TechnologyIQ

The smart home is a constantly evolving beast, not always for the better. But as platforms integrate, disintegrate and sometimes break entirely, IFTTT is the glue trying to keep it all pieced together. It's not perfect. As Nest users are made to migrate to Google's platform, IFTTT integration will actually break entirely. And you still can't use Alexa actions within IFTTT – i.e. you can't use IFTTT to trigger routines – which means there are still limits to what it can do. Still, for those who are willing, IFTTT can add another layer of smarts on top of existing platforms, and help tie them together. We already have a list of our best IFTTT Applets for the smart home, but below we've listed our top picks for Alexa specifically. And if there are individual platforms you're looking to integrate, such as Philips Hue, you can peruse them here. Read The best IFTTT Alexa and Echo Applets for your smart home via The Ambient * A portion of each sale from Amaz...

Graphic designer and marketer Sam Henri Gold has assembled an incredible archive of Apple’s promotional materials that stretches back to the 1970s, which he’s uploaded into a Google Drive folder for people to look through. The folder contains hundreds of videos and pictures of the company’s products, and it’s well worth the time to take a trip down memory lane. Gold has painstakingly organized this miniature online museum by decade and year, allowing visitors to scroll through and see how Apple marketed itself over the years. The archive mainly features the company’s TV ads, but there are also promotional features, product photos, and print advertisements as well. Gold notes that he began archiving the videos a couple of years ago after the “Every Apple Video” channel on YouTube stopped updating. Read Check out this incredible archive of Apple’s promotional photos and ads via The Verge * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these book...

While the overall project may seem a bit silly, the learning that it can foster is amazing. You can learn about Raspberry Pi hardware and programming, servos, battery power, user interface design and more. — Douglas Engineer Martin Fitzpatrick of Two Bit Arcade has created the “Etch-A-Snap”, a unique camera powered by Raspberry Pi that very slowly outputs images as magnetic drawings on the attached Pocket Etch-a-Sketch. The camera takes the picture, the picture is reduced to its simplest representation and is automatically sketched onto the board with the help of stepper motors that drive the drawing wheels in the proper directions Read Etch-A-Snap, A Brilliant Raspberry Pi Powered Camera That Slowly Outputs Images as Etch-A-Sketch Drawings via Laughing Squid * 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 Practical Mechanic's Journal (1849) - 25 in a series Available in PDF, Text, JPG formats, and more "Men judged of evidence, and often very correctly, before logic was a science, or they never could have made one. And they executed great mechanical works before they understood the laws of mechanics. But there ...

Nice feature to help those of us who need more time or wish Alexa would hurry up and say something already! (LAUGH) — Douglas Is Alexa rushing or dragging? Amazon has made it possible to adjust how fast its voice assistant talks. The new feature is now available in the US, with a global rollout TBD. It will make Alexa work better for many, but particularly those who are hard of hearing and would like to have Alexa speak more slowly. Read How to make Alexa talk faster or slower 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

As we’ve remarked in these pages before, oftentimes some of the best engineering around is invisible, hidden inside black boxes of one sort or the other. If the black box is sufficiently important in some way, professional forensic and reverse engineers can be employed to crack it open and reveal its secrets. But what about more humble items, such as the apparently unremarkable components that make up everyday electronics? Who cares enough to take the trouble to look inside them? Eric Schlaepfer does. To the delight of a growing following, in March of this year, Schlaepfer started posting to his @TubeTimeUS twitter accountmagnified cross sections of capacitors, cables, LEDs, transistors, and more, usually with accompanying annotations. Read Revealing the Hidden Beauty of Common Components via IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local libr...

This instruction is a story about how I made an ornithopter prototype. For those who do not know, an ornithopter is a machine designed to achieve flight by flapping wings like a real bird. The idea was to create an ornithopter from scratch, to control it remotely, and of course to make it fly. Please do not judge; I'm not the professional of the aircraft industry. So, not everything works as I would like, but it still does. Instead of photos, this instruction prevails by graphic schemes. The real result can be seen in a multi-series video on the Youtube channel. If you enjoy this guide, subscribe to the channel. The instruction will be corrected and supplemented with material over time. The ornithopter will also be improved. Read Opensource Ornithopter Prototype. Arduino Powered and Remote Controlled. via Instructables * 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...

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: Light science for leisure hours. A series of familiar essays on scientific subjects, natural phenomena, &c. by Richard A. (Richard Anthony) Proctor ((1871) - 24 in a series Available in PDF, Text, JPG formats, and more PREFACE. THE Essays in the present volume have been selected from my contributions to serial literature...

Alexa News: Free Audible Books Each Month Via Alexa Audible , being part of Amazon itself, offers a free audio book each month via Alexa. You don’t need an Echo device, though. You can access it using the Amazon app on your phone, too. This month’s selection is Life of Pi by  Yann Martel. You Alexa device will remember your location in the book and also give you statistics of how many hours remain in the audio. To access your free audiobook each month, say Alexa, What’s free from Audible? Enjoy! * 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

Loved printing the Low Poly Space Toys by @Flowalistik and @Hatsyflatsy. Enough to turn them into keycaps for my office mechanical keyboard. Now I want to share them with you. Read Star Wars MX Cherry Keycaps via Adafruit Industries An interesting link found among my daily reading

In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a Raspberry Pi security camera using OpenCV and computer vision. The Pi security camera will be IoT capable, making it possible for our Raspberry Pi to to send TXT/MMS message notifications, images, and video clips when the security camera is triggered. Back in my undergrad years, I had an obsession with hummus. Hummus and pita/vegetables were my lunch of choice. I loved it. I lived on it. And I was very protective of my hummus — college kids are notorious for raiding each other’s fridges and stealing each other’s food. No one was to touch my hummus. But — I was a victim of such hummus theft on more than one occasion…and I never forgot it! Read Building a Raspberry Pi security camera with OpenCV via PyImageSearch * 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

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Martin] is building an Open Source Multimeter that can measure voltage, current, and power. It’s an amazing build, and you too can build one yourself. The features for this multimeter consist of voltage mode with a range of +/-6V and +/-60V. There’s a current mode, basically the same as voltage, with a range of +/-60 mA and +/-500mA. Unlike our bright yellow Fluke, there’s also a power mode that measures voltage and current at the same time, with all four combinations of ranges available. There’s a continuity test that sounds a buzzer when the resistance is below 50 Ω, and a component test mode that measures resistors, caps, and diodes. There’s a fully isolated USB interface capable of receiving commands and transmitting data, a real-time clock, and in the future there might be frequency measurement. Read Finally, An Open Source Multimeter via hack a day * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books m...

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: Physico-mechanical experiments on various subjects, containing an account of several surprizing phaenomena touching light and electricity. (1709) - 23 in a series Available in PDF, Text, JPG formats, and more * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from...

Maker perfection is a journey not a destination. We’re all permanent students, and there’s always more to learn, so we’ve pulled together 50 of our top maker tips in this issue to help you be a better maker. Whether you’re a programmer who dabbles in metalwork, a crafter who likes to add electronics to builds or a woodworker who needs some new inspiration, there’s something  here to make you a better maker. Read Issue 20 — HackSpace magazine is here! #Making #Makers @HackSpaceMag via Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Here is the another use case of my Click Canvas. Can an interactive wall that was intentional to be use for creativity being use for an exercise and to make it more fun by incoporated game play into it. This project was being developing to be use in Bhiraj tower (luxury office rental in Bangkok) as a thank you gift for the rental. The brief is Bhiraj tower want to promote work life balance for the office worker. I coming up with this idea can they said OK. The graphic for this project was being designed by Wee Viraporn [Conscious' design director]. He also being my partner on this project. The way this game work is to press as much green buttons as possible in 30 seconds. My best score is 36 points. Some office workers manage to break my record for 37 points (DAMN). Read Pixercise via Arduino Project Hub * 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...

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: mits :: 8800 :: Altair Age Of Altair Catalog (1975) - 22 in a series Available in PDF, Text, JPG formats, and more The Altair 8800 is a powerful, general purpose computer that sells for an amazingly low price. The Altair 8800 is a superbly engineered, variable word length computer. Its byte orientation structure was design...

So, you snapped up an Echo, Echo Dot, or another Echo device during Amazon’s Prime Day extravaganza (or during one of Amazon’s periodic Echo sales), and it’s sitting in your kitchen, silently awaiting your next order. Now what? Before you can ask your Alexa-powered Echo to play your favorite Spotify playlist or to turn on your living room lights, you’ll need to tweak a few key settings. Get the scoop on how to train Alexa to recognize your voice, keep her from letting just anyone buy stuff on Amazon, tell her where you live and work, and more. Read You just bought a new Amazon Echo device? Do these 6 things first via TechHive * 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