TechnologyIQ

This morning, Facebook announced a new portability tool that might be of interest to publishers: the ability to export your Facebook posts for use elsewhere. Facebook is rolling out a new feature today, allowing users across the globe to have the option to archive their posts and notes created on the social media site and transfer a copy of that data onto Google Docs, WordPress, or Blogger. It’s expanding on a similar tool the company released last year that allows you to transfer photos from its platform onto Google Photos. In both cases, the tool allows users leaving Facebook to preserve a version of the content associated with their account. Read It just got a little easier to move your Facebook posts to some other platform via Nieman Lab An interesting link found among my daily reading

Watch Video: Roast coffee beans with a DIY Arduino-powered roaster via Engineering360  * 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! † Available from the LA Public Library An interesting link found among my daily reading

Kids can play with Alexa in their very own $300 pretend kitchen and grocery store, with the Amazon voice assistant dishing out cooking advice, shopping help and plenty of goofy toddler humor. The Alexa 2-in-1 Kitchen and Market, from toymaker KidKraft, is making its debut at this weekend's New York Toy Fair .  The deluxe wooden play set will be sold on Amazon.com next year and includes dozens of accessories that prompt various reactions from Alexa. Not included: Alexa itself, which would come from parents' Echo smart speaker, designed to sit at the center of the play set. Read Amazon Alexa connects to a toy kitchen for preschoolers via CNET An interesting link found among my daily reading

Programmer [aemkei] Tweeted the formula (x ^ y) % 9 alongside code for more “alien art”. But how can a formula as simple as (x ^ y) % 9 result in a complex design? The combination of Bitwise XOR (^) and Modulo (%) generate a repeating pattern that’s still complex enough to satisfy the eye, and it’s ok if that doesn’t sound like an explanation. Bitwise operations are useful when working with memory and shift registers, but also worth learning if you want to drive lines or matrices of LEDs or interpret combinations of multiple switches, or in this case a great way to throw an interesting test pattern up on a new flip-dot display or low-res LED matrix. Are you into it? We are, so let’s jump in. Read Alien Art Drawn with Surprisingly Simple Math via hack a day An interesting link found among my daily reading

 Over the nine-ish years since the release of our first model, we’ve watched grow a thriving global community of Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, hobbyists, and educators. But did you know that Raspberry Pi is also increasingly used in scientific research? Dr Jolle Jolles, a behavioural ecologist at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) near Barcelona, Spain, and a passionate Raspberry Pi user, has recently published a detailed review of the uptake of Raspberry Pi in biological sciences. He found that well over a hundred published studies have made use of Raspberry Pi hardware in some way. Read Raspberry Pi: a versatile tool for biological sciences via ブログドットテレビ An interesting link found among my daily reading

  Apple has so far released eight beta builds of iOS 14.5 to developers and public beta testers. The company is expected to release iOS 14.5 to the public later this week. If you are wondering what the release time of iOS 14.5 will be in your time zone, read below. Apple is likely to release the Release Candidate build of iOS 14.5 to developers and public beta testers after its ‘Spring Loaded’ event on April 20th. After that, the company should release iOS 14.5 to the public on April 21st. The Release Candidate build of iOS 14.5 and the public release should carry the same build number until and unless Apple ends up finding some major bugs Read iOS 14.5 Release Time in Your Time Zone via iPhone Hacks An interesting link found among my daily reading

Who doesn’t love getting a bottle of bubbles to have fun with friends and pets? What’s that? You get tired of all that blowing? Circuit Playground Express comes to the rescue. Along with the Crickit robotics controller, you can build a simple robot that dips the wand in bubble solution and blows the bubbles for you! Great at parties! This guide will show you how to build your own bubble blowing robot. Read Bubble Blowing Bot Project from Anne @roboweek #NationalRoboticsWeek #RoboWeek #MakeRobotFriend #CRICKIT via Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! An interesting link found among my daily reading

I received a message on twitter asking if I knew how to test if a GSM Sim900 module was working.  I have not worked with that module hands on but did recall a great write up on it from a trusted source, John Boxall of http://tronixstuff.com. I learned of John through Arduinos site under Mannuals and Curriculum. His book, Arduino Workshop, was listed right along with Massimo Banzi’s Getting Started With Arduino. What impressed me most with this book is that all 65 of the projects from the book can be found on the authors website along with videos documenting his build of the project. Actually, each of the projects from the book are well documented on the site and has great educational content on it’s own. Read A great Arduino project book and site via Hacker Space Tech – Be a hacker not a slacker * 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! † Available from the LA Public Libra

As you watch this video, it can start to feel like the footage is sped up. It isn’t. This person’s printer is just simply blazingly fast. A common complaint I hear (and have said myself) about 3d printing is that it can be painfully slow. Prints, even simple ones, are usually measured in hours per print. In a scenario like a classroom, this greatly limits the ability of multiple people to benefit from the machine. MirageC posted this video showing their blazing fast 3d printer, and explaining what they did to get there. The entire time the narration is happening you can watch as they fully print a “Benchy” in 7 Minutes, 10 seconds. One thing that stood out as an interesting side effect of the speed is that ABS appears to behave differently (largely do to massively different operating temperatures). They are blasting the ABS with cooling, something that traditionally you’d try to avoid so that it doesn’t warp. In this case, their benchy – which only took a bit over 7 minutes to pr

Released in 2015, Recalbox is an operating system well known to gamers who still enjoy “old” games. Free and open source, this software is developed by a team of passionate developers and it is easily installed on Raspberry Pi for cheap use. Recalbox supports more than a hundred systems, in an interface that is intended to be as easy as possible to use. Read Recalbox, the OS specialist in retrogaming, integrates into two new portable consoles - The Saxon via The Saxon An interesting link found among my daily reading