TechnologyIQ

The dream of home automation is forever present among makers and other tech types, and the Raspberry Pi has helped many people turn their Enterprise fantasies into a reality. Here are some kits, add-ons, and other gadgets that can help. Read Home automation add-ons for Raspberry Pi - The MagPi Magazine via The MagPi Magazine * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Technology isn't just computers, networks and phones. Technology has always been part of the human experience. All of our ancestors have looked for ways to help them survive and do less work for more gain.  Archive.org has a host of old technology books (from mid-19th to mid-20th Century) available in many formats and on a host of topics. Many of the technologies discussed within these books are being put to use again these days in the back to the land" and homesteading movements. You might even find something that could address one of your own garden or farm issues but has been lost to time and history. Enjoy! --Douglas Historical Technology Books: The Hug water wheel patented in the United States and foreign countries (1901) - 21 in a series   Available in PDF, Text, JPG formats, and more THE HUG WATER WHEEL Is of the well-known "Tangential Impulse" type, but by reason of its excellence of design and workmanship, it has proven itself far superior, not on

It's super common to misplace your phone at home. We all do it. It can fall between the couch cushions, get lost in the bedsheets, be left in some random room, or even forgotten in the car in your garage. We’ve all been there, done that. But the worst part is when you’ve looked absolutely everywhere and still have no idea where you left your phone. There are different ways of trying to locate it, but usually, the easiest method is to ask someone, "Can you call me?" But with an Echo now in every home, there's no need to pass off that task to your friends and family; Alexa can do it. You need to do a quick set up beforehand, but it saves you from ripping apart your house and bugging loved ones. Read How to use Alexa to find your lost phone (the easy way) via Pocket-lint An interesting link found among my daily reading

Read DJI Osmo Pocket - A 3-month-in REVIEW via Techmoan * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Hackers absolutely love building clocks. Seriously, there are few other devices for which we’ve seen such an incredible number of variations. But while the clocks that hackers build might blink out the time in binary, or write it out in words, they generally don’t feature hands. Apparently in 2019 it’s more reasonable to read binary than know which way the “little hand” is supposed to be pointing. This ESP8266 powered “shadow clock” from [Dheera Venkatraman] technically keeps that tradition intact, but only just. His clock doesn’t feature physical hands, but it does use a strip of RGB LEDs to cast multi-colored shadows which serve the same function. With his clock, you don’t even have to try and figure out which hand is the big one, since they’re all the same length. Now that’s what we call progress. Read An ESP8266 Sundial For Your Wall via hack a day * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local

If you're anything like us, you have an ever-growing pile of books you swear you'll get round to reading... eventually... maybe... once things get a little less hectic at work, I swear. Thank God for audiobooks, right? Some literary snobs may look down on audiobooks, but frankly we think those people have too much time on their hands. We love an audiobook here at The Ambient, and now that we can use smart assistants like Alexa to read them to us, it's easier than ever to jump back into a good read when you have a few minutes to spare (it's also great for bedtime). And no, you don't need an Audible subscription to do it. Read How to get Alexa to read your Kindle books on the Amazon Echo via The Ambient * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Technology isn't just computers, networks and phones. Technology has always been part of the human experience. All of our ancestors have looked for ways to help them survive and do less work for more gain.  Archive.org has a host of old technology books (from mid-19th to mid-20th Century) available in many formats and on a host of topics. Many of the technologies discussed within these books are being put to use again these days in the back to the land" and homesteading movements. You might even find something that could address one of your own garden or farm issues but has been lost to time and history. Enjoy! --Douglas Historical Technology Books: 1928 Fitz Steel Overshot Water Wheel catalog by Fitz Water Wheel Company of Hanover, PA, USA - 20 in a series   I was surprised to see that waterwheel technology was still so prominent in the late 1920’s, but then I remembered that electrical power was still something confined to large cities until late in the 1940’s, so it ma

Please note: this tutorial is not for beginners. This tutorial requires the use of Raspian terminal commands which are text-based, so you’ll at least need to have basic Linux knowledge. You can’t run actual MS-DOS on the Raspberry Pi as is, instead you will be running DOS via an emulator. By using a combination of QEMU PC emulator and FreeDOS, you can play classic DOS games and run other DOS programs on the Raspberry Pi. Once you’ve set up QEMU as the virtual machine and installed FreeDOS, you can run DOS programs and games on the Raspberry Pi. Read How to run DOS on a Raspberry Pi OnMSFT.com via OnMSFT.com An interesting link found among my daily reading

Scavenging is often the best way to find cheap parts for your projects. Strip everything useful from that old laptop before sending it off to waste recycling. — Douglas Read Upcycle an Old Laptop Touchpad as an Input for Your Arduino via Hackster Blog - Medium * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Technology isn't just computers, networks and phones. Technology has always been part of the human experience. All of our ancestors have looked for ways to help them survive and do less work for more gain.  Archive.org has a host of old technology books (from mid-19th to mid-20th Century) available in many formats and on a host of topics. Many of the technologies discussed within these books are being put to use again these days in the back to the land" and homesteading movements. You might even find something that could address one of your own garden or farm issues but has been lost to time and history. Enjoy! --Douglas Historical Technology Books: The laboratory, or, School of arts : containing a large collection of valuable secrets, experiments, and manual operations in arts and manufactures ... (1799) - 19 in a series       Available in PDF, Text, JPG formats, and more PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION. THE arts have so necessary a dependance on each other, that it w

And amazing — and on-going — story of how individuals protected the entire Internet over the course of a few days. The fight still continues on a daily basis. Learn all about WannaCry malware and what it took to defang it when it attacked. — Douglas It was late afternoon on May 12, 2017. Two exhausted security researchers could barely unpack the events of what had just happened. Marcus Hutchins and Jamie Hankins, who were working from their homes in the U.K. for Los Angeles-based cybersecurity company Kryptos Logic, had just stopped a global cyberattack dead in its tracks. Hours earlier, WannaCry ransomware began to spread like wildfire, encrypting systems and crippling businesses and transport hubs across Europe. It was the first time in a decade a computer worm began attacking computers on a massive scale. The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) was one of the biggest organizations hit, forcing doctors to turn patients away and emergency rooms to close. Read The sinkhole that

If you are interested in building your very own Raspberry Pi laptop you may be interested in new build by Hackaday member Calvin Nemo. The design was created using TinkerCAD 3D printed outer shell which houses the Raspberry Pi Zero mini PC and other components. Designed to resemble a spell book the mini laptop is now available to download from the Autodesk TinkerCAD website enabling you to 3D print your very own. Read Spellbook Raspberry Pi mini laptop via Geeky Gadgets * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Another privacy and security-related article for those of you who are working to secure their online communications. I have been using the Cloudflare DNS servers on my local network for a while and I am trying out the app on my iPhone. I am still on the waiting list for this new firewall feature, but will report back when I gain access. — Douglas April 1 is usually a day for terrible jokes masquerading as the truth, but Cloudflare says its latest announcement is the real deal. The company has fittingly chosen this hallowed day to announce that its 1.1.1.1 DNS service is getting a new feature: a free VPN. Again, it says this is not a joke . Read Cloudflare Adds a Free VPN to its 1.1.1.1 App via Extremetech An interesting link found among my daily reading

For the privacy-minded Alexa users out there, Amazon is making some progress in removing your voice data from their servers. — Douglas Read You can finally delete (most of) your Amazon Echo transcripts. Here's how via CNET * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Minecraft Link enables you to connect hardware devices such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi with Minecraft game via MCreator procedures, commands and general API for Minecraft mod developers. fter developers at MCreator developed MCreator for Arduino toolkit, a great interest for a more sophisticated framework arose, so they decided to make a new and much more powerful connector to connect Minecraft gameplay with DIY projects and other crafts powered by popular boards such as Raspberry Pi and Arduino. Minecraft Link is a great platform for use in summer camps, STEM workshops and as a part of computer science courses for schools. With Minecraft Link, students and children can get a great insight into the worlds of both programming and hardware design while connecting all this to their favorite game Minecraft. Could it get any better? Read Minecraft Link via Explore all projects * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be avai