- Tridium Niagara (Wired) — A critical vulnerability discovered in an industrial control system used widely by the military, hospitals and others would allow attackers to remotely control electronic door locks, lighting systems, elevators, electricity and boiler systems, video surveillance cameras, alarms and other critical building facilities, say two security researchers. cf the SANS SCADA conference.
- Santa Fe Institute Course: Introduction to Complexity — 11 week course on understanding complex systems: dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, self-organization, agent-based modeling, and networks. (via BoingBoing)
- Terms of Service Changes — a site that tracks changes to terms of service. (via Andy Baio)
- 3D Printing a Replacement Hand for a 5 Year Old Boy (Ars Technica) — the designs are on Thingiverse. For more, see their blog.
"3d printing" entries
Commerce Weekly: You can now buy stuff with tweets
AmEx now lets you buy with hashtags, 3D printing threats to retail, and PayPal comes to the gas pump.
American Express turns Twitter into an ecommerce platform
American Express announced an enhancement this week to its Sync with Twitter feature — users can now buy things with a tweet. Tricia Duryee reports at All Things Digital that all users will need to register to participate, even previous users of the sync feature, in order to provide a delivery address for purchased items. Once registration is complete, Duryee says, the purchasing process is pretty straightforward:
“For instance, participants will be able to buy a $25 American Express Gift Card for $15 … by tweeting #BuyAmexGiftCard25. American Express will reply via Twitter, asking the user to confirm the purchase in a tweet. All products will be shipped via free two-day shipping.”
Four short links: 7 February 2013
SCADA 0-Day, Complexity Course, ToS Tracking, and Custom Manufacturing Prostheses
Four short links: 8 January 2013
Design Trends, Researching Online Culture, Choosing Connection, and 3D Printing Creativity
- 13 Design Trends for 2013 — many of these coalesced what I’ve seen in websites recently, but I was particularly intrigued by the observation that search’s growing importance to apps is being reflected in larger searchboxes.
- How Twitter Gets In The Way of Research (Buzzfeed) — tl;dr: our culture increasingly plays outline, but scraping and otherwise getting access to the data stream of online culture sees researchers struggling in the face of data volumes and Twitter et al.’s commercial imperatives.
- The Post-Productive Economy (Kevin Kelly) — The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. and they have made their decision in massive numbers. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America have chosen Option B. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. (I know they don’t have a toilet because I’ve stayed in many of their homes.) But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.
- Crayon Creatures — We will bring to life the kid’s artwork by modeling a digital sculpture and turning it into a real object using 3D Printing technology.
Four short links: 7 January 2013
Building DroneNet, Manufacturing Help, Native Mobile Look, and Libre 3D Printing
- DroneNet: How to Build It (John Robb) — It’s possible to break the FAA’s “line of sight” rules regarding drones right now and get away with it to enable fast decentralized growth. This strategy works. e.g. PayPal flagrantly broke banking laws and regulations in order to out-compete a field of competitors that decided to follow the law. (via Daniel Bachhuber)
- How to Make a BOM (Bunnie Huang) — yet more very useful howto information for people looking into Chinese (or other) manufacturing.
- Junior — A front-end framework for building HTML5 mobile apps with a native look and feel.
- LulzBot — robust 3D printer, with full specs for making your own. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 5 December 2012
Poetry for Professionals, HTTPS Setup, Geodata Mining, and 3D Popup Print Shops
- The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals (HBR) — Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman once told The New York Times, “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”
- First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection — far more than you ever wanted to know about how HTTPS connections are initiated.
- Google Earth Engine — Develop, access and run algorithms on the full Earth Engine data archive, all using Google’s parallel processing platform. (via Nelson Minar)
- 3D Printing Popup Store Opens in NYC (Makezine Blog) — MAKE has partnered with 3DEA, a pop up 3D printing emporium in New York City’s fashion district. The store will sell printers and 3D printed objects as well as offer a lineup of classes, workshops, and presentations from the likes of jewelry maker Kevin Wei, 3D printing artist Josh Harker, and Shapeways’ Duann Scott. This. is. awesome!
Four short links: 3 December 2012
Manufacturing Returns, Android Mystery, 3D Printing Novelties, and Dropping Drones
- Manufacturing Returning to USA (The Atlantic) — because energy and wages. Oil makes shipping pricey, while “booming” US natural gas helps domestic manufacturing. Wages rising in China, dropping in America.
- The Android Engagement Mystery (Luke Wroblewski) — despite massively greater sales, Android users do less with their devices. Why?
- What’s Coming in 3D Printers (Wired) — enormous printers, printers that use sand to help with metal molding, and more.
- Drone Crashes Mount at Civilian Airports Overseas (Washington Post) — The drone crashed at a civilian airport that serves a half-million passengers a year, most of them sun-seeking tourists. No one was hurt, but it was the second Reaper accident in five months — under eerily similar circumstances.
Printing ourselves
At its best, 3D printing can make us more human by making us whole.
Tim O’Reilly recently asked me and some other colleagues which technology seems most like magic to us. There was a thoughtful pause as we each considered the amazing innovations we read about and interact with every day.
I didn’t have to think for long. To me, the thing that seems most like magic isn’t Siri or self-driving cars or augmented reality displays. It’s 3D printing.
My reasons are different than you might think. Yes, it’s amazing that, with very little skill, we can manufacture complex objects in our homes and workshops that are made from things like plastic or wood or chocolate or even titanium. This seems an amazing act of conjuring that, just a short time ago, would have been difficult to imagine outside of the “Star Trek” set.
But the thing that makes 3D printing really special is the magic it allows us to perform: the technology is capable of making us more human. Read more…
Four short links: 23 November 2012
Island Traps, Apolitical Technology, 3D Printing Patent Suits, and Disk-Based Graph Tool
- Trap Island — island on most maps doesn’t exist.
- Why I Work on Non-Partisan Tech (MySociety) — excellent essay. Obama won using big technology, but imagine if that effort, money, and technique were used to make things that were useful to the country. Political technology is not gov2.0.
- 3D Printing Patent Suits (MSNBC) — notable not just for incumbents keeping out low-cost competitors with patents, but also (as BoingBoing observed) Many of the key patents in 3D printing start expiring in 2013, and will continue to lapse through ’14 and ’15. Expect a big bang of 3D printer innovation, and massive price-drops, in the years to come. (via BoingBoing)
- GraphChi — can run very large graph computations on just a single machine, by using a novel algorithm for processing the graph from disk (SSD or hard drive). Programs for GraphChi are written in the vertex-centric model, proposed by GraphLab and Google’s Pregel. GraphChi runs vertex-centric programs asynchronously (i.e changes written to edges are immediately visible to subsequent computation), and in parallel. GraphChi also supports streaming graph updates and removal of edges from the graph.
Four short links: 13 November 2012
3D Printing Booth, Crowdsourcing Nanoscience, Mobile Numbers, and Web Techniques
- 3D Printing Photobooth Opening in Japan (io9) — A technician at the lab will scan your body (much like with early photography, you’ll need to be able to hold a certain pose for 15 minutes) and print out an impressively realistic 3D photo that captures not only your features, but also the basic textures of your clothing and hair. (via Julie Starr)
- Feynman Flowers — crowdsourcing analysis of STM imagery for nanoscale physics research. (via OKFN)
- Mobile Trends — Android on exponential growth vs iOS’s linear growth, and many more data-driven observations. Apple has a mobile product at every $50 price point between $0 and $850.
- The Definitive Guide to Forms-Based Website Authentication (Stack Overflow) — exactly what the title says.
Four short links: 29 October 2012
Behaviour Modification, Personal Archives, Key Printing, and Key Copying
- Inside BJ Fogg’s Behavior Design Bootcamp — see also Day 2 and Day 3.
- Recollect — archive your social media existence. Very easy to use and I wish I’d been using it longer. (via Tom Cotes)
- Duplicating House Keys on a 3D Printer — never did a title say so precisely what the post was about. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Teleduplication via Optical Decoding (PDF) — duplicating a key via a photograph.