Experience can be a valuable teacher and the Army leverages their experience. They have a significant incentive. The Middle East wars are no exception. John Spencer says The Most Effective Weapon On The Modern Battlefield Is Concrete and explains some of the lessons learned. It’s about modern fort building with some new ideas for population control and […]
These guys figured that the way to learn how to sail a boat was to start by building their own boat from trees on the family farm. The Mind of a Boat Builder – Acorn to Arabella is an interview with two 30 somethings who decided the thing to do with their lives was to build […]
The reaction to Microsoft acquiring Github says a lot about how tough it is for Microsoft to change the image it built in the 90’s. John Edwards explains Why Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Isn’t a Sign of the Apocalypse – “Fear not, developers. The open source development community will thrive, no matter who’s running the show.” […]
In 1998: For $1,299, you came home with a 233MHz PowerPC G3 processor, 32MB of RAM, a 4GB hard drive, a 15-inch built-in monitor, and stereo speakers—all in an amazingly stylish case. 8 ways the iMac changed computing By Benj Edwards (first published in 2008) — “Apple’s most iconic desktop computer.” Popularizing the I’net, USB, floppy […]
USB does fine for a microcontroller power development platform. But what do you do when you want to let some project loose in the wild? That is one of features Itead includes in its Sonoff line. For about the price of an ESP8266 development board (~ $5) you can get an ESP8266 with 1 MB […]
It started with a report based on How Much Sleep Do Fitbit Users Really Get? A New Study Finds Out by Danielle Kosecki. That lead to research about Wrist actigraphy. And then Amazon had a sale on the Letscom Fitness Tracker. Actigraphy has been around since the 50’s. The cell phone sensor revolution has put it […]
It started with an observation based on the Equifax fiasco by Hao-Kai Pai: Defanging identity fraud by verifying identities – “part of the damage here stems from organizations assuming that Social Security Numbers are secret … another part of the problem is that some businesses are startlingly lax about confirming who they are extending credit to.” That is […]
He says they are ‘hiring’ … and it’s an ad hoc group of volunteers trying to make Python better. The problem is significant: how do you encourage and motivate volunteers to join in and add to, rather than detract from, a project such as Python. Hettinger has some rather harsh words about the need to […]
Some claim it is the Next Big Thing and going to overturn civilization. It sounds so wonderful with peace, love, and all that: technology is going to solve all human ills and whatnot. Technology dreams seem to invite a blindness. Luboš Motl gets to the key issue with Bitcoin: Decentralized blockchain and subjectivity of the […]
The TS100 soldering iron (Amazon) has been getting a lot of buzz. It’s on github and both software and hardware specifications are open. It runs off 12 to 24 volts DC so a battery pack from a power tool or laptop will run it. A laptop power supply is a common resource for it as […]