TechnologyIQ

Jeopardy is one of the most popular skills on Amazon Echo devices and one of the first games we played regularly. Test your  knowledge of obscure facts on  your own or with a group of friends. We find ourselves playing Jeopardy at some point in the evening almost every time we get a group together. To play, simply say... Alexa, Open Jeopardy ABOUT THIS SKILL Did you know that every Jeopardy! category has an “extra” 6th clue? Now you can play those clues on Alexa! With a single voice command, test your knowledge with new clues every weekday. Step up to the podium and play the same categories you saw on the latest episode! Play a wide range of categories including sports, pop culture, travel, world history, and much more! Get the true Jeopardy! experience now as you respond, just like contestants on the show! Prime Members get a free subscription to Double Jeopardy! with 6 extra clues every weekday. Just say “Alexa, open Jeopardy” and play to get started. Double Jeopardy! is $1.9

This would be a great infographic for the wall of your favorite maker space! — Douglas If parenthood has taught me anything, it’s that when your kid’s toy needs a battery, you will not have the right size. This is a simple fact of life. In the most recent challenge to this pillar of truth, a Gekko toy (from the show PJ Masks, obviously) needed a button cell battery. I dug into my battery drawer — a reflection of toys past — naively thinking that I must have the right size. The excavation showed that I was in fact incorrect. The natural next step was of course to look up battery sizes and chart all of them. Read A Diagram of All the Batteries via FlowingData An interesting link found among my daily reading

The Raspberry Pi’s goal, at least while it was being designed and built, was to promote computer science education by making it easier to access a working computer. What its low price tag also enabled was a revolution in distributed computing projects (among other things). One of those projects is the Raspberry Shake, a seismograph tool which can record nearby earthquakes. Of course, the project just uses the Pi as a cost-effective computing solution. It runs custom software, but if you want to set up your own seismograph then you’ll also need some additional hardware. There are different versions of the Raspberry Shake, the simplest using a single Geophone which is a coil and magnet. Vibrations are detected by sensing the electric signal generated by the magnet moving within the coil of wire. Other models increase the count to three Geophones, or add in MEMS accelerometers, you can easily whip one of these up on your own bench. Read Raspberry Shake Detects Quakes | Hackaday via H

Amazon released a score of new and updated Alexa devices yesterday. Here are links to all of them. For me, the updated Echo Dot is the most interesting, although finally getting a full-blown Echo Plus with included Hue hub would also be a nice addition to the home. Hera are all the devices linked directly to Amazon where you can find all the tech specs on each.     * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs

Travel Tech (and more): Aluratek - Bluetooth Audio Receiver and Transmitter When flying long distances on airliners, especially in Economy class, I try to make my life a bit easier each time I fly. For our most recent trip to Milan, Italy for a screenwriting conference, family visiting and sightseeing, I decided I wanted a better audio experience than the past. On previous trips I had brought my own on-ear headphones, which helped a bit, but the wires were still a constant headache as you got up and down during the flight — something very necessary when you are spending 11+ hours in a tin can shooting through the sky ay 500+ miles per hour. (LAUGH) Back in January I picked up the  VAVA MOOV 28 Wireless Headphones Sports Earphones from Amazon to replace — yet another — dead pair of Apple headphones. These have delivered great performance and significantly cut down on environmental noise. So much so that I needed to be more careful when out walking as my hearing was supressed and I

Adding in my iPhone I am rapidly expanding my collection of Alexa devices without rally purchasing anything new. — Douglas I have no doubt that there are a lot of iPhone and iPad users out there who also have an Alexa device, like an Amazon Echo, in the house. The question is how many of them love Alexa so much that they would use that digital assistant on their iDevice instead of Siri. For those that might, Amazon released a new version of its iOS apptoday, and for the first time you can talk to it rather than just use it to manage other Alexa-enabled devices. The app can respond using voice or by displaying information–such as weather forecasts, sports scores, movies times, and calendar appointments–on the phone or tablet screen. The problem is getting to it. If you want to talk to Alexa you have to launch the app and then push a button on the screen. With Siri all you have to do is say, well, you know. Read You can now talk to Amazon’s Alexa app on your iPhone via Fast Company

If your interest has been piqued by the inexpensive wireless-enabled goodness of the ESP8266 microcontroller, but you have been intimidated by the slightly Wild-West nature of the ecosystem that surrounds it, help is at hand. [Alexander] is creating a series of ESP8266 tutorials designed to demystify the component and lead even the most timid would-be developer to a successful first piece of code. Read Demystifying The ESP8266 With A Series Of Tutorials via Hackaday Learn more about Arduino with these books and components Arduino Boards and Components via Amazon Arduino Boards and Components via eBay An interesting link found among my daily reading

Real-time Flight Information Photo: Matthew Smith We’re leaving on a flight to Europe this evening, so this built-in command (no skill installation required) has been helping me keep up to date with any schedule changes. To get info on your next flight, or the flight of friends or family arriving on a visit, ask... Alexa, What’s the status of <airline name> <flight number>? Alexa, What’s the status of American Airlines AA298? (Example) That’s all t here is. Simple, straightforward and yet nicely useful. Get an Echo Alexa Device for Your Home S ee all Echo Models * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs

Use the fun and accessible world of Minecraft to learn about coding. A great combination! — Douglas Learn to Code by Programming Robots in Minecraft! You've mined for diamonds, crafted dozens of tools, and built all sorts of structures—but what if you could program robots to do all of that for you in a fraction of the time? In Coding with Minecraft, you'll create a virtual robot army with Lua, a programming language used by professional game developers. Step-by-step coding projects will show you how to write programs that automatically dig mines, collect materials, craft items, and build anything that you can imagine. Along the way, you'll explore key computer science concepts like data types, functions, variables, and more. Coding with Minecraft is available under a Creative Commons license, and is free to read online. Get the print version Read Free Online Version of Coding with Minecraft via turtleappstore.com An interesting link found among my daily reading

The latest version of Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi's official OS, introduces a new set-up wizard to help beginners easily get over the first few hurdles after buying one of the $35 developer boards. The new version of Raspbian also introduces an equivalent of the App Store that recommends software that users can choose to install, alongside apps already bundled with Raspbian. Read Raspberry Pi's 'app store' lands with new Raspbian OS update via ZDNet * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs An interesting link found among my daily reading