamped;
    src: url("../font/Revamped.ttf") format('truetype');
}

/* get screen width based on device */
:root {
    /* desktop vars */
    --screen-w1: 500px;
    --screen-w2: 495px;
}

@media screen and (max-width: 500px) {
    :root {
        /* mobile vars */
        --screen-w1: 97vw;
        --screen-w2: 94vw;
    }
}

Sample CSS code

public function getGame($userName, $roomName, $gameToken)
    {

        //load game
        $this->game = $this->loadGame($gameToken);

        return $this->game;
    }

Sample PHP code

<!-- Main Nav Bar -->
        <div class="w3-top hide main">
            <div class="w3-bar w3-round-large z-nav-background z-width" xstyle="max-width:500px">
                <span class="">
                    <a onclick="showPanel('lobby')" class="w3-bar-item w3-round-large z-nav-text">Lobby</a>
                </span>

                <button onclick="showPanel('E-Space')" class="w3-button z-nav-text w3-border w3-border-blue w3-hover-black w3-small">E-Space</button>
                <button onclick="showPanel('F-Space')" class="w3-button z-nav-text w3-border w3-border-blue w3-hover-black w3-small">F-Space</button>

            </div>
        </div>

Sample HTML code

ALTER TABLE `activeUserTable`
  ADD PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  ADD KEY `time_index` (`time`);

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for dumped tables
--

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for table `activeUserTable`
--
ALTER TABLE `activeUserTable`
  MODIFY `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, AUTO_INCREMENT=1;
COMMIT;

Sample SQL code

Studio Ghibli 50 free stills

2020-09-19T00:44:38-05:00

Studio Ghibli just announced they’ll be uploading 50 free stills from each of their movies: “feel free to use them as you wish, within the bounds of common sense”

Link to the original article

Discover Phaser - The Book

2017-07-26T10:03:30-05:00

@photonstorm Thanks to @thomaspalef for this excellent resource. . Worth every penny.

Link to the original article

iOS is Boring

2017-01-23T19:13:00-06:00

I’m a big Apple fan and I have lots of Apple products and the real problem is that iOS is boring. Tim Cook is known for efficiency and Jonathan Ive loves his basic looks, however, when combined they are boring! iOS used to have lots of little details that were exciting to find, but now they are hard to find, hard to discover, and boring when found. They need to let their developers have a little fun, stay in their human guidelines of course, but still have a little fun. Hardware optimization makes sense, but don’t over optimize the software. It can provide a path to fun.

The Anatomy of the Underwater Fiber Optic Cables That Connect the Internet

2016-12-16T23:23:03-06:00

The Anatomy of the Underwater Fiber Optic Cables That Connect the Internet

Link to the original article

An Explanation for Why People Don’t Often See ‘B’ Batteries

2016-11-09T16:43:06-06:00

An Explanation for Why People Don’t Often See ‘B’ Batteries

Link to the original article

The Internet of Things - Nuts & Volts Magazine - For The Electronics Hobbyist

2016-07-21T19:48:00-05:00

Everything starts somewhere...

The Internet of Things - Nuts & Volts Magazine - For The Electronics Hobbyist

NUTS & VOLTS MAGAZINE (NOVEMBER2014)

THE INTERNET OF THINGS By Bryan Bergeron View Digital Edition

» Skip to the Extras Since the birth of the Internet, there has been talk of total connectivity — between people, people and their possessions, and things to things. Up until recently, the reality has been that such ecosystems existed only in academic and corporate research centers. Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a practical reality in many settings.

Read the original artical at: The Internet of Things - Nuts & Volts Magazine - For The Electronics Hobbyist

The Joy of Tech comic... A gathering of robots!

2016-07-05T11:22:00-05:00

The Joy of Tech comic... A gathering of robots!

More info at: The Joy of Tech comic... A gathering of robots!

AI, Apple and Google — Benedict Evans

2016-06-27T12:31:00-05:00

AI, Apple and Google — Benedict Evans

There are really two things going on here - you’re using voice to fill in a dialogue box for a query, and that dialogue box can run queries that might not have been possible before. Both of these are enabled by machine learning, but they’re built quite separately, and indeed the most interesting part is not the voice but the query. In fact, the important structural change behind being able to ask for ‘Pictures with dogs at the beach’ is not that the computer can find it but that the computer has worked out, itself, how to find it. You give it a million pictures labelled ‘this has a dog in it’ and a million labelled ‘this doesn’t have a dog’ and it works out how to work out what a dog looks like. Now, try that with ‘customers in this data set who were about to churn’, or ‘this network had a security breach’, or ‘stories that people read and shared a lot’. Then try it without labels ('unsupervised' rather than 'supervised' learning).

Today you would spend hours or weeks in data analysis tools looking for the right criteria to find these, and you’d need people doing that work - sorting and resorting that Excel table and eyeballing for the weird result, metaphorically speaking, but with a million rows and a thousand columns. Machine learning offers the promise that a lot of very large and very boring analyses of data can be automated - not just running the search, but working out what the search should be to find the result you want.

More info at: AI, Apple and Google — Benedict Evans

‘We Hardly Understand Anything’: Rodney Brooks On Artificial Intelligence | Radio Boston

2016-06-07T09:53:00-05:00

‘We Hardly Understand Anything’: Rodney Brooks On Artificial Intelligence | Radio Boston

If you’re going to talk about robots, there’s no better person to talk with than Rodney Brooks. He’s the former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He’s also co-founder of two companies: iRobot, maker of the Roomba, and now Rethink Robotics.

He’s spent his entire life thinking about robots and artificial intelligence. He sat down with us to talk how he built his first machine, what technology we have yet to tackle and why Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are wrong to fear the future of robots.

More info at: ‘We Hardly Understand Anything’: Rodney Brooks On Artificial Intelligence | Radio Boston

Robot Surgeons Are Taking Over the Operating Room - IEEE Spectrum

2016-06-07T09:49:00-05:00

Robot Surgeons Are Taking Over the Operating Room - IEEE Spectrum

Advanced surgical robots are already helping doctors perform operations with previously unimaginable precision. But fairly soon, doctors may be able to hand the scalpel over entirely—at least for simple, repetitive procedures—freeing up human surgeons’ valuable time for more complex work.

Some of the latest surgical robots can already plan and execute simple surgical tasks entirely on their own, select optimal approaches and tools, and even use deep learning to observe and replicate new procedures. So we’ve rounded up a few of the coolest robo-surgeons just for you.

More info at: Robot Surgeons Are Taking Over the Operating Room - IEEE Spectrum

Researchers want robots to feel pain | The Verge

2016-06-07T09:48:00-05:00

Researchers want robots to feel pain | The Verge

Researchers in Germany are developing a way for robots to feel pain, in the hopes that doing so will enable them to better protect humans. The researchers, from Leibniz University of Hannover, are working on an "artificial robot nervous system to teach robots how to feel pain," IEEE Spectrum reports, and presented their project at a robotics and automation conference in Sweden last week. Under the system, robots would identify pain and quickly respond to avoid further damage to their parts.

More info at: Researchers want robots to feel pain | The Verge

Rethinking Knowledge in the Internet Age - Los Angeles Review of Books

2016-05-25T08:00:00-05:00

Rethinking Knowledge in the Internet Age - Los Angeles Review of Books

The internet started out as the Information Highway, the Great Emancipator of knowledge, and as an assured tool for generating a well-informed citizenry. But, over the past 15 years, that optimism has given way to cynicism and fear — we have taught our children that the net is a swamp of lies spun by idiots and true believers, and, worse still, polluted by commercial entities whose sole aim is to have us click to the next ad-riddled page.

More info at: Rethinking Knowledge in the Internet Age - Los Angeles Review of Books

Economy

2016-05-03T11:32:00-05:00

Robots are doing more and more human jobs. We need a plan on how the majority of humans will survive when there is no work for them to do. How do we need to change our economy so that everyone benefits from the work robots are doing, not just the few that control all the robots. Should taxes be collected and the benefits shared with everyone? Think about the control the few companies that manage the robots will have.

How worthless will we all feel, what will keep us entertained?

http://mentalfloss.com/article/58332/7-new-robots-designed-do-human-jobs

Fast

2016-05-03T11:28:00-05:00

Robots are faster than we are. How long before we just race robots?

http://www.slashgear.com/puma-made-a-robotic-shoebox-to-help-runners-train-30438359/

Guns

2016-04-29T13:25:00-05:00

Guns won’t protect us from the robots.

http://boingboing.net/2016/04/26/riot-control-robot-unveiled-in.html

How should I parse user input in a text adventure game? - Game Development Stack Exchange

2016-04-12T15:53:53-05:00

How should I parse user input in a text adventure game? - Game Development Stack Exchange

Link to the original article

Security

2016-04-04T12:38:00-05:00

Did we not learn anything from Windows? Security is a must.

Robots and AI

2016-03-28T19:20:00-05:00

Does a robot need AI or be self aware to be a robot?

Wikipedia

IBM Watson

2016-03-28T19:16:00-05:00

IBM Watson. AI or Not?

IBM Watson

Wikipedia

Google Now

2016-03-28T19:14:00-05:00

Google Now. AI or not?

Google Now

Wikipedia

Microsoft Cortana

2016-03-28T19:10:00-05:00

Microsoft Cortana. AI or not?

Microsoft Cortana

Wikipedia

Amazon Alexa

2016-03-28T19:07:00-05:00

Amazon Alexa/Echo. AI or not?

Amazon Echo

Wikipedia

Apple Siri

2016-03-28T18:58:00-05:00

Apple’s personal assistant. AI or not?

Apple Siri

Wikipedia

Holoportation from Microsoft

2016-03-28T11:54:00-05:00

Microsoft Research

Not what they expected

2016-03-27T21:21:00-05:00

Google said to be selling Boston Dynamics.

Marketwatch.com

Boston.com

The new AI

2016-03-26T19:15:00-05:00

What was wrong with the goals of the last one?

What is AI?

2016-03-26T19:09:00-05:00

The real question is what is intelligence?

AI

2016-03-26T09:30:00-05:00

When AI becomes self aware will it like who we are?

Who are we?

2016-03-24T17:17:00-05:00

We are the ones making the decisions, it’s not pretty.

Robots

2016-03-23T22:42:00-05:00

We are all robots in one way or another. We all have goals and we all have constraints that we have to work within. There's nothing wrong with being a robot, we just have to accept it.

Bits of Cents — Disassembling the Dash

2015-05-15T09:02:00-05:00

Bits of Cents — Disassembling the Dash

Disassembling the Dash On Thursday I got an email from Amazon saying I had been selected to try out two Dash buttons at zero cost. To be honest it as kind of surprising given that although we order from them plenty, I can’t say that we regularly stock up on consumables from Amazon: they suggested I get the Gillette razor button, something I’ve ordered twice. Maybe it’s a ploy to try and get me to order more regularly from them. Maybe it’s because I’m in New York and they are trying to get more density in Manhattan. Maybe they read my blog. Who knows but in any case it’s free hardware. The functionality is simple enough: click a button, get the Dash item at your door. But what makes it tick? Like any good hardware nerd, I was excited to find out.

More info at: Bits of Cents — Disassembling the Dash

Arduino IDE Becomes More Open, Less Snarky | Hackaday

2015-05-15T08:55:00-05:00

Arduino IDE Becomes More Open, Less Snarky | Hackaday

More info at: Arduino IDE Becomes More Open, Less Snarky | Hackaday

KIM-1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2015-05-09T10:51:00-05:00

KIM-1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Remembering the good ole days. This was one of my first computers. I had to punch in the hex values into memory locations. It was the brains of my for Robot project. I was in high school back in about 1980.

The KIM-1 consisted of a single printed circuit board with all the components on one side. It included three main ICs; the MCS6502 CPU, and two MCS6530 Peripheral Interface/Memory Devices. Each MCS6530 comprises a mask programmable 1024 x 8 ROM, a 64 x 8 RAM, two 8 bit bi-directional ports, and a programmable interval timer.[3] The KIM-1 brochure said "1 K BYTE RAM" but it actually had 1152 bytes. The memory was composed of eight 6102 static RAMs(1024 x 1 bits) and the two 64 byte RAMs of the MCS6530s. In the 1970s memory sizes were expressed in several ways. Semiconductor manufacturers would use a precise memory size such as 2048 by 8 and sometimes state the number of bits (16384). Mini and mainframe computers had various memory widths (8 bits to over 36 bits) so manufacturers would use the term "words", such as 4K words. The early hobbyist computer advertisements would use both "words" and "bytes". It was common to see "4096 words", "4K (4096) words" and "4 K bytes". The term KB was unused or very uncommon. The KIM-1 was introduced in the April 1976 issue of Byte magazine and the advertisement stated "1 K BYTE RAM" and "2048 ROM BYTES".[4]

More info at: KIM-1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All About The JPEG #SaturdayMorningCartoons «

2015-05-09T10:27:00-05:00

All About The JPEG #SaturdayMorningCartoons « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

Our friends at Adafruit posted an article from SaturdayMorningCartoons explaining the JPG image format and how image compression works.

More info at: All About The JPEG #SaturdayMorningCartoons « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

Blocked Website

2015-05-06T19:34:00-05:00

Finally! It has been over a week since I could access this site from my home ISP. Everything looked ok on the traceroute except the very last IP would not respond. No email, no ftp, no web. In fact for all 800+ websites on the same hosted server, they were all unaccessible.

So today I narrowed it down to my router. For some reason my old Apple Airport Extreme blocked this one IP. I could access everything else that I tried. Once I reset it back to factory conditions and set it up as a new router then everything worked again. Not sure what caused it, so I'm not sure why this fixed it. I'll wait and see if it happens again.

Update:

Found a forum discussion from 2009 that explains the problem. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1908377?start=0&tstart=0

Apple shows their security hand

2014-03-05T20:56:00-06:00

Apple released the details of their iOS security and all we get from the news is crickets. Think about this a moment. We have more important information on-line then we have ever had in the history of the world. It has always been at risk and there are daily news reports of hacks, stolen credit cards, stolen data and pretty much every other kind of corporate and state espionage. This is a huge problem in modern society, this is a huge business for those trying to secure insecure systems. This is a huge problem for consumers, for corporations, and for governments. Everyone just expects everything to be insecure. It seems to me that when a solution appears that people would stand up and take notice, get excited, talk about it and be generally amazed that such a huge problem could be solved at all.

Ok, so it has to be tested, it has to be proven that it works the way they say it works. I get that, I get that we should all be skeptical. But, really we should be getting pretty excited about the benefits if this is all true. Apple has always had a pretty good security reputation, even when the competitors sling a lot of crap about them. Of course they do, because the competitors seem to have not thought about security at all.

Here is what I think is going on with Apple.

1. In 2007 they introduced iOS, a new operating system and hardware platform that is built from the ground up to be secure. It worked pretty well and a lot of bugs have been fixed since then.

2. In 2013 a new iPhone was released with a secure enclave and a finger print sensor. The sensor is used in a pretty simple way to continue to work out the bugs and make sure everything works as expected.

3. In early 2014 a security document is released that details all the different security and encryption features of the platform. Why? Why did they do this now? Why did they detail this. It is normally only a loose, loose situation when companies detail their security procedures. They either share their details with the bad guys, or they look foolish in the public eye for everything they missed or did wrong. It takes a lot of confidence to publish these kinds of details. Why, because it sets the stage for the next major industry change.

Speculation on the future:

4. In June 2014 Apple discusses the new API at their developer conference. They talk about how all transactions can be secured, how endpoints can be known and how everything works seamlessly. This kickstarts an entirely new app business. A business where everyone understands that security is now a strategic advantage for the Apple platform and that it creates a huge rush by consumers, corporations and governments to use the platform so that they can keep their secretes from their competitors, other governments and of course from the NSA.

5. In the spring of 2015 Apple announces their partnerships with retail chains and other major corporations. They offer an end to end secure payment system that does not require credit cards, just an iPhone and a fingerprint. The world goes crazy and says it can’t be done, the credit card industry sues to have it stopped, all other forms of payment collapse and by the end of the first year it become obvious that Apple just changed the world again by implementing the first secure digital payment system.

6. There’s more! In all of that everyone overlooks the fact that Apple already ships to hundreds of millions of users a non-breachable voice and video communications system. It is encrypted from end-to-end and doesn’t use the cell-service voice channel. Once again everyone that wants to have a private conversation switches to iOS. The consumers, the corporations and the governments.

7. And even more! There is now a way to sign documents electronically and guarantee the signature of the person signing it. That document can then be sent securely from person to person and not be breached by someone in the middle. Once again everyone that wants to have digital documents that are digitally signed and secured switches to iOS. The consumers, the corporations and the governments.

Perfect timing as usual. The world is pissed at the NSA, the world is scared (or should be) of Android and all of its security problems and Apple hands the world a solution to some of their biggest problems.

2001 changed the music industry, 2007 changed the phone industry, 2010 changed the computer industry, 2015 changed the payment industry.

Thoughts on Apple's new iWatch or Whatever

2014-02-24T09:56:00-06:00

Everyone is designing a new watch that looks and acts just like an old watch. Look at Pebble, look at Samsung. They don’t get it. If Apple were to design a new watch it wouldn’t look and act like an old watch with just a few features added to make everyone think it was smart. They would start from scratch, something new, something useful, the only thing in common with an old watch will be the name so that we can understand it. This is what they did with the iPhone, it is not like any phone before except in name. Here are some of my thoughts on what a new Apple designed watch will do.

1. It will be much larger than a regular watch. That is, a much bigger screen size. It will not be square, it will not be round. It will be like an iPod touch on your wrist (ok maybe not that big, but big!).

2. It will be unbelievably thin. Think how thin you think it could be and then make it even thinner. It will be so thin and light you will not believe it to be possible.

3. It will have unimaginably long battery life. Think weeks, maybe months, not days. So long that the rest of the industry will laugh at first saying that it is impossible.

4. It will be all screen. How do you adjust fashion to meet everyones styles and tastes? You do it with software! Everyone that wears it will make it look different, make it to match their style and mood. This thing will be so skinnable, it will redefine the term.

5. Oh, it will have a few features too. It might even be able to tell time, check your status, show some messages, report on your heart rate. At first, everyone will laugh and say it doesn’t do something that they heard of or thought of. It won’t matter, once the basic form factor is in place then it will grow. It will be better at everything eventually. The software will be amazing. Eventually a new SDK, new apps, new interactions, new ways to stay connected and share your life with your family and friends.

Spark | Wi-Fi for Everything

2014-02-20T21:26:00-06:00

Spark Wi-Fi for Everything

A tiny Wi-Fi development board that makes it easy to create internet-connected hardware. The Core is all you need to get started; power it over USB and in minutes you'll be controlling LEDs, switches and motors and collecting data from sensors over the internet!

No need to ever plug the Core into your computer; you can write code in our web IDE and download it wirelessly to the Core.

Arduino compatible

Familiar with Arduino? The Core uses Wiring, the same programming language that Arduino uses. Plus, with an accessory called the Shield Shield, you can connect the Core to any standard Arduino shield.

Easy set-up

How do you connect a Wi-Fi device to your network when it doesn't have a screen or keyboard? With Smart Config, the Core's one step set-up process. Bring the Core online in seconds from any iOS or Android device.

More info at: Spark Wi-Fi for Everything

NEW PRODUCT – Rosie Revere, Engineer « adafruit industries blog

2014-01-30T17:24:00-06:00

NEW PRODUCT – Rosie Revere, Engineer « adafruit industries blog

More info at: NEW PRODUCT – Rosie Revere, Engineer « adafruit industries blog

Easy build: Make a bubble in a Q-tip cube

2014-01-09T10:25:00-06:00

Easy build: Make a bubble in a Q-tip cube

Everyone should make a square bubble.

More info at: Easy build: Make a bubble in a Q-tip cube

Agency Approvals Symbols

2014-01-07T13:22:00-06:00

Agency Approvals Symbols

More info at: Agency Approvals Symbols

MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact 3D Printer

2014-01-07T09:18:00-06:00

MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact 3D Printer

New Leading-Edge Printers

At MakerBot, we’ve been making professional-quality 3D printers affordable and accessible since 2009. In that short time we’ve released four generations of 3D printers, helping unleash a worldwide 3D printing revolution in art and design, engineering and manufacturing, architecture, education, and more.

Today we’re yet again defining the new standard in ease of use, quality, and reliability with the introduction of three new MakerBot Replicator 3D printers. We are proud to introduce the:

– MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact 3D Printer

– MakerBot Replicator Desktop 3D Printer

– MakerBot Replicator Z18 3D Printer

The MakerBot Replicator 3D Printing Platform
All three Fifth Generation MakerBot Replicator 3D Printers run on a common MakerBot Replicator 3D Printing Platform, which enables improved reliability, ease of use, and seamless connectivity. Check out the features below:

More info at: MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact 3D Printer

The Cubli: a cube that can jump up, balance, and 'walk' - YouTube

2013-12-20T10:04:00-06:00

▶ The Cubli: a cube that can jump up, balance, and 'walk' - YouTube

Everyone should see this.

More info at: ▶ The Cubli: a cube that can jump up, balance, and 'walk' - YouTube

Arcade/SpaceInvaders – Computer Acheology

2013-12-16T17:12:00-06:00

Arcade/SpaceInvaders – Computer Acheology

Wow, this brings back memories! From the Z80 assembly language to the hardware specs. Those were the days.

09A5: 23              INC     HL                  ; Load ...
09A6: 7E              LD      A,(HL)              ; ... the ...
09A7: 23              INC     HL                  ; ... screen ...
09A8: 66              LD      H,(HL)              ; ... coordinates ...
09A9: 6F              LD      L,A                 ; ... to HL
09AA: C3 AD 09        JP      $09AD               ; ** Usually a good idea, but wasted here

;##-Print4Digits
; Print 4 digits in DE
09AD: 7A              LD      A,D                 ; Get first 2 digits of BCD or hex
09AE: CD B2 09        CALL    $09B2               ; Print them
09B1: 7B              LD      A,E                 ; Get second 2 digits of BCD or hex (fall into print)

;##-DrawHexByte
; Display 2 digits in A to screen at HL
09B2: D5              PUSH    DE                  ; Preserve
09B3: F5              PUSH    AF                  ; Save for later

More info at: Arcade/SpaceInvaders – Computer Acheology

Everyone Should Have The Opportunity To Code

2013-12-09T13:38:00-06:00

Everyone should have the opportunity to code. Join in here: http://code.org/learn

Blokify 3D Modeling Software | MAKE

2013-10-10T21:31:00-05:00

Blokify 3D Modeling Software | MAKE

Electronics Workshop Craft Science Home Art & Design Maker Pro SUBSCRIBE Projects Blog Magazine Videos Skill Builders Reviews Events Shop Forums Education Blokify 3D Modeling Software By Goli Mohammadi Posted 10/10/2013 @ 5:40 pm Category 3D Printing, General, Kids & Family Comments 0

Last month, at World Maker Faire New York‘s 3D Printer Village, I had the pleasure of meeting two enthusiastic, bright makers, Jenny Kortina and Brett Cupta, who were sharing their brand new creation with the community: Blokify. Their custom block-based 3D modeling software makes it easy for folks, especially kids, to build object models, which they can then send directly to a home 3D printer or get printed through Blokify’s service. Giving kids easy access to designing and printing their own toys has great impact on creative potential. I was impressed with their clean, slick, approachable interface, and they had a steady stream of engaged Fairegoers interacting with their displays all weekend long

More info at: Blokify 3D Modeling Software | MAKE

This is what a Filled-up Maker’s Notebook Looks Like

2013-10-04T21:08:00-05:00

This is what a Filled-up Maker’s Notebook Looks Like

A two year journey of one editor's battered Maker's Notebook.

Every spaceship ever

2013-09-27T09:52:00-05:00

Every spaceship ever

Every spaceship ever. To size. Compiled by Dirk Loechel.

More info at: Every spaceship ever

EE Bookshelf: The International System of Units, 8th Edition

2013-09-23T20:55:00-05:00

EE Bookshelf: The International System of Units, 8th Edition

Have you ever wondered what the official SI unit for magnetic field strength is (hint: ampere per metre), or maybe kinematic viscosity (square metre per second), or perhaps the correct abbreviations or symbols for some specific SI unit or value? The Bible of SI Units, The International System of Units, 8th Edition, has all the (very official) answers and can be downloaded in PDF format in English or French from the website of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. It’s actually just kind of find reading through one of the most important changes in recent scientific history, but it’s particularly useful in a world where there is still a lot of confusion over which units and scale are appropriate to use and when, and how to properly cite them!

More info at: EE Bookshelf: The International System of Units, 8th Edition

The Simpsons' secret formula: it's written by maths geeks | Television & radio | The Observer

2013-09-23T10:51:00-05:00

The Simpsons' secret formula: it's written by maths geeks | Television & radio | The Observer

Edition:UKUSAUSign inMobile About us Subscribe Sign into the Guardian using your Facebook account Hide

News US World Sports Comment Culture Business Money Environment Science Travel Tech Media Life & style Data Culture Television & radio The Simpsons The Simpsons' secret formula: it's written by maths geeks When one of Britain's best-known science writers went to Los Angeles to meet the show's writers for a new book, he found a team dedicated to inserting gags about complex maths problems. And you thought it was just a cartoon… Share 462

11 inShare 34 Email

Simon Singh The Observer, Saturday 21 September 2013 Jump to comments (309)

The Simpsons: TV's secret mathematicians. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/20th Century Fox Without doubt, the most mathematically sophisticated television show in the history of primetime broadcasting is The Simpsons. This is not a figment of my deranged mind, which admittedly is obsessed with both The Simpsons and mathematics, but rather it is a conc

More info at: The Simpsons' secret formula: it's written by maths geeks | Television & radio | The Observer

Teach kids programming — Medium

2013-09-16T12:09:00-05:00

Teach kids programming — Medium

Updated September 15, 2013

2 min read Teach kids programming A collection of resources

I’ve been gathering the best resources to teach children & teens programming — books, environments, apps, courseware and games.

These resources are meant for teachers and parents who want to have their children fall in love with computers and see the magic of programming.

I’m staying away from philosophical debates of whether kids should learn to program, when they should start and other such topics. I know this — I fell in love with computers in 3rd grade (a beautiful ZX Spectrum), and I want to share the joy of programming with others.

I’ve chosen in this list to be quite comprehensive in listing all resources — but also choosy to restricting this to things I found useful & of high quality.

I’ve also started this list with my own opinionated picks on what kind of material from the larg

More info at: Teach kids programming — Medium

Easy 6502 ebook (with a built-in emulator)

2013-09-12T15:03:00-05:00

Easy 6502 ebook (with a built-in emulator)

Easy 6502

Why 6502? Why not a useful assembly language, like x86? Well, I don’t think learning x86 is useful. I don’t think you’ll ever have to write assembly language in your day job – this is purely an academic exercise, something to expand your mind and your thinking. 6502 was originally written in a different age, a time when the majority of developers were writing assembly directly, rather than in these new-fangled high-level programming languages. So, it was designed to be written by humans. More modern assembly languages are meant to written by compilers, so let’s leave it to them. Plus, 6502 is fun. Nobody ever called x86 fun.

via \@radar

More info at: Easy 6502 ebook (with a built-in emulator)

MAKE | Smartphone Servo

2013-09-03T21:47:00-05:00

MAKE | Smartphone Servo

Electronics Workshop Craft Science Home Art & Design Maker Pro SUBSCRIBE Projects Blog Magazine Videos Skill Builders Reviews Events Shop Forums Education MAKE: PROJECTS Smartphone Servo By Kazuhisa “Kazu” Terasaki Category: Computers & Mobile, Electronics, Robotics Time Required: 30 minutesDifficulty: Easy Comments 2

Smartphones have become our primary interface to the network world, and increasingly, to the real world as well. I call this project GlueMotor, because it works like “glue” for putting gadgets together under smartphone control, providing a very easy way to build simple servo-controlled machines.

To use it for making simple gadgets or prototyping your projects, attach any convenient on-hand materials — PVC pipe, chopsticks, Legos, duct tape — to a GlueMotor, then plug it into your smartphone’s headphone jack. The GlueMotor app lets you control it with a finger swipe.

How It Works Controlling a hobby servomotor is relatively easy. It requires a single digital pulse

More info at: MAKE | Smartphone Servo

Beautifully rendered electromagnetic radiation chart from 1944

2013-08-02T14:41:00-05:00

Beautifully rendered electromagnetic radiation chart from 1944

Electromagnetic radiation infographic from 1944 is beautiful, informative

At some point in the last few decades, someone took a poster and stuffed it in an unused office at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL). The poster was made by the W.M Welch Scientific Company in 1944, and it depicts in excruciatingly awesome detail how electromagnetic waves work.

Each section of the spectrum corresponds to a color-coded section in the bottom area. You can learn all about the properties, uses, and effects of each type of electromagnetic wave. It covers everything from simple diffraction to the effects of cosmic rays.

You can check it out on the LLNL Flickr page and zoom way in – its resolution is 10,000 x 6958 pixels and it’s a 107MB jpeg file.

More info at: Beautifully rendered electromagnetic radiation chart from 1944

Cereal Box Robot

2013-07-28T16:56:00-05:00

Cereal Box Robot

Think outside the cereal box to create an upcycled robot! Anyone who’s a fan of MAKE must, at a minimum, appreciate a good robot when they see it. So when there’s an easy way to create a robot from materials you have in your kitchen, it’s a great, budget-friendly way to have fun with your kids on a summer’s day—or anytime.

Retro Wooden Robot Nut Crackers

2013-07-24T18:20:00-05:00

Retro Wooden Robot Nut Crackers

Matthias Zschaler designed two retro-styled wooden Nut Crackers for SUCK UK that look like robots. To operate them, the nut goes in the robot’s tummy and the key is turned to crack open the shell. They are available to purchase at SUCK UK.

…Robot Nut Crackers are easy to use and will break into any nut, from the smallest hazelnut to the toughest walnut. Your new best friend is made from solid beech wood and finished with a gleaming retro paint-job.

More info at: Retro Wooden Robot Nut Crackers

Eleven iPad-centric schools to open in the Netherlands

2013-07-02T18:44:00-05:00

Eleven iPad-centric schools to open in the Netherlands

Eleven schools in The Netherlands plan to replace blackboards, schedules and more with iPads. In fact, each student's entire educational career will hinge on Apple's revolutionary tablet device.

Scheduled to open this August, the so-called "Steve Jobs Schools" will host about 1,000 children, aged four to 12. According to Spiegel Online, the curriculum will be largely student-directed. Gone will be typical education tools like lesson plans, schedules, grades and parent-teacher meetings.

The school day will be atypical as well. While each participating school will be open from 7:30 AM to 6:30 PM each workday, students will only be required to attend between 10:30 AM and 3:00 PM. Also, parents will be encouraged to take vacations as it suits their own schedules.

Gertjan Kleinpaste, the principal of a participating school in Rotterdam, understands that the program will be envied by some and reviled by others. It's certainly a bold educational experiment. I'm quite interested to see how this pans out.

Eleven iPad-centric schools to open in the Netherlands originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 02 Jul 2013 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments

More info at: Eleven iPad-centric schools to open in the Netherlands

Robotic Machine Vision Software

2013-05-30T15:22:00-05:00

Robotic Machine Vision Software

RoboRealm® is an application for use in computer vision, image analysis, and robotic vision systems. Using an easy point and click interface RoboRealm simplifies vision programming! With an inexpensive USB webcam and the PC you already have you can now add machine vision to your robotic projects! Image and/or video processing can be technically difficult. Home robots are continuously moving towards PC based systems (laptop, netbook, embedded, etc.) that have the power to support complex image processing functions. RoboRealm provides the software needed to get such a system up and running. We've compiled many image processing functions into an easy to use windows based application that you can use with a webcam, TV Tuner, IP Camera, etc. Use RoboRealm to see your robot's environment, process the acquired image, analyze what needs to be done and send the needed signals to your robot's motors, servos, etc.

For example, you can use RoboRealm to track colored objects, navigate with obstacle avoidance, identify fiducials that let your robot know where it is, and much more!

More info at: Robotic Machine Vision Software

How-To: A Quick and Sturdy Wood Box

2013-05-30T11:44:00-05:00

How-To: A Quick and Sturdy Wood Box

At some point we're all going to need to build a box. Whether it's to keep a tool safe, or build a project enclosure, knowing how to make a box that's a custom size really comes in handy.

Read the full article on MAKE

More info at: How-To: A Quick and Sturdy Wood Box

Arduino Robot

2013-05-26T17:38:00-05:00

Arduino Robot

\$275 from the MakerShed.

With the Arduino Robot, you can learn about electronics, mechanics, and software. It is a tiny computer on wheels. It comes with a number of of project examples you can easily replicate, and it is a powerful robotics platform that you can hack to perform all sorts of tasks. The robot comes with a large number of inputs; two potentiometers, five buttons, a digital compass, five floor sensors, and an SD card reader. It also has a speaker, two motors, and a color screen as outputs. You can control all these sensors and actuators through the Robot library. There are two different boards on the Robot: the Control Board (top) and the Motor Board (bottom). If you're just getting started with electronics and programming, you should work with the Control Board. As you become more experienced, you may want to tinker with the Motor Board.

More info at: Arduino Robot

Arduino - Robot

2013-05-17T23:28:00-05:00

Arduino - Robot

The Arduino Robot is the first official Arduino on wheels. The robot has two processors, one on each of its two boards. The Motor Board controls the motors, and the Control Board reads sensors and decides how to operate. Each of the boards is a full Arduino board programmable using the Arduino IDE. Both Motor and Control boards are microcontroller boards based on the ATmega32u4 (datasheet). The Robot has many of its pins mapped to on-board sensors and actuators. Programming the robot is similar to the process with the Arduino Leonardo. Both processors have built-in USB communication, eliminating the need for a secondary processor. This allows the Robot to appear to a connected computer as a virtual (CDC) serial / COM port. As always with Arduino, every element of the platform – hardware, software and documentation – is freely available and open-source. This means you can learn exactly how it's made and use its design as the starting point for your own robots. The Arduino Robot is the result of the collective effort from an international team looking at how science can be made fun to learn. Arduino is now on wheels, come ride with us!

More info at: Arduino - Robot

MAKE | Introducing New Column from Arduino’s Massimo Banzi

2013-05-17T23:26:00-05:00

MAKE | Introducing New Column from Arduino’s Massimo Banzi

Ask any maker what the hottest subjects are in DIY electronics these days, and odds are the first answer will be Arduino. Since the earliest boards were built in 2005 to enable students to run interactive design projects with open-source tools, the platform has become a world-wide phenomenon, igniting the imaginations of makers, hackers, and artists all over. Simply speaking, Arduino is huge in the maker and MAKE communities. Here’s a great interview Dale Dougherty conducted with Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi from MAKE Vol. 32.

Today we are thrilled to announce Massimo will be writing a monthly column for MAKE, which we’re calling “MAKE the Future with Arduino.” On the first Tuesday of each month, Massimo will share his unique perspective on the Arduino platform, including insight on the development of the boards, new products, and exciting projects for Arduino fans to share and adapt. Indeed, today’s first column is a preview of an exciting new Arduino product that will be unveiled to the world at Maker Faire Bay Area this week—the Arduino Robot.

So, please join us in welcoming Massimo to MAKE!

More info at: MAKE | Introducing New Column from Arduino’s Massimo Banzi

Sparki - The Easy Robot for Everyone! by ArcBotics — Kickstarter

2013-05-16T16:13:00-05:00

Sparki - The Easy Robot for Everyone! by ArcBotics — Kickstarter

Easy, affordable, feature packed Arduino robot. Comes w/ sensors motors and more. Great intro to programming/electronics/robots

New: Drag-and-Drop

We're partnering with MiniBloq to bring Drag-and-Drop programming to Sparki! Easy robot programming, bringing the age range down to elementary, and opens robotics to whole new group of future roboticists.

More info at: Sparki - The Easy Robot for Everyone! by ArcBotics — Kickstarter

RoboBrrd : Your DIY Educational Robotic Pet!

2013-05-15T20:51:00-05:00

RoboBrrd : Your DIY Educational Robotic Pet!

Another cool robot from RobotGrrl.

Buddy 4000 Your Fun Robot!

A classy robot chassis designed to express robot emotions with an artistic flair

More info at: RoboBrrd : Your DIY Educational Robotic Pet!

Jack Conte Video Featuring Awesome Robots

2013-05-15T20:49:00-05:00

Site of J. Edgar Park

A cool video of some awesome robots by Jack Conte.

More info at: Site of J. Edgar Park

#adafruit6secs - The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival

2013-04-21T19:06:00-05:00

#adafruit6secs - The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival

The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival! #adafruit6secs

Call For Entries: Announcing The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival! Share your cool project in 6 seconds of video and win up to \$600 at the Adafruit store, with six runners up winning \$60 store credit each. In a 6 second video, we want you to share the best project you've made. Be sure not to use any copyrighted music, video, etc. This should be all your project, all by you. The Adafruit team will be looking on Twitter, G+/youtube and beyond for Vines, 6 second videos and more tagged with #adafruit6secs. The deadline is 6pm ET, 5/6/13. The Adafruit team of judges will pick their favorites and announce the winner on May, 12th at 6pm ET.

tl;dr - Post a 6 second video of your electronic project(s) using Vine on Twitter and tag it #adafruit6secs !

Keep reading for all the details!

More info at: #adafruit6secs - The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival

Lego's Mindstorms EV3 programmable robots have character - YouTube

2013-04-20T11:06:00-05:00

Lego's Mindstorms EV3 programmable robots have character - YouTube

The next generation of Lego's programmable robotics kit is teaches kids how to program, but also offers something for adult enthusiasts.

More info at: Lego's Mindstorms EV3 programmable robots have character - YouTube

HowStuffWorks "How Robots Work"

2013-04-20T10:58:00-05:00

HowStuffWorks "How Robots Work"

On the most basic level, human beings are made up of five major components:

A body structure
A muscle system to move the body structure
A sensory system that receives information about the body and the surrounding environment
A power source to activate the muscles and sensors
A brain system that processes sensory information and tells the muscles what to do

Why your 8-year-old should be coding | VentureBeat

2013-04-16T14:22:00-05:00

Why your 8-year-old should be coding | VentureBeat

April 12, 2013 9:01 AM Jolie O'Dell

Learn-to-code startups abound these days, but one in particular is focusing on the very young and is having some success in elementary schools around the country — even underserved schools with no budgets for STEM but a great need for better tools.

[The startup is ]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}Tynker}[; it makes a ]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"web-based learning platform and a visual programming language[ }[ for teachers and kids in K-12 classrooms. In a discussion with its co-founder, we found out why ]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}[[teaching ]{.kLink style="outline: none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: none !important; font-size: inherit !important; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: none; background-color: transparent; width: auto !important; float: none !important; display: inline !important; font-family: inherit !important; position: static;"}[kids]{.kLink style="outline: none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: none !important; font-size: inherit !important; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: none; background-color: transparent; width: auto !important; float: none !important; display: inline !important; font-family: inherit !important; position: static;"}]{style="outline: none medium; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; position: static; color: #1f81e5;"}[ how to code is so important to him.]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"

]{style="outline: none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}

Moving d11.me Website To New URL

2013-04-08T21:16:00-05:00

Welcome to the new home of d11.me. I have moved the Url to robotcraft.org and hopefully everything has transferred successfully. You will need to reregister to make a new comment and you will need to update the RSS feeds. Thanks for putting up with the confusion.

Doug

Fraser Speirs - Blog - Teaching Programming with iOS and Amazon EC2

2013-04-04T14:22:00-05:00

The world just keeps on changing. Never bet against it.

Fraser Speirs - Blog - Teaching Programming with iOS and Amazon EC2

I just shut down the Amazon EC2 instance we've been using all school year, so I thought it was worth reflecting on. Last August, I wrote about my new approach to teaching Ruby programming on our iPads.

How did it work? In a word: perfectly.

When Did Intelligent Life Emerge in the Universe? » A Curious Mind

2013-03-13T10:11:00-05:00

When Did Intelligent Life Emerge in the Universe? » A Curious Mind

Figure 1. The Helix Nebula; the gaseous outer layers expelled by a dying star. The ejected material enriches the interstellar medium (from which new stars and planets form) with carbon. Credit: NASA, ESA, C. R. O’Dell (Vanderbilt University), M. Meixner and P. McCullough (STScI).

Observations from the ground and with the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that the cosmic rate of birth of new stars reached its peak some 9–10 billion years ago, and it has been declining ever since. The peak in the universal rate of carbon production lags behind the cosmic star-formation rate by no more than about a billion years. Consequently, we can guess that if the universe did indeed experience a burst of life-formation, similar perhaps (in terms of its eruptive nature) to the Cambrian explosion on Earth, the earliest this might have happened was about 9 billion years ago.

It took life on Earth about three billion years to develop from primitive to complex. We have no idea if this is “typical,” but it seems reasonable to assume that if “intelligent” life develops at all, this process should take a few billion years, given the rather slow pace of Darwinian-like evolution. This means that we might expect “intelligent” (more cautiously, “complex”) life forms to have emerged in abundance in the universe some 5–6 billion years ago. If true, then there could be quite a few civilizations out there that are more advanced than ours by a few billions of years. How is that for a humbling thought?

LEGO.com MINDSTORMS : News

2013-03-08T11:09:00-06:00

LEGO.com MINDSTORMS : News

Announcing LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 04/01/2013 Coming Fall 2013: LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Create and command robots that do what you want.

With LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 you can turn your LEGO creations into live robots that follow your every command. The new LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 set includes everything you need – motors, sensors, programmable brick, 550+ LEGO Technic elements, remote control – to create and command robots of even your wildest imagination, including 5 cool robot characters. Download the 3D building instructions and the app to command your robot via your smart device. Then program your robots to walk, talk, move and do whatever you want them to do to via the intuitive software program, the programmable brick or your smart device.

Apple Today

2013-03-06T20:00:00-06:00

Jobs made Apple exciting, now it's just a company. Journalists are bored.

Dynamic Robot Manipulation – Brick throwing robot « adafruit industries blog

2013-03-01T20:42:00-06:00

Now we are getting somewhere. This is really cool.

Dynamic Robot Manipulation – Brick throwing robot « adafruit industries blog

BigDog handles heavy objects. The goal is to use the strength of the legs and torso to help power motions of the arm. This sort of dynamic, whole-body approach is routinely used by human athletes and animals, and will enhance the performance of advanced robots. The control techniques and actuators needed for dynamic manipulation are being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the Army Research Laboratory’s RCTA program.

Oreo Separator Machine #1 « adafruit industries blog

2013-02-27T18:26:00-06:00

The ultimate robot!

Oreo Separator Machine #1 « adafruit industries blog

A detailed look into the complex world of Oreo separation- featuring music by my band, Anamanaguchi

Enchanting : Enchanting : Enchanting

2013-02-27T18:13:00-06:00

Cool new way to program the NXT. Will have to follow this to see how it turns out...

Enchanting : Enchanting : Enchanting

What is Enchanting?

Enchanting is a tool to allow children an easy-to-understand way to program LEGO MINDSTORMS NXTrobots. It is based on Scratchand BYOB/Snap!, and powered by leJOS NXJ(Java for the NXT). Enchanting is free and open-source.

For more details, see the About page. Is it any good?

Yes! But, don't take my word for it. See what people are saying about Enchanting.

How do I use it?

Try out our brand new Enchanting Cards! (Here is a preliminary German translation.)

Your other best resource at this time, aside from diving in and trying it out, is the interactive book Robotics with Enchanting and LEGO® NXT: A Project Based Introduction to Programming, available for the iPad or as an interactive PDF for use on your computer. (Please note that we've re-arranged the order of the palettes and changes the 'motor' blocks' colour from red to cyan).

Knowing how to use Scratchis certainly helpful, and, for the advanced user, look at how to use BYOB/Snap, especially the BYOB manual.

Next Generation LiveCode (Open Source) by RunRev Ltd — Kickstarter

2013-02-27T11:14:00-06:00

I just backed a Kickstarter project!

Next Generation LiveCode (Open Source) by RunRev Ltd — Kickstarter

LiveCode is like a next generation version of HyperCard. It is used to create #1 one app store apps, real-time flight booking systems and control satellites. It is used to create simple one off apps and utilities to solve day-to-day problems.

There are some things it can’t do – yet. This project is to create a next-generation LiveCode.

Our vision is that this new next-generation LiveCode will be free and open source.

It will run on every popular platform and device.

It will let you write programs in English.

And by being open, its English language programming will be extensible to any computing problem out there. That's a world first.

If you couldn’t code before, LiveCode is the answer. If you’ve used the existing version of LiveCode before and it didn’t do everything you needed, this next-generation version has you covered.

Celebrity Lecture Series | Fort Worth Museum of Science and History

2013-02-21T17:34:00-06:00

Can't wait to see Mark Frauenfelder at the science museum next week!

Celebrity Lecture Series | Fort Worth Museum of Science and History

February 28, 2013 Mark Frauenfelder The Maker Movement – 7 pm Adult \$12 Children (2-12)/Senior (65+) \$10.00

Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make magazine, the leading publication of the do-it-yourself movement, and the founder of the popular Boing Boing blog, which has over five million unique visitors per month. He is the former editor-in-chief of Wired online, and was an editor at Wired magazine and Wired Books from 1993-1998. He has appeared on The Colbert Report and The Martha Stewart Show, and has written for New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Business Week, The Hollywood Reporter, Wired and other national publications.

Hans 555 Timer IC - Circuit Playground Plushie ID: 1022 - $9.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

2013-02-17T20:02:00-06:00

Hans 555 Timer IC - Circuit Playground Plushie ID: 1022 - \$9.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

Hans is the 'old man' of the group. He tends to be nervous and is often indecisive. Hans frequently changes his mind, and is a little fidgety (he oscillates) when he's not moving around. He is very meticulous and precise in other ways; Hans does not like to compromise, preferring to be in a steady state until a dramatic change is called for. Hans speaks with the voice of a kindly old man with a Swiss-German accent, though his voice can become more nasally when he's upset or feels strongly about something. His catchphrase is "maybe so, but perhaps not."

About the 555: The 555 timer IC was designed by Hans Camenzind in 1971. It consists of two threshold triggers, an RS flip-flop, and an output buffer. The 555 provides an easy, reliable way to create rectangular waveforms of adjustable pulse width and frequency by using different external component values.

Review: Marware Axis and MicroShell Folio iPad mini cases | 9to5Mac

2013-02-17T19:59:00-06:00

Review: Marware Axis and MicroShell Folio iPad mini cases | 9to5Mac

Marware, one of the leading accessory makers for Apple’s mobile devices, has sent us two of their latest iPad mini cases for review. Both cases are unique in their own right, but both are built with versatility and quality materials. Check our reviews of both the Marware Axis and Marware MicroShell Folio cases for the iPad mini below.

How to Make a Professional Looking Front Panel « adafruit industries blog

2013-01-04T16:19:00-06:00

via adafruit.com

Handy.

RoboBrrd Indiegogo campaign funded! 151%! | RoboBrrd Blog

2012-12-08T15:27:00-06:00

Posted on December 6, 2012 by RobotGrrl

Last night was the final countdown for the RoboBrrd Indiegogo campaign, we surpassed our stretch goal!

Big thanks to all the new and old friends of RoboBrrd, for backing the project and/or spreading the word!

We will be keeping everyone in the loop as to what is happening, and we will be posting pics and vids of the behind the scenes action on twitter/facebook/g , so you can follow RoboBrrd!

If you have any questions about RoboBrrd feel free to ask them!

It is extremely exciting to be able to get RoboBrrd in the hands of even more people now. I can’t wait to see what people will be making with them!

YIPEE WOOT WOOT CHIRP CHIRP BEEP BLOOP WHIRR SQUAWK!

Thanks again!

This post was originally posted on RobotGrrl.com

Tags: 2012, awesome, campaign, crowdfunding, fun, funded, indiegogo, robobrrd, woot

Leave a Reply [Cancel reply}]{.small

← 27 hours left! & RoboBrrd Dashboard Beta!

via robobrrd.com

Congratulations to RoboBrrd for making their funding goal!

RoboBrrd Blog

2012-11-05T21:03:00-06:00

via robobrrd.com

Help make it happen. Support the RoboBrrd campaign today!

HOW-TO: Animating Multiple LED Backpacks @ The Adafruit Learning System « adafruit industries blog

2012-10-15T20:09:00-05:00

via adafruit.com

Mars orbiter catches pic of Curiosity on its way down!

2012-08-06T15:31:00-05:00

That's one amazing robot!

From Discovery Bad Astronomy Blog

[This is truly astonishing: the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped what may turn out to be the Space Picture of the Year: Curiosity descending to Mars under its parachutes!]{style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"}

The simple and sheer amazingness of this picture cannot be overstated. Here we have a picture taken by a camera on board a space probe that’s been orbiting Mars for six years, reset and re-aimed by programmers hundreds of millions of kilometers away using math and science pioneered centuries ago, so that it could catch the fleeting view of another machine we humans flung across space, traveling hundreds of million of kilometers to another world at mind-bending speeds, only to gently – and perfectly – touch down on the surface mere minutes later.

The news these days is filled with polarization, with hate, with fear, with ignorance. But while these feelings are a part of us, and always will be, they neither dominate nor define us. Not if we don’t let them. When we reach, when we explore, when we’re curious – that’s when we’re at our best. We can learn about the world around us, the Universe around us. It doesn’t divide us, or separate us, or create artificial and wholly made-up barriers between us. As we saw on Twitter, at New York Times Square where hundreds of people watched the landing live, and all over the world: science and exploration bind us together. Science makes the world a better place, and it makes us better people.

It’s what we can do, and what we must do.

iTunes Match

2012-08-05T18:36:00-05:00

Finally getting around to turning on iTunes match. I only have about 4,000 songs in my library. It will be interesting to see how many match their database.

Open Source Hardware

2012-07-08T10:49:00-05:00

A great TED talk about the Arduino and open source hardware. Video

RC Car Meets Arduino

2012-05-28T13:30:00-05:00

via rcarduino.blogspot.com

Way cool.

The iPad Is The Future Of Education

2012-05-15T10:51:00-05:00

For the past years, Apple has been showcasing the educational advantages of devices like Macs, iPhones and iPods on its Apple in Education website. Since the introduction of the iPad in 2010, however, the company has been making an effort to position the device as the best tool now available to teachers and students to improve the quality of education and level of engagement. The dedicated iPad in Education webpage showcases recent moves by Apple such as iBooks Textbooks and the iTunes U iOS app.

While we have covered schools and educational institutions adopting iPads in the past, the latest profile posted by Apple today on their UK website is quite possibly the best example of iPad in education to date. Those of you who have been following the progress of iPad deployment in schools may remember Fraser Speirs’ iPad Project, which made headlines throughout 2011 as it was the first one-to-one iPad deployment to every people in a school. Speirs documented the process of giving an iPad to every teacher and student at Cedars School of Excellence (Scotland) on his personal website, and today Apple has posted a video profile showing how “Cedars students boost learning with iPad”.

The full video is available here, and it shows teachers and kids using the iPad as a modern, regular tool in their daily lives that has improved the way they create and share content of any kind. One particular segment towards the end of the video struck a chord with me:

I don’t think we could ever go back from where we are right now with the iPad. The only way’s really forward — to more access to knowledge, more empowerment, more creativity…all these things in the classroom”.

As I wrote before, Apple’s education strategy will be interesting to follow. Actually seeing kids and teachers who have been using the iPad as a real substitute for and enhancement over old learning tools for over a year now, however, reminds me that, no matter Apple’s strategy as a company, software is the future of education, and the iPad is giving our kids a bit of that future today.

Detractors of the iPad as a learning tool point at the management required by connected devices to ensure that, in the classroom, the possibilities offered by the Internet don’t get in the way of teachers’ requirements and students’ attention. Fortunately, this is something Apple has been addressing since day one, and that has recently improved with more tools.

Every major change in our society and culture will be awarded an equal amount of optimism and skepticism. As someone who’s been lucky enough to find his dream job in the possibilities offered by the Internet and software, I tend to see skepticism as a challenge, rather than a roadblock. People like Fraser Speirs are proving that, beyond analysts and blog posts, a better education for our kids is possible, today, every day, with a device that’s making kids eager to learn.

Free of the constraints of paper and old, disconnected learning material, the iPad brings new challenges and practical issues to overcome. With time, patience, and willingness to look past rules established in societies different than ours, we must make sure these devices we have built and ecosystems we have nurtured won’t be remembered for Angry Birds, because among other things, our kids deserve a better, modern education. And we have to start building it today.

via macstories.net

Get Started with Arduino and iOS - Save 60% - O'Reilly Media

2012-05-15T10:40:00-05:00

Get Started with Arduino and iOS

Save 60% – One Week Only Use code: WKAAVE

Turn your iPhone or iPad into the hub of a distributed sensor network with the help of an Arduino microcontroller. For Objective-C programmers who like to experiment, Alasdair Allan's new video and related ebook explain the basics of Arduino and other hardware components you need—and lets you have fun in the process. The new video also covers the latest TTL Redpark Serial Cable for iOS.

Ebooks and videos from oreilly.com are DRM-free. You get free lifetime access, multiple file formats, free updates.
Deal expires May 21, 2012 at 11:59pm PT, and cannot be combined with other offers.

via shop.oreilly.com

Nice combo.

The Google leaders’ crazy asteroid venture: A platinum rush? | VentureBeat

2012-04-23T10:36:00-05:00

via venturebeat.com

Sounds like they will need a lot of robots!

AmazonSupply opens for business. Now bring on the 3-D printers. — Tech News and Analysis

2012-04-23T10:18:00-05:00

via gigaom.com

Hmmm... getting closer and closer to mainstream.

Preface | learn.parallax.com

2012-04-07T22:12:00-05:00

via learn.parallax.com

Training for the Parallax Board of Education Shield for Arduino

April Showers

2012-04-06T18:52:00-05:00

I'm really liking the ability to embed processingjs right into a page.

How 3D Technology is Changing Shoe Design | Design Decoded

2012-04-06T15:29:00-05:00

via blogs.smithsonianmag.com

3D printing is here is is already changing how we think about manufacturing. The custom, one-up, goods industry is ready to explode!

STEM Teaching infographic « adafruit industries blog

2012-03-26T15:51:00-05:00

via adafruit.com

I still like the idea of STEM including Art (STEAM). I have a degree in computer science and have worked in large aerospace companies for 25 years and every day I wished that more people understand the fundamentals of art and how it impacts humans. We could be so much farther along if we just included this basic instinct!

Parallax BOE Shield-Bot book – meet author Andy Lindsay « adafruit industries blog

2012-03-26T11:57:00-05:00

via adafruit.com

We are going to use this for the Boy Scout Robotics Merit Badge!

How I Finally “got” STEM | The Tech Savvy Educator

2012-03-26T10:48:00-05:00

via techsavvyed.net

[STEM is one of those edu-acronyms that gets tossed out at large conferences, as models for new innovative schools, and a “catch all” for science and math stuff lately, yet it still seems to mystify many teachers. An informal poll of teachers in my district revealed that while a good portion of them knew that it stood for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, many of them weren’t sure what it meant beyond students taking a more project based approach to science and math. Other teachers I’ve talked with around the state have a similar understanding, but a growing number of them have begun to understand that ]{style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 24px;"}STEM is really about flipping the traditional classroom structure}[, from teacher-centered learning to more inquiry, problem solving, and exploratory learning.]{style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 24px;"

Good way to see it.

The Free Universal Construction Kit | F.A.T.

2012-03-23T07:14:00-05:00

via fffff.at

What a great idea.

BOE Shield for Arduino

2012-03-15T19:51:00-05:00

via parallax.com

Now we are talking. This looks great!

Lines Marching

2012-03-11T14:44:00-05:00

Here is a fun one I re-created from the good ole days.

Lines of March

2012-03-11T11:54:00-05:00

Here is a short program that demonstrates using Processing.js. It is all built into modern browsers, no plug-ins required.

1970-1979

2012-03-11T10:46:00-05:00

Check out this website I found at oldcomputermuseum.com

This takes me back. What a collection. I've owned hundreds of computers over the years. I wonder if I could think of them all.

Cool HTML 5 Project

2012-03-10T17:58:00-06:00

By: http://studio.sketchpad.cc/

Adafruit 5V-friendly GPS Breakout – 66 channel w/10 Hz updates – MTK3329 chipset

2012-03-10T16:27:00-06:00

Adafruit has their new GPS module out. Looks great, good features and good price.

Home IP Camera setup with a Mac (or just an iPhone)

2012-03-10T10:09:00-06:00

I just purchased a new wireless IP camera from Amazon and it works great. I didn't use any of the software that came with the camera and I did it all with my Macbook or I could have done it all with my iPhone or iPad.

IP Cameras

I've been looking at cameras for a long time. Mainly, so I can see who is at the front door. It would be nice if I could be notified every time someone came to the door or even just dropped a package off. I looked at wired cameras but they all involve me getting into the attic, not something I like to do anymore. Based on the very helpful reviews on Amazon I took the plunge and bought a Wireless IP Camera Pan/Tilt. It was very inexpensive at \$58.03 and free shipping with Amazon Prime.

So what did I get? Well... a little confused at first. Come to find out there are numerous cameras all sold under different names, like: HooToo, Apexis, FosCam, EasyN, Wansview, and LofTek. From what I can tell these are all basically made by the same company and work the same way. The camera I ordered was Wansview, the camera that I received was HooToo. The pictures look identical.

[caption id="attachment_174" align="alignleft" width="300"] HooToo Internet Camera[/caption]

This is a pretty neat piece of equipment. No it is not Apple quality, and no it is not especially easy to set up and configure. However, they have gone out of their way to make it doable and they do NOT require a Windows-based PC.

Of course it comes with a camera. Not a great one, but fine for the price. It also comes with Pan/Tilt built-in. It works very well. The infrared LEDs work and come on automatically when it starts getting dark. They will light up your 25' hallway just fine in pitch black conditions. A built-in mic is nice so you can hear what is going on, a CAT-5 cable for a physical connection to your network, a Wifi connection and a power adapter. Yes, you have to plug it into power wherever you are going to put it.

It has a built-in web server that provides all the features of the camera to your Mac or iPad. You really just connect to it with Safari and you are good to go. Very nice.

The IP in IP Camera means that it communicates over TCP/IP not through USB or FireWire. This camera does not connect directly to your Mac, it connects to your network and then is available to any other device on your network, wither Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, etc.

Network Environment

I have a pretty standard all Apple network environment. I have a 13" MacBook Air running Lion, an Airport Extreme base station with wired and wireless devices connected to it, and an iPhone and iPad connected wirelessly. All standard equipment.

The IP camera works in this environment just fine, it is just another device on the network. It can connect through a CAT-5 cable physically or wirelessly through Wifi. Either way works exactly the same as far as the user is concerned.

The hardest part is understanding what it means to connect to the local network, and not just to the Mac.

Routers

A router helps route IP traffic around your home, but more importantly through your cable/dsl modem to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and on to the internet.

The Airport Extreme is very easy to set up and manage. It pretty much defaults to just what you want out of the box. I won't go into all the details because it is probably already working for you if you are reading this page.

DHCP

This is the technology that is built into your router that lets you have one IP address from your ISP but have lots of different devices in your home that have their own unique local IP address. This is a bit confusing, but it works. Anytime you add a new device to your local network (either wired or wireless) it is automatically assigned a unique local IP address by the router, usually in the range of 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.255. These are known to the industry as non-routing IP addresses. This means they do not get routed outside of your, um, router. They are only visible to other devices on your local network. This is a good thing, it helps protect them from outside intruders. What they can't see they can't attack very easily.

The point of all this is that you have one external IP address assigned to you by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Your Airport Extreme router then uses DHCP to assign unique local IP address to all the devices connected in your house. When you connect your camera it is assigned a unique IP address.

By the way your external IP address is probably (unless you pay extra) assigned to your house by using DHCP and it may change at anytime. Read later about DDNS to get around this so you can access your camera from your iPhone/iPad or other device when you are not at home.

Setup Software

The first thing I wanted to do was to get the camera connected to my home wireless network. There are a couple of ways to do this. However, I found it very easy to just turn it on... hmmm... really I connected it to the CAT-5 wired network first, found its IP address using one of the following apps then accessed its built-in web server using Safari on my Mac, by entering the IP address in the Url field (Ex. 192.168.0.182). I worked through the setup webpage and found the wireless network, added the security password (known as Share key on their built-in server) for my wireless network then connected it to the wireless network by unplugging the CAT-5 network cable. Whew, not really hard but there are a lot of steps.

IP Scanner (Free) in the Mac App store, and IP Scanner Home in the Mac App store. One of these apps, is very useful for finding your camera the first time it is connected to your wired or wireless network. They show the assigned IP address and hardware address (sometimes called the MAC address) of every device on your network. I tried the free version at first but it was limited to only showing the first 5 devices it found. The new camera did not show up, so I purchased the app and it displayed all the devices on my network. Very helpful indeed!

IP Network Scanner Lite in the iOS App store. If you are going for the no Mac option and prefer to use your iPhone or iPad then this app is by the same company. I tried the free version and it worked very well. However, it is limited to only showing the first 5 devices on your network. If you have more than that then you will have to purchase the full version. At \$9.99 it is more than the Mac version.

This type of software may be more convenient now that Apple has removed the device list from version 6.x of their Aiport Utility software. Well, it does show the connected wireless devices, but only the first 6. You might get lucky, or have less than this connected. I was surprised how many devices are on wireless these days.

So there you are. You have now connected a new wireless IP Pan/Tilt camera to your wireless network and never installed any of the software that came with it. You either did it on your Mac or your iPhone/iPad. So far you have only used one extra app to find the IP address and then used the standard Safari browser to access the cameras built-in web server.

But there is more. You don't want to have to lookup the IP address of the camera every time you want to use it. Your wireless Airport Extreme (router) may assign it a new IP address at any time. You really want to set it to a known location so that you can find it from anywhere.

DHCP Reservations

There are two basic ways to make sure a device always has the same IP address. You can do everything manually or you can use the Airport Utility to make a DHCP reservation.

The new Airport software makes this really easy. Just edit your base station, click on the Network tab and then click the plus sign under the DHCP Reservations section.

Give it a good description like "IP Camera" or "IP Camera Front Door", select Reserve address by "MAC Address" (this is the hardware address assigned to all devices). Type in the MAC address of your camera or use copy/paste from on the apps above. Then type in the permanent IPv4 address that you want. Make sure no other device on your network is assigned this same address. When you click Save you will now always know the local address of your IP camera. Well, ok click Update to make the changes to your router.

Mine is 192.168.0.82 and I can type this into any browser and access the built-in webpage on the camera. It will never change. Very cool!

Port Mapping

See what I did there. I said "local address". That means any device connected to your local network can see your camera at the reserved IP address. But, what if you leave your local network and want access? Your router can help you here too. It is called Port Mapping, it allows an external device to navigate through your router to the specific device you want.

What is a port? If you think of the IP address your house is assigned by your ISP as your street address, then the port is like which door to use. Everything has standard ports, web sites, email, Skype, Minecraft, they all have different ports be default. As long as you don't interfere with another port on your network then you can use anything you want. Well it has to be above port number 1024, but that is a long story.

I chose port 25000 for my front door camera. It is unused on my network and it is a nice easy number to remember. The new Apple Airport Utility makes this very easy to set up. Start the utility again on your Mac or iPhone/iPad. Select your Airport base station and then select Network. Check the check-box to Enable NAT Port Mapping Protocol. Next click the plus sign to add a new Port Mapping.

Give it a good description like "IP Camera", or "Front Door Camera". Enter 25000 for the Public TCP port, enter your reserved IP address for your camera Ex. 192.168.0.182, then enter 80 as the Private TCP Ports. This is the default port for the webpage on your IP camera. Click Save. Click update to make changes to the router.

* My Airport Utility seems to have a bug, it would not let me click save until I entered a Public UDP port as well. I put in 25000 and it worked.

There you have it. You can now type in your ISP assigned external IP address and append :25000 and you will see the webpage from your camera.

So you are asking how you find your external IP address assigned by your ISP? Airport Utility to the rescue. Just click the world map icon at the top labeled Internet and a pop-up bubble shows the router address. Something like: 71.81.163.5. You would type in 71.81.163.5:25000 into your browser to access your camera.

Remember you just made a hole in your network security to allow anyone from the outside to see your camera. This means they now have at least a little access to your home network. Be careful what port mappings you create, every new one provides more access, and more chance for security problems.

Wow, you have now reserved a specific IP address for your camera and mapped a port through your router so that you can access it from anywhere in the world by just typing that address and port into a browser window. Powerful!

So, what happens when you get a new IP address assigned by your ISP? That's right you have to start Airport utility all the time to see your external IP router address. Not very convenient if you are not at home and want to connect to your network. See the next section on setting up a DDNS to give you a permanent address that you can always find, anywhere in the world, at anytime.

DDNS

Remember above when I said your ISP probably issues your house a dynamic IP address and that it could change at any time. Yep, that's right. Any time. It probably changes every few months.

I will have to continue this in the next article in this series. Stay tuned, more to come.

Viewing Software

IP Cam Viewer Pro in the iOS App store.

EvoCam for the Mac.

Safari Browser

2012/03/05 DARPA’s “Cheetah” Sets Land Speed Record for Legged Robots

2012-03-05T13:22:00-06:00

Check out this website I found at darpa.mil

I've always said that mobile robots will not be fully useful until they understand and can utilize momentum. We are finally on our way.

New electronics reference sheet « adafruit industries blog

2012-03-04T09:17:00-06:00

via adafruit.com

Handy.

Retina display Macs, iPads, and HiDPI: Doing the Math | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

2012-03-02T17:35:00-06:00

via tuaw.com

Can't wait.

Resistor Photo ID app for iPhone « adafruit industries blog

2012-03-02T07:29:00-06:00

via adafruit.com

I'm not colored blind, but I really like this app!

Give it five minutes - (37signals)

2012-03-01T16:18:00-06:00

Give it five minutes Jason F. Mar 01

46 comments Latest by Gavin

A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view.

It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant was that I wasn’t thinking hard enough about the problem. The faster you react, the less you think. Not always, but often.

It’s easy to talk about knee jerk reactions as if they are things that only other people have. You have them too. If your neighbor isn’t immune, neither are you.

This came to a head back in 2007. I was speaking at the Business Innovation Factory conference in Providence, RI. So was Richard Saul Wurman. After my talk Richard came up to introduce himself and compliment my talk. That was very generous of him. He certainly didn’t have to do that.

And what did I do? I pushed back at him about the talk he gave. While he was making his points on stage, I was taking an inventory of the things I didn’t agree with. And when presented with an opportunity to speak with him, I quickly pushed back at some of his ideas. I must have seemed like such an asshole.

His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said “Man, give it five minutes.” I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes” represented “think”, not react. He was totally right. I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.

This was a big moment for me.

Richard has spent his career thinking about these problems. He’s given it 30 years. And I gave it just a few minutes. Now, certainly he can be wrong and I could be right, but it’s better to think deeply about something first before being so certain you’re right.

There’s also a difference between asking questions and pushing back. Pushing back means you already think you know. Asking questions means you want to know. Ask more questions.

Learning to think first rather than react quick is a life long pursuit. It’s tough. I still get hot sometimes when I shouldn’t. But I’m really enjoying all the benefits of getting better.

If you aren’t sure why this is important, think about this quote from Jonathan Ive regarding Steve Jobs’ reverence for ideas:

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

That’s deep. Ideas are fragile. They often start powerless. They’re barely there, so easy to ignore or skip or miss.

There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money and 2. Dismissing an idea.

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it.

via 37signals.com

I've seen this too many times. It has been very sad.

-- ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

Codea for iPad on the iTunes App Store

2012-02-28T09:12:00-06:00

via itunes.apple.com

Very cool. I've been looking for a good way to teach programming on the iPad. Adding this to my to-do list.

LEGOspace.com On Orbit Classroom

2012-02-27T11:03:00-06:00

via legospace.com

This is cool. A classroom from the ISS showing how different simple machines work on Earth and in the microgravity of space.

The Diyode CodeShield « Diyode

2012-02-24T11:46:00-06:00

via diyode.com

This looks very interesting. I've been thinking of a way to get kids interested even faster. I will have to get one and try it out.

Hakko FX-888 Soldering Station review « adafruit industries blog

2012-02-24T11:40:00-06:00

via adafruit.com

Nice. This is the iron I use now. The difference the cord makes is astounding. It keeps the heat up and is light weight. Highly recommended.

In Response to “Innovation, education, and Makers” | soundcyst industries

2012-02-12T20:13:00-06:00

Dear Mr. Kalil,

I cannot tell you how overjoyed I am that our Nation’s leaders have finally opened an intrigued eye to the blossoming Maker movement. Your speech following the Maker Faire in New York was encouraging, exciting, and promising. It put a well deserved spotlight on the achievements of garage tinkerers and hackers around the country (and let’s be honest, the world). That our leaders are paying attention to these atypical, underground activities and interested in turning them into mainstream, common American values is incredibly motivating to me as a maker.

There is, however, one facet of this movement that was overlooked in your speech, and as far as I can tell, is unfortunately overlooked everywhere STEM is championed. It is an undeniable aspect of humanity as valuable to Captain Picard as it was to Albert Einstein. It has been a driving force, technologically and economically, in the multi-billion dollar video game industry (and thus, the personal computer and home entertainment industries). It is introduced to Americans before Kindergarten, but somewhere along the path to high school, it is hopelessly abandoned as impractical and unproductive. But, it is also how we stop fragmenting ourselves into STEMs; it is how we come together to pick up STEAM for the renaissance (and yes, the ice cream was its idea).

Of course I am talking about art.

While art is a broad word that is dangerously all-encompasing (there is indeed an art to routing a circuit board, and a quite different art to designing a state machine), the art I am talking about here is fine art — that which Wikipedia defines as “developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application.” Fine art is no longer just painting on a canvas, drawing musical notes on a stave, or spinning clay into a pot. Fine art, in addition to everything it used to be, is electrical, dynamic, and algorithmic now, and to borrow from Oscar Wilde, as “quite useless” as it ever was. Take as an example, Syyn Labs‘ recent contribution to GLOW.

I wasn’t at the Maker Faire in New York, but I have been to two in San Mateo, and many of the projects I saw there not practically useful, but were quite inspiring. Many of the useful projects I did see had one thing in common with the beloved MakerBots and DIYDrones: They were based on an Arduino, the open-source microcontroller and programming environment designed by artists for everyone.

Yes, the Arduino does fall under the blanket category of Technology, but it would be naive to think that its developers were trained only as technologists and engineers. Their training in art, sociology, and community is doubtlessly and inextricably linked to the platform’s success across its diverse applications. Their desire to create something useful for artists is what drove them to simplify the user interface and lower the barrier to entry.

As I mentioned above, art also has a crucial role in the video game industry. Visual arts in video games are the reason why many of my friends own HDTVs. They are also the reason that companies like nVidia and ATi have had a thriving market in which to sell graphics cards and innovate parallel processing. By and large, people want the latest GeForce and Radeon cards for artistic reasons: they want their games to look good. It wasn’t until very recently that using these massively parallel architectures for anything else was even reasonable.

I could go on about other examples of influences of fine arts on technology, like “Daisy” and the Altair 8800, but your time is valuable, and so is mine, so I’ll cut to the point. This letter is to ask you to take a step back, have a look at the immense discrepancy between grant opportunities from the NSF and those from the NEA, and think about what we can do to pick up STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. Educating and encouraging our children to embrace artistic expression is just as important as teaching them calculus and the periodic table. Let’s encourage our engineers to design new Most Useless Machines. Let’s inspire our mathematicians to devise new mind-boggling N-dimensional fractal animations. Let’s teach our artists to write programs and draw schematics so that they might create an electronic Mona Lisa. And let’s show our children how fun and intertwined all of these fields are, so that they may form communities that flourish as they grow older and spread the joy to their children, and so on.

The train is headed in the right direction, we just need to invite everyone aboard.

Sincerely,

Kevin Nelson
Computer Engineer, Electronic Musician, Crasher

via soundcyst.com

He's right. Art is the reason we want to live. STEM is how to make it work. In other words Art is the goal, STEM is the process.

Symphony of Science

2012-02-12T11:39:00-06:00

via symphonyofscience.com

Wow, these are great videos. I'm not sure how I've not heard of them before.

Symphony of Science - the Quantum World! - YouTube

2012-02-12T11:26:00-06:00

via youtube.com

Not about robots, but without this kind of knowledge then the rest just doesn't matter.

Apps For Arduino - Hot Keys

2012-02-11T22:16:00-06:00

via appsforarduino.com

Control your Arduino, control the world with Hotkeys on your Mac.

Blinky Grid and Blinky POV | Wayne and Layne

2012-02-11T18:04:00-06:00

via wayneandlayne.com

This is a great little project that I just completed. The programming is the cool part. You just go to their website and they have a little javascript page that you can type in your message. You set you Blinky to receive mode and it programs by blinking parts of the screen. The Blinky has two tiny light receivers that detect the flashes on the webpage. You can program any message up to 253 characters. The hard part is waving the Blinky back in forth the correct timing to read the message.

It was very easy to assemble. The only compliant I had was they combined the build instructions with the Blinky Grid. Not a big deal, but it did confuse my eight year old son for awhile. For early beginners this could be enough of a problem to cause a fright.

I purchased my kit from Maker Shed, but they do sell them directly from their website. All of their projects are Open Hardware, so you can build on their ideas.

Here is a link to the programming page. http://www.wayneandlayne.com/blinky_programmer/

I plan to show this to the students at our schools technology night. I ran the programmer from my iPhone and it worked perfectly. I wonder if I can download their javascript page and run it offline. I may try that in the future.

Real Steel (2011) - IMDb

2012-02-10T19:17:00-06:00

via imdb.com

Hey, at least it is about robots.

Circuit Playground : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

2012-02-10T19:11:00-06:00

via adafruit.com

Very useful and just the beginning!

BBC News - Transplant jaw made by 3D printer claimed as first

2012-02-07T11:01:00-06:00

via bbc.co.uk

Wow, this is real right now! We should all be learning how to design and print objects in 3D.

Dangerous Prototypes Cadsoft Eagle style guide and best practices - DP

2012-02-01T18:23:00-06:00

via dangerousprototypes.com

Once you're ready then you can design your own printed circuit board.

The Anatomy of Coobro Labs « adafruit industries blog

2012-01-30T10:27:00-06:00

via adafruit.com

Not much is required to make and sell your own kits. Just get started!

Ninja Blocks: Connect your world with the web. by Ninja Blocks — Kickstarter

2012-01-30T10:13:00-06:00

via kickstarter.com

The Internet of Things is coming. Are you prepared?

“Solenoid test” using Adafruit Small push-pull solenoids « adafruit industries blog

2012-01-30T09:59:00-06:00

via adafruit.com

Hmmm... I wonder what I could do with a bunch of these?

NEW PRODUCT – 1 GS/s Digital Storage Oscilloscope + Extras « adafruit industries blog

2012-01-26T16:47:00-06:00

via adafruit.com

I've been waiting for their recommendation. This really looks like the one to get. Any electronics workshop should have one!

NewerTech TOOLISESAMO iSesamo: Ultra-thin steel pry... in stock at OWC

2012-01-16T19:07:00-06:00

via eshop.macsales.com

Perfect when you just can't wait to take something apart.

Layer by Layer - Technology Review

2012-01-12T09:17:00-06:00

via technologyreview.com

So, it is already bigger that I realized. Production parts are already being flown on aircraft.

Discover the NEW AR.Drone 2.0. Fly, Record & Share in High Definition - YouTube

2012-01-09T16:42:00-06:00

via youtube.com

Not a robot, but very cool just the same.

Chap 05 - Colbert and Flowers.mov - YouTube

2012-01-08T17:26:00-06:00

via youtube.com

This is a great 8 minute introduction to FIRST robotics and what it is trying to accomplish. I agree with everything he says here. You can't just be informed, you have to know how to think.

Apps For Arduino

2012-01-05T20:40:00-06:00

via appsforarduino.com

Awesome Lego Machine

2012-01-03T14:27:00-06:00

via mpviral.com

All-new ASIMO (Nov 2011) - YouTube

2012-01-01T21:27:00-06:00

Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

via youtube.com

Wow, just wow! Taking control of the physical world is here.

Rebrickable - What Can You Build?

2011-12-28T17:30:00-06:00

via rebrickable.com

Combine your LEGO sets to create other sets.

My predictions for the next five years

2011-12-26T14:48:00-06:00

I'm not really big into making predictions but there are several technology forces all coming together that will lead to significant changes in our society in the next few years.

1. Robotics - Take Apple's Siri and Honda's Asimo and you could have a really useful robot assistant around the house or office. You will talk to it in very natural language and it will respond in very natural movements. In five years (say about 2017) it will not be unheard of to know someone with a robot assistant in their house. The time is right for an energetic individual to introduce robots to the common citizen. It is like 1978 for the microcomputer market. Most people can't imagine what it is all about and it sounds ridiculous. However, all the individual components and technologies are available, they just need to be brought together in a satisfying way and showed to solve some real problems.

2. Virtual Reality Work Force - Take the budget crises and the need for businesses to save even more money and it makes sense for them to reduce their office space and have even more workers work from home. We are now just in the beginning of virtual working, the interfaces are crude, the keyboard, the mouse, the 2D display are all tools from the previous generation that are being used for the next 3D generation. The new tools are on the way. We will have 3D virtual technology that we cannot or at least barely distinguish from the real thing. Technology has caught up with our senses and will be able to trick them anytime we want. I say in five years (2017) it will be more common to work from home or other remote location not owned by the business than going to work in a company owned office environment. What will this do to the auto industry? Could your family live with just one car?

3. Virtual Reality Classrooms - All the same forces are working here. Budgets are being cut, schools have difficultly keeping the kids safe, the best teachers are not always available in the cities where they need to be. The forces are quickly moving to virtual classrooms. Students will log in from home or a remote class location and join their friends and teachers in a virtual classroom. Teaching tools will be unbelievable by todays standards. There are lots of security, safety and social issues that will become apparent, but they won't matter, the lack of dollars will drive public and private schools into the virtual worlds by 2017. This also applies to colleges and universities too. In the not to distant past it was a poor choice to have a degree from an on-line college, today it is very acceptable, in the near future it will be the norm. The best universities in the world are already moving in this direction.

4. Personal Manufacturing - The technology is moving very fast here. Today you can buy a 3D printer that can create objects to display or use around your home and office. These objects can be very complex in shape and be printed in any color you can imagine. The home furnishings industry is about to be overwhelmed. An artist or designer can design the item in a 3D environment on their computer. That file can then be sent via email, website or any other way electronic documents can be transferred. The person on the end will just open the file and select print, just like an email today. The end result is a printed object that can be used anywhere. But this is just the beginning, all manufacturing will be done like this soon. The concept of large production runs to reduce costs will be a thing of the past. By 2017, just five years from now it will be common for anything you want to be created locally at a local print shop. Look for them to start showing up in your retail areas soon. Even better, you will be able to design your own items on-line, get the size, the look, the color, the feel of exactly what you want and send it to the printer.

5. There will be a huge spike in demand for artists and creative people. The first phase of technology is created by the engineers. These are people that can solve the problems, but they have very little creative style, taste or design. The rise of the creative types is quickly approaching. Apple has already proven that old engineering based designs are not what the consumers are looking for. These online virtual worlds will need to be human friendly, we will need nice environments to live in, to work in, to play in. We will all spend time with our coworkers, friends and families on-line, we will want to hang out in the prettiest most beautiful places on earth, or any other world for that matter. The 3D objects will need to be designed, the old school companies will not want to share their designs, just like the movie studios are trying to keep their old business model alive by getting new laws passed. The opportunities for open on-line markets for beautiful digital items will be huge and very profitable with the right business model.

Sounds crazy doesn't it? Who can imagine today what it will be like, but the forces are all in action right now. There is very little stopping it. Be prepared, the tools you are using today will be changing. The days of sitting at an office desk are on the way out. The social impact alone will be a huge blow to anyone over 10 years old. Your children's education and work environments will not be like yours. That I guarantee.

Doug
December 2011

Sensor tutorials - Tilt sensors!

2011-12-22T22:11:00-06:00

The Adobe Flash Plugin is needed to display this content.

via ladyada.net

You should always know which way is up.

We Are LEGO Education.wmv - YouTube

2011-12-13T11:05:00-06:00

via youtube.com

LEGO Education. They offer great programs for all kids. They are teaching kids how to make a difference in their future.

Best IoT Open Source Project 2011 | Postscapes

2011-12-10T16:08:00-06:00

via postscapes.com

Vote for your favorite Internet of Things open platform.

Best IoT DIY Project 2011 | Postscapes

2011-12-09T16:55:00-06:00

via postscapes.com

Great ideas. Nice to see the Internet of Things (IoT) growing so quickly.

Robotic Open Platform « adafruit industries blog

2011-12-09T16:40:00-06:00

Robotic Open Platform via Erin…

Robotic Open Platform (ROP) aims to make hardware designs of robots available under an Open Hardware license to the entire robotic community. It provides CAD drawings, electric schemes and the required documentation to build their own robot. In the near future, standard electromechanic interfaces between the various robot components will be presented to enable the possibility to combine hardware components of various groups into one robot. By making the robots modular, users are encouraged to develop their own components that can be shared with the community.

In software, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is nowadays acknowledged as a standard software platform and is used by numerous (research) institutions. This open source software is available to everyone and by sharing knowledge with the community there is no need to ‘reinvent the wheel’, hence drastically speeding up development. Similarly, Robotic Open Platform (ROP) functions as a platform to share hardware designs available to all research groups within the community.

via adafruit.com

Welcome - Fritzing

2011-12-07T10:24:00-06:00

via fritzing.org

Document your prototype, share them with others, teach electronics and create PCB layouts.

The Ultimate Robot Gift Guide

2011-12-06T09:41:00-06:00

via thenextweb.com

Monitor: More than just digital quilting | The Economist

2011-12-01T14:19:00-06:00

via economist.com

It keeps moving forward.

Arduino - HomePage

2011-12-01T10:38:00-06:00

via arduino.cc

Arduino 1.0 is here!!! It's all the rage, everyone is talking. Go take a look and make something today.

Found a picture of the first robot I built

2011-11-30T21:59:00-06:00

Well my niece, brother and dad found an old picture of the first robot I built back in the 1980's. I was still in high school. It was powerful enough the kids could ride it around the house.

Ten Weeks of Gift Ideas | Week 3 - MAKE Technology - O'Reilly Media

2011-11-30T19:35:00-06:00

via shop.oreilly.com

All the Make: books you can shake a stick at. A nice find by my brother!

STEM Shortage | Online Engineering Degree

2011-11-30T14:35:00-06:00

via onlineengineeringdegree.com

This is why I do it. It is very important for kids to understand. STEM is their best future and the best future for America.

Mars Science Laboratory: Rover

2011-11-25T20:30:00-06:00

via mars.jpl.nasa.gov

Wow, now that's a robot.

Make: Kit Reviews | The Ultimate Kit Guide

2011-11-23T20:06:00-06:00

via kits.makezine.com

Kits, kits and more kits. Find one you like and build it. There is no better time than now to get started.

Stanislaw Lem

2011-11-22T21:24:00-06:00

from The Cyberiad

One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions to the letter. Still not completely sure of its ability, he had it produce, one after the other, nimbuses, noodles, nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads, and natrium. 'This last it could not do, and Trurl, considerably irritated, demanded an explanation.

"Never heard of it," said the machine.

"What? But it's only sodium. You know, the metal, the element..."

"Sodium starts with an s, and I work only in n."

"But in Latin it's natrium."

"Look, old boy," said the machine, "if I could do everything starting with n in every possible language, I'd be a Machine That Could Do Everything in the Whole Alphabet, since any item you care to mention undoubtedly starts with n in one foreign language or another. It's not that easy. I can't go beyond what you programmed. So no sodium."

via english.lem.pl

An author worth reading.

Soldering | EEVblog - The Electronics Engineering Video Blog

2011-11-21T09:32:00-06:00

via eevblog.com

Great introduction to the tools and techniques required to make a good solder connection.

RoboBrrd at instructables

2011-11-15T12:04:00-06:00

via instructables.com

Way cool.

PLUMEN US - PLUMEN 001

2011-11-14T09:25:00-06:00

via plumenshopus.com

A light we can all love.

The Entrepreneurial Generation

2011-11-13T20:13:00-06:00

via nytimes.com

Our kids can no longer expect to work for a large corporation when they grow up. All of the benefits that used to be there are quickly disappearing. We need to be teaching our kids how to be Entrepreneurs.

Components | Component Engineering Consultants

2011-11-08T13:47:00-06:00

via componentsengineering.com

MightyOhm » Blog Archive » Announcing the “Soldering is Easy” Complete Comic Book!

2011-11-08T09:16:00-06:00

via mightyohm.com

Now that's a comic book I really like.

Arduino @radioshack – the official post from Radioshack congrats @arduinoteam « adafruit industries blog

2011-11-06T09:28:00-06:00

Arduino \@radioshack – the official post from Radioshack congrats \@arduinoteam

The Shack® Blog – We Listened: Arduino Is Coming via DP.

A few months ago, we reached out to our community and asked what DIY parts and pieces you wished you could find at your local RadioShack store. We were overwhelmed with the response, and promised to bring in a top list of suggestions from you – including Arduino.

Today, we’re pleased to be able to tell you that the first batch of Arduino boards and shields have left the RadioShack distribution centers en route to our thousands of local stores. Now you can easily find a RadioShack store and get the parts you need to finish that awesome project, instead of having to order it online and wait.

We won’t just be carrying a single board, either – no way! Below is the full list of boards and shields that you can expect to find:

Microcontrollers:

Arduino Uno REV 3 (2760128): This is the latest revision of the basic Arduino USB board. It connects to the computer with a standard USB cable and contains everything else you need to program and use the board. It can be extended with a variety of shields: custom daughter-boards with specific features.

Arduino Mega 2560 REV3 (2760127): The version of the Mega released with the Uno, this version features the Atmega2560, which has twice the memory.

Arduino Mega ADK (2760129): Based on the Mega 2560, this version has a USB host interface to connect with Android based phones.

Shields:

Arduino Ethernet Shield Without PoE Module (2760130): The Arduino Ethernet Shield allows an Arduino board to connect to the internet.

Arduino Motor Shield (2760131): This shield allows an Arduino board to control DC motors and read encoders.

Arduino SD Shield (2760132): The SD Card Shield v2.1 for Arduino is a break out board for a standard SD Card. Now you can add mass storage and data logging to your project!

Arduino Proto Shield (2760140): The Proto Shield Kit allows you to move your projects from a breadboard to an Arduino-compatible PCB. Included are a number of common components.

We also have a large assortment of Parallax boards and shields, as well as an awesome selection of other DIY parts, pieces, and tools. You probably already know where the closest RadioShack store is, but if not, you can use our handy RadioShack Store Locator.

Now that Arduino boards and shields are available at your local RadioShack store, what will YOU build with them? Check out the awesome projects that have been shared at the Great Create or share your own project.

Filed under: announce,arduino,open source hardware — by adafruit, posted November 6, 2011 at 8:31 am

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via adafruit.com

Now this is the Radio Shack I remember from the late 80's. Hope this works for them. Go out and buy something. You owe it to yourself to make something today!

STEM Summit

2011-11-01T07:22:00-05:00

via legoeducation.us

Robots help teens learn about science - San Antonio Express-News

2011-10-30T11:31:00-05:00

via mysanantonio.com

This is what it is all about. Letting the kids experience learning first hand that does not include sitting at a desk and being lectured.

DIY Projects, Inspiration, How-tos, Hacks, Mods & More @ Makezine.com - Tweak Technology to Your Will

2011-10-29T21:28:00-05:00

via makezine.com

The Making of Arduino - IEEE Spectrum

2011-10-29T21:18:00-05:00

Photo: Randi Silberman Klett

The Arduino core team [from left]—David Cuartielles, Gianluca Martino, Tom Igoe, David Mellis, and Massimo Banzi—get together at Maker Faire in New York City.

The picturesque town of Ivrea, which straddles the blue-green Dora Baltea River in northern Italy, is famous for its underdog kings. In 1002, King Arduin became the ruler of the country, only to be dethroned by King Henry II, of Germany, two years later. Today, the Bar di Re Arduino, a pub on a cobblestoned street in town, honors his memory, and that’s where an unlikely new king was born.

The bar is the watering hole of Massimo Banzi, the Italian cofounder of the electronics project that he named Arduino in honor of the place. Arduino is a low-cost microcontroller board that lets even a novice do really amazing things. You can connect an Arduino to all kinds of sensors, lights, motors, and other devices and use easy-to-learn software to program how your creation will behave. You can build an interactive display or a mobile robot and then share your design with the world by posting it on the Net.

Released in 2005 as a modest tool for Banzi’s students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), Arduino has spawned an international do-it-yourself revolution in electronics. You can buy an Arduino board for just about US \$30 or build your own from scratch: All hardware schematics and source code are available for free under public licenses. As a result, Arduino has become the most influential open-source hardware movement of its time.

The little board is now the go-to gear for artists, hobbyists, students, and anyone with a gadgetry dream. More than 250 000 Arduino boards have been sold around the world—and that doesn’t include the reams of clones. "It made it possible for people do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise," says David A. Mellis, who was a student at IDII before pursuing graduate work at the MIT Media Lab and is the lead software developer of Arduino.

There are Arduino-based breathalyzers, LED cubes, home-automation systems, Twitter displays, and even DNA analysis kits. There are Arduino parties and Arduino clubs. Google has recently released an Arduino-based development kit for its Android smartphone. As Dale Dougherty, the editor and publisher of Make magazine, the bible of DIY builders, puts it, Arduino has become "the brains of maker projects."

But Arduino isn’t just an open-source project that aims to make technology more accessible. It’s also a start-up company run by Banzi and a group of friends, and it’s facing a challenge that even their magic board can’t solve: how to survive success and grow. "We need to make the next jump," Banzi tells me, "and become an established company."

Arduino rose out of another formidable challenge: how to teach students to create electronics, fast. It was 2002, and Banzi, a bearded and avuncular software architect, had been brought on by IDII as an associate professor to promote new ways of doing interactive design—a nascent field sometimes known as physical computing. But with a shrinking budget and limited class time, his options for tools were few.

Like many of his colleagues, Banzi relied on the BASIC Stamp, a microcontroller created by California company Parallax that engineers had been using for about a decade. Coded with the BASIC programming language, the Stamp was like a tidy little circuit board, packing the essentials of a power supply, a microcontroller, memory, and input/output ports for attaching hardware. But the BASIC Stamp had two problems, Banzi discovered: It didn’t have enough computing power for some of the projects his students had in mind, and it was also a bit too expensive—a board plus basic parts could cost about US \$100. He also needed something that could run on Macintosh computers, which were ubiquitous among the IDII designers. What if they could make a board that suited their needs themselves?

Banzi had a colleague from MIT who had developed a designer-friendly programming language called Processing. Processing was rapidly gaining popularity because it allowed even inexperienced programmers to create complex—and beautiful—data visualizations. One of the reasons for its success was an extremely easy-to-use integrated development environment, or IDE. Banzi wondered if they could create similar software tools to code a microcontroller instead of graphics on a screen.

A student in the program, Hernando Barragán, took the first steps in that direction. He developed a prototyping platform called Wiring, which included both a user-friendly IDE and a ready-to-use circuit board. It was a promising project that continues to this day, but Banzi was already thinking bigger: He wanted to make a platform that was even simpler, cheaper, and easier to use.

via spectrum.ieee.org

adafruit industries

2011-10-25T12:46:00-05:00

via vimeo.com

Video archive for Ask An Engineer

NEW PRODUCT – Solder:Time DIY watch kit « adafruit industries blog

2011-10-21T09:13:00-05:00

via adafruit.com

Lego Robot Beats Human World Record For Solving the Rubik’s Cube! | Singularity Hub

2011-10-19T12:20:00-05:00

via singularityhub.com

Wow.

Software Sunday – RC time constant / voltage calculator « adafruit industries blog

2011-10-10T21:10:00-05:00

via adafruit.com

Nice calculator. Should keep this around just in case...

Halloween contest WINNER! « adafruit industries blog

2011-10-09T11:41:00-05:00

via adafruit.com

Now that is cool.

How To: The Basics of Breadboarding - YouTube

2011-10-07T17:53:00-05:00

via youtube.com

Good introduction video on using a breadboard for your electronic experiments.

littleBits

2011-10-06T17:59:00-05:00

via adafruit.com

This looks so cool. It is just very pricy. Not sure I could afford this for the kids I'm working with.

Favorite Product of the Day

2011-10-06T17:56:00-05:00

via panavise.com

My favorite product of the day. My new PanaVise PV Jr. It is perfect for holding circuit boars while soldering. Just received two from Amazon.

Parallax Boe-Bot Robot Kit - USB

2011-09-29T22:53:00-05:00

via robotshop.com

Here is the one to get for the Boy Scouts Robotics Merit Badge.

Rover Remote-Control Wireless Spy Tank for iPad—Brookstone Exclusive!

2011-09-29T17:10:00-05:00

via brookstone.com

I love the idea of controlling robots with cell phones. This just seems very cool. I would like to build a robot with an iPhone or iPod touch as its micro controller.

Robotics -- Boys' Life magazine

2011-09-29T17:08:00-05:00

via boyslife.org

All the details you need to get started on the Boy Scouts Robotics merit badge. I hope to get all the kits and documentation ready and have a scout day at the house.

Top 40 Arduino Projects of the Web | Hack N Mod

2011-09-29T12:47:00-05:00

via hacknmod.com

Make: Arduino

2011-09-29T11:18:00-05:00

via makershed.com

Arduino - Getting Started

2011-09-29T10:29:00-05:00

Getting Started with Arduino

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Introduction: What Arduino is and why you'd want to use it. | Instructions for other boards: | | | | | Installation: Step-by-step instructions for setting up the Arduino software and connecting it to an Arduino Uno, Mega2560, Duemilanove, Mega, or Diecimila. | - Arduino Nano | | | - Arduino Mini | | - Windows | - Arduino BT | | - Mac OS X | - LilyPad Arduino | | - Linux (on the playground wiki) | - Arduino Fio | | | - Arduino Pro | | Environment: Description of the Arduino development environment. | - Arduino Pro Mini | | | - Xbee shield | | Troubleshooting: Advice on what to do if things don't work. | - Ethernet shield | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The text of the Arduino getting started guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Code samples in the guide are released into the public domain.

via arduino.cc

Book: The New Cool

2011-09-26T09:51:00-05:00

This is a fantastic book about Robot competitions and how important the skills learned by the kids are valuable throughout life and to the future of our country. I highly recommend it to everyone interested in robots, education and building a strong country.

Arduino Uno Starter Kit

2011-09-24T22:48:00-05:00

Just ordered this basic kit. I've been wanting to play with Arduino for a long time now. I think the boys will get a kick out of programming hardware and seeing what it can do. This is so much better than building plastic models that don't do anything after all your hard work.

Sparkfun Starter Kit On Amazon

Desk Pets

2011-09-23T18:08:00-05:00

These look like fun, especially when you control them with your iPhone or Android device.

Desk Pets

My First Robot

2011-09-23T17:09:00-05:00

When I was but a little teen, around 1980, I built my first robot. It was based on the book "How to Build a Computer Controlled Robot" by Tod Loofbourrow. Of course it was very clumsy those days, but it was programmable and you could sit on it and it would drive you around. Built around the 6502 processor KIM-1 it only had a hex display and keypad. This was before thumb drives, before CD/DVD drives, before hard drives, before floppy drives, and before cassette tape storage. Every program had to be entered by hand every time. All the programming was done in hex, oh what for a real assembler in those days.

I have memories of going to the junk yard and looking for metal pieces that could be cut or bent into the right shape for the frame and skin. I found an old green hi-way sign with the reflector paint still on it. It was sturdy aluminum. Perfect for the outer bumpers that went all the way around the outside. The contact switches were messy and it was always making contact with ghosts.

More memories from Servo Mag.

Here is a picture of the interior structure with the KIM-1 on top.

I wish I had a picture of mine. I'm sure there is one somewhere at my parents house.

Edit: Found a picture of my robot.

Welcome!

2011-05-31T02:12:00-05:00

Welcome to Robots D11. I am a robots enthusiast and I hope you enjoy what you find here. Please join me on my quest to build and collect the best robots around.

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

2010-08-14T06:17:35-05:00

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Link to the original article

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) on Vimeo

2009-01-02T00:38:36-06:00

Just gives you hope about the whole world...

Link to the original article