Every week, Limor and Phil from adafruit industries do a Ustreamed "Ask an engineer" live chat. This week, tonight, they're going to do it from Maker Faire Rhode Island. Here's what they said on their site:
Tonight is our weekly "Ask an engineer" live chat - 10pm ET tonight, we're going to attempt to "broadcast" LIVE from Maker Faire Rhode Island. We'll see how it goes, we might need to go text only if there isn't a good connection. Either way - stop by! Here are some handy details:* Visit our new "chat" section on Adafruit at 10pm ET - 9/19/2009
* Or visit our Ustream page
* For old schoolers, you can use IRC, you'll need a Ustream log/pass, check out the Ustream IRC how-tos here and here
* We are #adafruit-industries6796 on IRC server chat1.ustream.tv
* There will be a trivia question at the end of the night as always!
* Lastly, if anyone can save a log we'd appreciate it
"Ask an engineer" live chat - 10pm ET tonight LIVE from Maker Faire Rhode Island (hopefully)
Maker Faire Rhode Island
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here's our pal Bre Pettis' Gnomedex presentation on Makerbot, what it is, how it came about, and his thoughts on bringing your ideas to market, collaborating, open sourcing, etc.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The last time we covered this neat die reading machine by Steve Hoefer, he had a very nice design that was starting to be able to determine the number of a die placed on it. Well, he swapped out his problematic photoresistor sensors for an infrared emitter/detector-based scheme to produce version 2, which he claims works with almost perfect accuracy. Another feature he added is to display the complement of the sensed number, so that the display shows the same number as the top of the die.
I find this project especially interesting because of the homemade sensing apparatus. Instead of going with a full-blown computer vision system to solve this problem, he used a bunch of simple sensors in a creative way, and was able to build the whole thing using a low-power microcontroller. In fact, his solution reduces the problem so well, that even the microcontroller could be eschewed for a straightforward set of logic gates. Anyone up for that project?
Challenge: Steve determined that he needs to look at five 'pip' (black dot) locations to uniquely identify each number. Can you explain why? Are there any other arrangements of five sensors that could work? Remember that each number could physically be rotated to four different positions, and you need to detect it no matter how it is stuck in. Answer on Monday.
[via Hacked Gadgets]
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There seems to be much progress on the DNS project I asked for a couple of days ago. Two or three developers seem to be approaching the point of deploying and the APIs probably are pretty close. I hope that when they surface we can try to get the APIs into agreement. The differences appear to be cosmetic. 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you're a Lovecraft fan and have not yet seen the HPLHS's 2005 silent-film adaptation of Call of Cthulhu, well, there may be nothing, anywhere, that's more important than that you go do so immediately. So. Very. Good. The look they achieve on a low budget is amazing, and a lot of that is due to the outstanding props, including several awesome Cthulhu idols, many of which are available in reproduction. But the art deco "LeGrasse" idol shown here is my favorite.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Photo credit: rgbspace
Inside this Media Literacy Digest:
Networks serve as a useful model to describe electricity grids, business activity, the internet, spread of diseases, and even obesity.
Caution is warranted, however, in over emphasizing networks.
In themselves, networks reveal a structure and mode of organizing. They can serve as both a foundation on which to build societal structures (such as education) and as a gateway to action.
Network analysis reveals the flow of information in an organization.
As important as the structure itself is the why and how of connection forming.
For most of the late 80's and into early 2000, innovation on the desktop seemed slow or even non-existent.
Microsoft dominated the personal computer experience. That has changed.
Between Apple, Google, and open source software, innovation abounds.
Dave Cormier offers an insightful (and touching) post on how identity and memory are preserved online. He compares the passing of a colleague (last year) and his brother (20 years ago) and how they are remembered today.
The identity people create online today is, in a sense, a gift to their children and future generations. I know my grandparents through a few black and white pictures. As Cormier notes, his children / grandchildren will know him through rich media. Memories preserved in full colour.
Too often, when discussing identity, the focus rests on "do not post this online, you will regret it in the future when you are [running for office, interviewing for a new job, etc.]". The flip side of this argument is aptly expressed in Dave's post.
Forget multitasking.
The real challenge many people face in work productivity is coping with distractions. I find it rather easy to ignore activities I ought to be doing with sites like
at my finger tips.
It is always been easy to find distractions (going for coffee with a colleague, chats around the water cooler), but even then, a bit of effort was required. I actually had to leave my office.
Now, distractions are much more accessible. But there are ways of coping with, of course, more technology.
Britannica is getting sloppy with their blog postings. Most posts - even ones I disagree with - are usually fairly well though-tout.
Then, they post this: The Future World of Work: Flexible and Decentralized. The post is poorly presented and largely speculative. Most obvious is the generational argument.
Work in organizations is changing. That has nothing to do with generational differences. Technological advances in communication and collaboration tools are producing a distributed workforce. What does that have to do with age?
The idea that work is changing is worth exploring. The concept that it is generational is silly.
With CCK09 now underway, I am having a bit of trouble keeping up with posts and reflections of learners.
We encourage individuals to set up blogs (or use Moodle, SecondLife, whatever else)... and reading blog posts takes more effort than reading discussion forums.
"... Humans have an innate motivation to participate in shared knowlege and that it is this motivation that makes writing for "real" audiences more rewarding for students than writing for an individual "teacher"... is connective learning naturally self-reinforcing? Is the building of community a means to an end (learning), an end in and of itself, or both? Put another way, would you keep writing your blog of you knew nobody was reading it?"
Location and immediacy are two big trends developing in part to mobile devices - constant connectivity enables us to receive information in context - i.e. location... and microblogging produces a constant flow of information. The implications of immediacy is particularly interesting.
What used to be an off the record comment can now be broadcast immediately.
Consider Obama's experience this week. For celebrities and leaders, the concept of a "safe zone" or an "off period" simply do not exist.
I wonder how many higher education faculty are blissfully unaware that their statements / lecture habits / clothing choice are the topic of lively discussion and commentary on Facebook / Twitter / Friendfeed?
Multitasking has gotten bad publicity recently.
I personally do not think I multitask - I task switch. Some people can task switch rapidly. Others prefer to focus on one element at a time. However, this article - why studies about multitasking Are missing the point - takes a different stance.
The author states:
"If you judge a juggler by how many times the balls hit the floor and contrast that with someone throwing and catching one ball at a time, the juggler will always lose. But the juggler is doing something different".This is a valid point, but it also misses the differences in the type of activities we engage in. When I am involved in "flow" activities, I jump from my RSS reader, to my blog, to delicious, to a Skype chat, to Tweetdeck, to an online news site, etc. But... when I want to create something (a paper, design a course, create a podcast), I need a different approach. If I continue to utilize a flow approach, I will likely not apply the depth of thinking needed to complete the project well. Context is king. Approaches to learning and interacting are rooted in differing contexts.
Information rich, and attention poor addresses a frustration many of us feel: There is too much! it is all going too fast!
I agree with the author that attention is the attribute in greatest demand today. But that misses an important point: Abundance is not simply more, it is also different. Which means (and the author addresses this slightly at the end of the article) we need to think about what changes in this world of "much more".
I am frequently negative on Google (largely because in a few year's time, Google will likely have a similar lock-in in many of its services / markets to what Microsoft had at its peak). However, the DataLiberation initiative by Google is a huge step in the right direction:
At the heart of this lies our strong commitment to an open web run on open standards. We think open is better than closed - not because closed is inherently bad, but because when it is easy for users to leave your product, there is a sense of urgency to improve and innovate in order to keep your users. When your users are locked in, there is a strong temptation to be complacent and focus less on making your product better.
George Siemens is the Associate Director in the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. George blogs at www.elearnspace.org where he shares his vision on the educational landscape and the impact that media technologies have on the educational system. George Siemens is also the author of Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age and the book "Knowing Knowledge" where he developes a learning theory called connectivism which uses a network as the central metaphor for learning and focuses on knowledge as a way to making connections.
Tanner of Noystoise demos a rather sweet little synth he's housed inside of what appears to be an alarm clock's former enclosure -
mini keyboard heavily modified to make synthesizer sounds. frequency divider triggers an envelope generator that modulates the vcf with resonance at 1/256? of the vco. the vco is divided in 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and mixed to the vcf. 1/32,1/64, 1/128 of the vco also modulates the frequency of the vco(pitch) and generates some pretty random voices.This piece is just the tip of the iceburg - for more, be sure to hit up the NoysToise blog. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
After exploring the innards of our CD drives, students in my robotics class are coming up with some clever junkbots. Here are a few of the first ones, more to come as they evolve. In both cases, by the end of the period, these student designed and made devices had been improved before the period ended.
As the school year begins, how do you help students understand the basics of electricity, manufacturing, and creating original devices? As a student, what are the best projects for the start of the semester or school year to get you excited to go deep and learn more?
More:
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nate at Sparkfun writes:
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!A tweeting kegerator! Why? So we can tell when the keg needs replacing, of course. We combine an Arduino with a magnetic reed switch and weight sensor to get our keg's status available to our beer guru. Follow the SparkFunKeg on twitter.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Interesting article about the "Right-to-repair bill"....
The federal “cash for clunkers” program succeeded in bringing customers back to new car lots after a long absence, but most people are still driving the car they had. Increasingly they are driving to their local mechanics to make sure those cars last even longer.
That is good news for the independent automotive repair industry because car owners are now willing to spend their money on repair work rather than take on new car payments, and they are saving on those repairs at independent shops.
But while consumers appear content to keep their older cars on the road, they are increasingly discovering that their car’s computerized systems may be conspiring to force them to turn to more expensive dealer repair shops even when those cars are out of warranty.
Most consumers experience this when they see a ‘check engine’ light or another warning that suddenly appears on their dashboard. When they bring it into independent (non-dealer) shops like ours, they simply want the underlying problem fixed so that pesky light goes off.
Sometimes, however, we can’t shut off that light even when we can make the underlying repair.
Most legislation on Beacon Hill is controversial and ultimately difficult to decipher, but Right to Repair is straightforward: You own your car and you should have the right to choose where it gets repaired and not be forced back to dealer mechanics.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Transportation | Digg this!
House Bill 228 and Senate Bill 124 are controversial only because car manufacturers don’t want car owners to have unfettered access to their own repair information and are fighting it vigorously. That alone should flash a warning light for legislators and consumers that might read: Check Manufacturer’s Motives Now.
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.He goes on to explore how this applies to music, movies, books, newspapers and software. From there, he comes to the same conclusion many of us have been discussing for years:
Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying "this will sell a lot of papers!" Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model. The reason they make less money now is that people don't need as much paper.
What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? You have two choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for.Good stuff and worth reading the whole thing, though I think he misses one key important ingredient. If you take a step back and look at the overall economics of such markets, you quickly realize how much bigger they get when you free the content from the constraints and scarcity of physical media. This is the hardest part for some people to see, at times, but the key to recognizing it is realizing that the content itself is a resource, rather than a final product, and you've just increased the availability and massively decreased the cost of that resource -- and you can then use it (for free!) to make many other things more valuable. That, in a nutshell, is the most exciting part about freeing up digital content.
The first is probably the future of most current media. Give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts. Publish articles for free and make money from one of a dozen permutations of advertising. Both publishers and investors are down on advertising at the moment, but it has more potential than they realize.
I'm not claiming that potential will be realized by the existing players. The optimal ways to make money from the written word probably require different words written by different people.
Above, Jude Law in fab drag. A still from the forthcoming feature Rage, directed by Sally Potter, in which Law plays a female model named "Minx." The short version: A young student uses his phonecam to shoot interviews with the staff of a New York fashion house, and posts them online without the interviewees' knowledge or consent. A runway accident turns into a murder investigation, then, "denial leads to devastation." Here's a New York Times piece about the film, by Guy Trebay.
Zoolander it is not. Here's a Flickr set with more stills.
You'll spot Steve Buscemi, Judi Dench, John Leguizamo, Dianne Wiest, and Eddie Izzard all in the trailer, which is embedded after the jump.
(Thanks, Karol Martesko-Fenster)
Required weekend listening. Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America shares word that a special TSOYA feature episode on The Kasper Hauser Comedy Group is now up.
[The] San Francisco-based sketch comedy group [have] been mainstays of The Sound of Young America, and have appeared on Comedy Central and on This American Life. They're the authors of three hilarious books: "SkyMaul: Happy Crap You Can Buy From A Plane," "Obama's Blackberry," and "Weddings of the Times." They also wrote the website Wonderglen for former Onion editor and Daily Show executive producer Ben Karlin.Go have a listen here, or click the embed below.On this special hour-long Sound of Young America special, they talk about their careers, and we hear their comedy -- both sketches produced for The Kasper Hauser Comedy Podcast and all-new pieces.
Authorities are using an assortment of technologies to analyze the contents of property belonging to Phillip Garrido, the accused rapist/kidnapper whose alleged abduction and abuse of Jaycee Dugard is the subject of previous Boing Boing posts. Bone fragments have been found on the patch of land in Antioch where he, his wife, and his victims lived. Along with cadaver dogs, authorities are using "ground-penetrating radar" and forensic archeology tools including magnetometers, in hopes of finding (or ruling out the possibility of) remains of other girls who disappeared around Dugard's age. Here's the website of Bill Silva, an archaeologist assisting in the case. He reported finding an "anomaly in the soil that will require further investigation." Does anyone know more about the specific devices used for this sort of operation? I am interested to know more about the technology involved. Contrary to CSI, none of this is particularly glamorous or fast-paced work.
Here's what DPA, Germany's national news wire reported this past September 11th 10th:
A terrorist attack occurred in the city of Bluewater, California. The suicide bombers were German rappers, the "Berlin Boys".
A half hour later DPA issued a correction: there had been no bombing. The "Berlin Boys" are not a rap group. The city of Bluewater does not exist.
It was all an elaborate publicity stunt to promote the satirical German film Short Cut to Hollywood. Filmmaker Jan Henrik Stahlberg and his team fooled their entire nation by creating fake websites and videos:
Here's the fake city of Bluewater (link).
Here's the fake local Bluewater news station, KVPK (link).
And here are the "Berlin Boys" with their club hit "Hass":
Wired has a detailed report (link).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wondering what all the fuss is about hackerspaces? Want to meet cool people from the Ontario area and learn some new skills? Then you should definitely check out MiniSoOnCon, a mini hackerspace conference being held next month in Hamilton, Ontario. From their press release:
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this!Four Hackerspaces in Ontario have joined forces ( Hacklab.TO from Toronto, think|haus from Hamilton, diyode from Guelph, Kwartzlab from Kitchener-Waterloo) to put on a mini hackerspace conference!
On Friday evening October 2nd and all day Saturday October 3rd, think|haus will host talks, how to sessions, and a projects gallery at which anyone who is interested can give a 20 minute talk on something related to creating projects, show people how to build/take apart/modify something, or show off their cool projects.
Some confirmed talks so far are:
- You Let Your Kid Do What? / A brief story about children and taking advantage of applied engineering skills in a positive way.
- Intro to Kite Aerial Photography / Come learn about the kinds of kites you can use to fly your camera, what you need to build your own kite, and how to modify your camera to take pictures automatically.
- RF Countersurveillance / A primer on monitoring police and security frequencies using a trunk-tracking scanner, and how it can assist in penetrating a target.
- OpenWRT Demo / Unboxing, flashing, and demonstrating OpenWRT on an Asus WL-520GU.
- Intro to Electronics Hardware Design By Someone Who Isn't an Expert / It's not nearly as hard as you think it might be, I'll show you the steps and tools you may want to take, and warn you of some of the potential issues you may face.
- Badge Hacking / That badge you're wearing is more than just a blinky light - find out how to do more with the first production badgeduino.
Check out the website and join in as an attendee or participant!
This is just a friendly reminder to use the MAKE Events Calendar to post notices of your upcoming regular or one-time events and meetings. We're getting too many events submitted each week to post them all here, so we're hoping to get people in the habit of posting to the calendar and then, each week, we can post some of the upcoming highlights from the calendar in a single post. Make: Online readers -- be sure to regularly check the calendar to see what events are coming up.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!
23 queries. 5.431 seconds