TechnologyIQ

For a year or so I have owned a nice fake-vintage radio/bluetooth speaker that originally caught my eye for sale in a FedEx office. The front has a quite nice VFD-style LED to show the status, a volume knob and four hard buttons. It has Bluetooth, USB, AUX and FM input. The radio and bluetooth was not bad, but there was nothing to be impressed about. It was definitely not "smart." I decided to hack it to make it a bit smarter: to do AirPlay and be a smart alarm clock and whatever else I could think of. Since it was inexpensive, I had nothing to lose and everything to win. I thought putting a Raspberry Pi 0 or something in it would be nice. Read My venture in hacking a fake vintage radio – Huan Truong's Pensieve via Huan Truong's Pensieve An interesting link found among my daily reading

All about Hilbert's Decision Problem, Turing's solution, and a machine that vanishes in a puff of logic. Read and Watch This Youtuber Dismember Popular Devices to Make See-Through Gadgets via MAKE: Blog An interesting link found among my daily reading

Just a few years ago, had someone asked you how much a digital camera with WiFi would cost, you probably wouldn’t have said $6. But that’s about how much [Bitluni] paid for an ESP32-CAM. He wanted to try making the little camera do time lapse, and it turns out that’s pretty easy to do. Read ESP32-Cam Does Time Lapse via hack a day An interesting link found among my daily reading

The Winograd schema is a language test for intelligent computers. So far, they're not doing well. Watch The Sentences Computers Can't Understand, But Humans Can via Tom Scott on YouTube  

We are used to flipdots, single mechanical pixels that are brightly colored on one side and black on the other, flipped over by a magnetic field. Driving the little electromagnets that make them work is a regular challenge in our community. [Johan] however has a new take on the flipdot, and it’s one we’ve never seen before. Instead of making a magnetic field to flip his dots he’s doing without the electronics entirely, and just using a magnet. Read Flipdots, Without The Electronics via hack a day An interesting link found among my daily reading

As an adolescent in the mid-80s, I got a see-through Swatch watch (with translucent green trimming) that showed the internal structures and the gears in motion. It was my favorite, and ever since then I’ve been a big fan of clear casings on electronics. I often wonder why they’re not more prevalent — the motors, circuitry, and wiring are so much more interesting to look at than a dull grey plastic cowl. With that, the new youtube channel  Useless Mod  is quickly turning into my favorite place to find unexpected see-through variations of popular gadgets. From an  iPhone SE 2020 , to Airpods ( standard  and  Pro ), to a  Mavic Mini  and a  GoPro Hero 8 , the channel’s mastermind Dennis is putting very real devices under the knife. No throwaway thrift store goods here, these are legit items getting the “invisible shell” treatment. Read and Watch This Youtuber Dismember Popular Devices to Make See-Through Gadgets via MAKE: Blog An interesting link found among my daily reading

The new approach, known as ICARUS — short for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space — will also be able to track animals across far larger areas than other technologies. At the same time, ICARUS has shrunk the size of the transmitters that the animals wear and made them far cheaper to boot. Read A look at ICARUS, a new approach to tracking animals, tagged with transmitters, over long distances using new equipment aboard the International Space Station (Jim Robbins/New York Times) via Techmeme An interesting link found among my daily reading

This lovely short film by Cristóbal Vila shows how the simple Fibonacci sequence manifests itself in natural forms like sunflowers, nautilus shells, and dragonfly wings. See also  Arthur Benjamin’s TED Talk  on the Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio and  the Fibonacci Shelf . (via  @stevenstrogatz ) Read Nature By Numbers via kottke.org An interesting link found among my daily reading

There are plenty of ways to create timelapse videos, but [Andy] has an efficient method for ensuring up-to-date ones exist for his infrared sky camera, and he has it running thanks to some well-documented shell scripts on a spare Raspberry Pi. The resulting timelapse video is always available from the web, and always up-to-date for the current day. The idea is to automatically fetch images from a remote source (in his case, an infrared sky camera) and turn them into a cumulative video that is regularly updated for the day in question. The resulting video file is either served from the same machine, or sent elsewhere. All that’s needed besides a source for the stills are two shell scripts and some common Linux utilities. Read More At Automatic Timelapses, Made Educational and Easy via hack a day An interesting link found among my daily reading

In a major announcement for developers, GitHub has launched Codespaces — a feature that lets you code directly on the web. Think of this as a virtual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the cloud. Earlier, to contribute to a project you would need to make a pull request, and set up the environment on your local machine according to the requirements of a project. With Codespaces, you don’t need to do that anymore. As soon as you click on the code button, the website sets up the environment in seconds. Read GitHub Codespace lets you code in your browser without any setup via The Next Web An interesting link found among my daily reading

    The whole idea of the project was to see how close to reality I can make a scale model perform.  Spring rates and resonance frequencies don't scale down realistically when you go down to a 1:10 size, so I had to figure something else out. I've seen active suspension systems made before, but to improve handling. I'm doing the exact opposite. The whole system consists of a an accelerometer, connected to an arduino board, which controls 4 servos, each one controlling the ride height at each corner. It didn't start as a drift chassis, but eventually became one, so the front suspension and steering was also re-engineered to allow for a great turning angle.  Read Super scale active suspension, arduino powered, 3D printed, RC drift, Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 via Superscale2020 An interesting link found among my daily reading