- Living Light — 3D printed cephalopods filled with bioluminescent bacteria. PAGING CORY DOCTOROW, YOUR ORGASMATRON HAS ARRIVED. (via Sci Blogs)
- Repacking Lego Batteries with a CNC Mill — check out the video. Patrick programmed a CNC machine to drill out the rivets holding the Mindstorms battery pack together. Coding away a repetitive task like this is gorgeous to see at every scale. We don’t have to teach our kids a particular programming language, but they should know how to automate cruft.
- My Thoughts on Google+ (YouTube) — when your fans make hatey videos like this one protesting Google putting the pig of Google Plus onto the lipstick that was YouTube, you are Doin’ It Wrong.
- Presto: Interacting with Petabytes of Data at Facebook — a distributed SQL query engine optimized for ad-hoc analysis at interactive speed. It supports standard ANSI SQL, including complex queries, aggregations, joins, and window functions. For details, see the Facebook post about its launch.
"hacks" entries
Four short links: 11 November 2013
Squid in the Dark, Beautiful Automation, Fan Criticism, and Petabyte Queries
Four short links: 13 August 2013
Retro Hackery, Etsy Ops, Distributed Identity, and lolcoders
- How Things Work: Summer Games Edition — admire the real craftsmanship in those early games. This has a great description of using raster interrupts to extend the number of sprites, and how and why double-buffering was expensive in terms of memory.
- IAMA: Etsy Ops Team (Reddit) — the Etsy ops team does an IAMA on Reddit. Everything from uptime to this sage advice about fluid data: A nice 18 year old Glenfiddich scales extremely well, especially if used in an active active configuration with a glass in each hand. The part of Scotland where Glenfiddich is located also benefits from near-permanent exposure to the Cloud (several clouds in fact). (via Nelson Minar)
- Who Learns What When You Log Into Facebook (Tim Bray) — nice breakdown of who learns what and how, part of Tim’s work raising the qualify of conversation about online federated identity.
- lolcommits — takes a photo of the programmer on each git commit. (via Nelson Minar)
Four short links: 30 July 2013
Transit and Peering, Quick Web Interfaces, Open Source Licensing, and RC Roach
- Why YouTube Buffers (ArsTechnica) — When asked if ISPs are degrading Netflix and YouTube traffic to steer users toward their own video services, Crawford told Ars that “the very powerful eyeball networks in the US (and particularly Comcast and Time Warner Cable) have ample incentive and ability to protect the IP services in which they have economic interests. Their real goal, however, is simpler and richer. They have enormous incentives to build a moat around their high-speed data networks and charge for entry because data is a very high-margin (north of 95 percent for the cable companies), addictive, utility product over which they have local monopoly control. They have told Wall Street they will do this. Yes, charging for entry serves the same purposes as discrimination in favor of their own VOD [video-on-demand], but it is a richer and blunter proposition for them.”
- Ink — MIT-licensed interface kit for quick development of web interfaces, simple to use and expand on.
- Licensing in a Post-Copyright World — This article is opening up a bit of the history of Open Source software licensing, how it seems to change and what we could do to improve it. Caught my eye: Oracle that relicensed Berkeley DB from BSD to APGLv3 [… effectively changing] the effective license for 106 other packages to AGPLv3 as well.
- RC Cockroaches (Vine) — video from Dale Dougherty of Backyard Brains Bluetooth RoboRoach. (via Dale Dougherty)
Four short links: 11 April 2013
Automating NES Games, Code Review Tool, SaaS KPIs, and No Free Lunch
- A General Technique for Automating NES Games — software that learns how to play NES games and plays them automatically, using an aesthetically pleasing technique. With video, research paper, and code.
- rietveld — open source tool like Mondrian, Google’s code review tool. Developed by Guido van Rossum, who developed Mondrian. Still being actively developed. (via Nelson Minar)
- KPI Dashboard for Early-Stage SaaS Startups — as Google Docs sheet. Nice.
- Life Without Sleep — interesting critique of Provigil as performance-enhancing drug for information workers. It is very difficult to design a stimulant that offers focus without tunnelling – that is, without losing the ability to relate well to one’s wider environment and therefore make socially nuanced decisions. Irritability and impatience grate on team dynamics and social skills, but such nuances are usually missed in drug studies, where they are usually treated as unreliable self-reported data. These problems were largely ignored in the early enthusiasm for drug-based ways to reduce sleep. […] Volunteers on the stimulant modafinil omitted these feedback requests, instead providing brusque, non-question instructions, such as: ‘Exit West at the roundabout, then turn left at the park.’ Their dialogues were shorter and they produced less accurate maps than control volunteers. What is more, modafinil causes an overestimation of one’s own performance: those individuals on modafinil not only performed worse, but were less likely to notice that they did. (via Dave Pell)
Four short links: 10 April 2013
Street View Tiles Hacks, Policy Simulation, Map Tile Toolbox, and Connected Sensor Device HowTo
- HyperLapse — this won the Internet for April. Everyone else can go home. Check out this unbelievable video and source is available.
- Housing Simulator — NZ’s largest city is consulting on its growth plan, and includes a simulator so you can decide where the growth to house the hundreds of thousands of predicted residents will come from. Reminds me of NPR’s Budget Hero. Notice that none of the levers control immigration or city taxes to make different cities attractive or unattractive. Growth is a given and you’re left trying to figure out which green fields to pave.
- Converting To and From Google Map Tile Coordinates in PostGIS (Pete Warden) — Google Maps’ system of power-of-two tiles has become a defacto standard, widely used by all sorts of web mapping software. I’ve found it handy to use as a caching scheme for our data, but the PostGIS calls to use it were getting pretty messy, so I wrapped them up in a few functions. Code on github.
- So You Want to Build A Connected Sensor Device? (Google Doc) — The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of infrastructure, options, and tradeoffs for the parts of the data ecosystem that deal with generating, storing, transmitting, and sharing data. In addition to providing an overview, the goal is to learn what the pain points are, so we can address them. This is a collaborative document drafted for the purpose of discussion and contribution at Sensored Meetup #10. (via Rachel Kalmar)
Four short links: 13 March 2013
HTML DRM, Visualizing Medical Sciences, Lifelong Learning, and Hardware Hackery
- What Tim Berners-Lee Doesn’t Know About HTML DRM (Guardian) — Cory Doctorow lays it out straight. HTML DRM is a bad idea, no two ways. The future of the Web is the future of the world, because everything we do today involves the net and everything we’ll do tomorrow will require it. Now it proposes to sell out that trust, on the grounds that Big Content will lock up its “content” in Flash if it doesn’t get a veto over Web-innovation. […] The W3C has a duty to send the DRM-peddlers packing, just as the US courts did in the case of digital TV.
- Visualizing the Topical Structure of the Medical Sciences: A Self-Organizing Map Approach (PLOSone) — a high-resolution visualization of the medical knowledge domain using the self-organizing map (SOM) method, based on a corpus of over two million publications.
- What Teens Get About The Internet That Parents Don’t (The Atlantic) — the Internet has been a lifeline for self-directed learning and connection to peers. In our research, we found that parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one. (via Clive Thompson)
- Portable C64 — beautiful piece of C64 hardware hacking to embed a screen and battery in it. (via Hackaday)
Four short links: 24 January 2013
Google's Autonomous Cars, DIY BioPrinter, Forms Validation, and Machine Learning Workflow
- Google’s Driverless Car is Worth Trillions (Forbes) — Much of the reporting about Google’s driverless car has mistakenly focused on its science-fiction feel. […] In fact, the driverless car has broad implications for society, for the economy and for individual businesses. Just in the U.S., the car puts up for grab some $2 trillion a year in revenue and even more market cap. It creates business opportunities that dwarf Google’s current search-based business and unleashes existential challenges to market leaders across numerous industries, including car makers, auto insurers, energy companies and others that share in car-related revenue.
- DIY BioPrinter (Instructables) — Think of it as 3D printing, but with squishier ingredients! How to piggyback on inkjet printer technology to print with your own biomaterials. It’s an exciting time for biohackery: FOO Ewan Birney is kicking ass and taking names, he was just involved in a project storing and retrieving data from DNA.
- Parsley — open-sourced forms validation library in Javascript.
- ADAMS — open sourced workflow tool for machine learning, from the excellent people at Waikato who brought you WEKA. ADAMS = Advanced Data mining And Machine learning System.
Four short links: 31 October 2012
Turing Complete Users, Live Bootstrap Editor, Remix Exemptions, and Automatically Strengthening 3D Designs
- Turing Complete User — General Purpose Users can write an article in their e-mail client, layout their business card in Excel and shave in front of a web cam. They can also find a way to publish photos online without flickr, tweet without twitter, like without facebook, make a black frame around pictures without instagram, remove a black frame from an instagram picture and even wake up at 7:00 without a “wake up at 7:00” app. [… They are] users who have the ability to achieve their goals regardless of the primary purpose of an application or device. (via BoingBoing)
- Bootstrap Live Editor — a WYSIWYG HTML5 Editor built for Bootstrap. It offers a nice and elegant way to edit and beautify html content with Bootstrap-ready UI elements. I love how Bootstrap has become this framework for simpler website creation. I’m just disappointed they’re all startups chasing $ instead of being open source infrastructure.
- DCMA Exemption Recommended for Remix — recommended expanding the noncommercial remix exemption to cover both DVDs and online services. The reference to “motion pictures” covers “movies, television shows, commercials, news, DVD extras, etc.”
- New Tool Gives Structural Strength to 3-D Printed Works (Science Daily) — Findings were detailed in a paper presented during the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in August. Former Purdue doctoral student Ondrej Stava created the software application, which automatically strengthens objects either by increasing the thickness of key structural elements or by adding struts. The tool also uses a third option, reducing the stress on structural elements by hollowing out overweight elements. (via BoingBoing)
The Transportation Security Administration's QR code flub
Prank or mistake? A QR code on a TSA poster links to a non-TSA site.
Fred Trotter discovers that a QR code embedded in a TSA poster at the Orlando airport links to justinsomnia.org, which is about as far as you can get from a government website.
Four short links: 25 October 2011
Smart Thermostat, Lamer News, Expensive Meaning, and Hardware Kits
- Nest Learning Thermostat — learns how long it takes your house to adjust temperature, so can tell you not just “it’s 55 now” but “it’ll be 65 in 16 minutes”. Looks gorgeous as well as being a good example of embedded intelligence. Data really does make everything better.
- lamernews (Github) — an implementation of a Reddit / Hacker News style news web site written using Ruby, Sinatra, Redis and jQuery.
- Information is Cheap, Meaning is Expensive — interview with George Dyson. That quote is a wonderful summary of why data is important. But George also says: The danger is not that machines are advancing. The danger is that we are losing our intelligence if we rely on computers instead of our own minds. On a fundamental level, we have to ask ourselves: Do we need human intelligence? And what happens if we fail to exercise it? (via Mathew Ingram)
- Cubelets, Littlebits, and Others (Russell Davies) — he’s been playing with some sweet hardware kits. It’s not new and surprising behaviour in a toy and it’s not unbuildable with Lego or Mecanno. But there’s something different and good about being able to do it so quickly, roughly and spontaneously – throwing bits together and getting behaviour out. Not following instructions or typing laboriously. That ease makes it magical and educational – you start to understand the functions of things as a builder not a thinker. (Slightly, you know, slightly – at a lego level, not at a 5-year engineering degree level, but it’s a start.)