Control your technology, don't let it control you!
We have a tradition of inventing microscopes at IBM in Zurich. In 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer created the scanning tunneling microscope here. As a DIY enthusiast, I quickly found myself in my own quest to build a better setup. The result was a US $300 modular and motorized microscope that combines my three favorite adulthood hobbies: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Lego.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
Zoom is bringing its Live Transcription feature to free users. Paid users have had access to the service for a while, but free users will soon also have the option to add automated, AI-powered closed-captioning to their meetings.
Live transcription rolls out to all accounts this Fall, but you can apply for early access through this request form. Multi-lingual Zoom hosts, take note: At launch, the feature only recognizes English.
Read How to Enable Zoom's New Live Transcriptions via Lifehacker
An interesting link found among my daily reading
On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project" siphoned that data out of Gab's backend databases in an effort to expose the platform's largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump's election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
A digital photo frame is a small screen that can sit on your desk in your office or in your kitchen displaying your favorite pictures, changing at regular intervals. The first commercial digital photo frame was introduced in the 1990s shortly after the digital camera. Digital photo frames made a comeback in popularity during 2020, perhaps because people were staying at home more.
In this tutorial, we’ll turn our Raspberry Pi into a digital photo frame using MagicMirror and the GooglePhotos module. Please note, we will skip installation of the 2-way mirror in the original Magic Mirror project. Consider this project, “Magic Mirror, without the mirror.”
Read How to Build a Raspberry Pi-Powered Digital Photo Frame via Tom's Hardware
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Coding can seem scary at first - but it's actually not that hard! Let's learn how to program in C#.
During my Track and Field training sessions, my coach often expressed his desire to have a more precise way of measuring an athlete's performance. However, living in a third-world-country means that shipping from the US is expensive and sports clubs and educational institutions do not have precise timing systems as a funding priority.
I had been working on line-follower robots with Arduino for some time, so I realized that an affordable, wireless and precise laser gate timing system made of easy to find components should be possible. Accounting for the different prices across the world, absolutely all of the components and parts needed for the complete system should cost around 100USD. This is a major price difference with other systems, considering that it has a very decent precision and has a wireless range that exceeds almost any Track and Field oval in the world.
The system consists of two finish line modules and one start line module.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
BrachioGraph - arm-writer - is an easy-to-build pen-plotter, driven by a library of simple Python applications.A BrachioGraph can be built in an hour or so without any special skills. The total cost of all components can be as low as €15 or so. Apart from a Raspberry Pi computer and some hobby servo motors, the plotter can be built with everyday household items such as a clothes-peg. The software in the BrachioGraph library includes code to drive the hardware and vectorise bit-map images.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
After a thorough cleaning, most of the innards of the SNES controller had to be hollowed out to fit the LCD while still holding the controls in place. Josh0O0 used the LCD from a Waveshare Tiny GamePi15, which measures just 1.54" diagonally and has a perfect 4:3 aspect ratio, to display games. The LCD happened to fit right where the Start and Select buttons on the SNES controller normally reside. That meant moving those buttons to the bottom of the controller to retain functionality, but just about everything else from the controller appears to be standard.
To get the Raspberry Pi Zero to fit, almost all of the surface-mounted ports had to be removed. Josh0O0 retained the micro USB port, though, because it's necessary to charge the built-in 600 mAh battery, which lasts between one and two hours. While the first video doesn't show the completed device, it appears that the LCD and battery attach to the Tiny GamePi15. Josh0O0 cut down the GPIO pins on the Waveshare device and pushed them through the emptied GPIO on the Pi Zero. Part one wraps up with cutting the hole in the controller for the LCD.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
Historical Technology Books - 77 in a series - Olivetti P6040 - opuscolo
One of the first programmable computers I ever touched — and programmed on. — Douglas
