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{ Category Archives } Education and Support

about getting a handle on what is needed for making good decisions.

Calculus and the bag of tricks (Chinese Room) approach

Trevor Klee: How to fix how people learn calculus: make calculus exciting again — “I only realized in college that I had been cheated out of a deep understanding of math and given a shallow collection of tricks instead.” There is a hierarchy in learning math and Klee provides insight into why with his diagnosis of the […]

BNC history

Dan Maloney has a summary of the development of the BNC connector at Hackaday. The connector that would eventually become known as the BNC connector when it was invented in the 1950s has its roots in two separate connectors developed in the 1930s and 1940s for the burgeoning radio and telephone industries. … Salati’s connector […]

Swinging for the fences

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 […]

What makes Python interesting

Python is different but not too different and that makes it interesting and worthwhile for study. An example is Loop better: A deeper look at iteration in Python by Trey Hunner — “Dive into Python’s for loops to take a look at how they work under the hood and why they work the way they do.” […]

Sonoff, VSCode, ESP8266, IOT

Another Amazon sale, another opportunity. This time is was a 4 pack of basic Sonoff switches. These are $5 boxes controlling a relay via Wifi meaning an app or Alexa. They run off of, and switch, 90-240 VAC and use an ESP8266 for the smarts and radio. As they are easy to take apart and […]

Self defense and Parakeets: Culture and history speaking

Two stories uncovered today provide a lot of insight into who we are and how we got that way. One is about The American Indian foundation of American gun culture by David Kopel. This is on Wapo in the Volokh Conspiracy, a lawyer’s blog so it’s got reader harassment and bias to watch out for. The essay […]

Headless via VNC

Headless machines need a head somewhere. A barebones text terminal run via a serial port is the base option. A remote graphics desktop gets into the virtual machine and full access territory. Faster networks and more capable computers and graphics have made the full desktop option feasible enough that Raspbian takes very little to set […]

Guide to the Galaxy for Mobile App Developers

freetechbooks.com has posted Don’t Panic: Mobile Developer’s Guide to The Galaxy, 17th Edition.   More than 20 writers from the mobile community share their know-how in dealing with topics such as accessibility in mobile apps, UX design, mobile analytics, prototyping, cross-platform development, native development, mobile web and app marketing. It is an easy to read rundown about […]

The Amazing $1 microcontroller – a treasure chest for building modern electronic devices

The Amazing $1 microcontroller by Jay Carlson — “A new series that explores 21 different microcontrollers — all less than $1 — to help familiarize you with all the major ecosystems out there.” It is a good overview of what is out there for the electronics guiding much modern equipment as well as a guide […]

ten years on and a lot of small (and some big) steps

How I would explain a decade of web development to a time traveler from 2007 by Ivan Zarea  Today we have many more of them than we did 10 years ago, and that comes with new challenges. We wear computers on our wrists and faces, keep them in our pockets, and have them in our fridges and […]