- Seeed RePhone — open source and modular phone kit.
- Cyrcle — prototype round phone, designed by women for women. It’s clearly had a bit more thought put into it than the usual “pink it and shrink it” approach … circular to fit in smaller and shaped pockets, and software features strict notification controls: the device would only alert you to messages or updates from an inner circle.
- TensorFlow for Poets (Pete Warden) — I want to show how anyone with a Mac laptop and the ability to use the Terminal can create their own image classifier using TensorFlow, without having to do any coding.
- Finding the Natural Motivation for Change (Pia Waugh) — you can force certain behaviour changes through punishment or reward, but if people aren’t naturally motivated to make the behaviour change themselves then the change will be both unsustainable and minimally implemented. Amen!
"hardware" entries
Four short links: 1 March 2016
Phone Kit, Circular Phone, TensorFlow Intro, and Change Motivation
Rob Coneybeer on Nest and the next big thing in hardware
The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Virtual reality, robotics, and today’s hardware landscape.
Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing: TuneIn, Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.
In this new episode of the Hardware Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Rob Coneybeer, managing director and co-founder of Shasta Ventures, one of the critical first investors in hardware startups including Nest, Fetch Robotics, and Turo (formerly RelayRides).
Discussion points:
- Why Nest looked like an appealing investment back in 2010
- Coneybeer’s focus on virtual reality and robotics as the next big things for hardware startups.
- Why it’s essential for hardware startups to have a long-term plan for improving products after they’re in place, and the importance of over-the-air software updates.
- The consumer psychology of selling a compelling hardware product, and when to aim for high price and high value. “People are willing to spend money when there’s something that’s really revolutionary,” says Coneybeer.
- The current state of venture capital investments in hardware startups. While raising later rounds is becoming more difficult, Coneybeer says: “the most interesting, innovative hardware companies will always find capital.”
Four short links: 24 February 2016
UX Metrics, Page Scraping, IoT Pain, and NLP + Deep Learning
- Critical Metric: Critical Responses (Steve Souders) — new UX-focused metrics […] Start Render and Speed Index.
- Automatically Scrape and Import a Table in Google Spreadsheets (Zach Klein) — =ImportHtml("URL", "table", num) where “table” is the element name (“table” or a list tag), and num is the number of the element in case there are multiple on the page. Bam!
- Getting Visibility on the iBeacon Problem (Brooklyn Museum) — the Internet of Things is great, but I wouldn’t want to have to update its firmware. As we started to troubleshoot beacon issues, we wanted a clean slate. This meant updating the firmware on all the beacons, checking the battery life, and turning off the advanced power settings that Estimote provides. This was a painstakingly manual process where I’d have to go and update each unit one-by-one. In some cases, I’d use Estimote’s cloud tool to pre-select certain actions, but I’d still have to walk to each unit to execute the changes and use of the tool hardly made things faster. Perhaps when every inch of the world is filled with sensors, Google Street View cars will also beam out firmware updates.
- NLP Meets Deep Learning — easy to follow slide deck talking about how deep learning is tackling NLP problems.
Four short links: 22 February 2016
Immersive Flood, Human Jobs, Anonymous Security, and Chrome Speed
- Facebook Creates Social VR Team (FT) — Facebook said that users had uploaded 20,000 videos in VR-friendly 360-degree format. At same time as HTC Vive VR Headset price is announced, LG 360 VR is announced, the new Samsung handsets come with a Gear VR headset, and Samsung’s Gear 360 camera is announced. There’s a heap of immersive hardware coming.
- AAAI-16 Panel on Future of Work (Tech Republic) — “It’s hard to argue that there will be new jobs for humans,” said Vardi. “It’s a vacuous promise.”
- Security Without Identification (PDF) — a David Chaum paper from 1985. Digital pseudonyms, handheld signing devices, Current systems emphasize the one-sided security of organizations attempting to protect themselves from individuals; the new approach allows all parties to protect their own interests. The new approach relies on individuals keeping secret keys from organizations and organizations devising other secret keys that are kept from individuals. During transactions, parties use these keys to provide each other with specially coded confirmation of the transaction details, which can be used as evidence.
- Killing Slow Chrome Tabs (Medium) — There is one not-so-well known tool in Chrome, that allows you to analyse how much resources the individual tabs consume. It is called Task Manager and you can find it in Menu > More Tools > Task Manager.
Four short links: 19 February 2016
Exoskeletons Insured, Companies Rethought, IoT OS Launched, and BotNets Open Sourced
- Exoskeletons Must be Covered by Health Insurance (VICE) — A medical review board ruled that a health insurance provider in the United States is obligated to provide coverage and reimbursement for a $69,500 ReWalk robotic exoskeleton, in what could be a major turning point for people with spinal cord injuries. (via Robohub)
- New Models for the Company of the 21st Century (Simone Brunozzi) — large companies often get displaced by new entrants, failing to innovate and/or adapt to new technologies. Y-Combinator can be seen as a new type of company, where innovation is brought in as an entrepreneurial experiment, largely for seed-stage ideas; Google’s Alphabet, on the other hand, tries to stimulate innovation and risk by dividing a large company into smaller pieces and reassigning ownership and responsibilities to different CEOs.
- Zephyr — Linux Foundation’s IoT open source OS project. tbh, I don’t see people complaining about operating systems. Integrating all these devices (and having the sensors actually usefully capturing what you want) seems the bigger problem. We already have fragmentation (is it a Samsung home or a Nest home?), and as more Big Swinging Click companies enter the world of smarter things, this will only get worse before it gets better.
- A Hands-On Approach on Botnets for a Learning Purpose — these researchers are working on open source botnet software for researchers to bang on. (So you don’t need to attract the interest of actual botnet operators while you learn what you’re doing.)
Four short links: 18 February 2016
Potteresque Project, Tumblr Teens, Hartificial Hand, and Denied by Data
- Homemade Weasley Clock (imgur) — construction photos of a clever Potter-inspired clock that shows where people are. (via Archie McPhee)
- Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens — teens perform joy on Instagram but confess sadness on Tumblr.
- Amazing Biomimetic Anthropomorphic Hand (Spectrum IEEE) — First, they laser scanned a human skeleton hand, and then 3D-printed artificial bones to match, which allowed them to duplicate the unfixed joint axes that we have […] The final parts to UW’s hand are the muscles, which are made up of an array of 10 Dynamixel servos, whose cable routing closely mimics the carpal tunnel of a human hand. Amazing detail!
- Life Insurance Can Gattaca You (FastCo) — “Unfortunately after carefully reviewing your application, we regret that we are unable to provide you with coverage because of your positive BRCA 1 gene,” the letter reads. In the U.S., about one in 400 women have a BRCA 1 or 2 gene, which is associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
Four short links: 5 February 2016
Signed Filesystem, Smart Mirror, Deep Learning Tuts, and CLI: Miami
- Introducing the Keybase Filesystem — love that crypto is making its way into the filesystem.
- DIY Smart Bathroom Mirror — finally, someone is building this science-fiction future! (via BoingBoing)
- tensorflow tutorials — for budding deep learners.
- clmystery — a command-line murder mystery.
Four short links: 4 February 2016
Shmoocon Video, Smart Watchstrap, Generalizing Learning, and Dataflow vs Spark
- Shmoocon 2016 Videos (Internet Archive) — videos of the talks from an astonishingly good security conference.
- TipTalk — Samsung watchstrap that is the smart device … put your finger in your ear to hear the call. You had me at put my finger in my ear. (via WaPo)
- Ecorithms — Leslie Valiant at Harvard broadened the concept of an algorithm into an “ecorithm,” which is a learning algorithm that “runs” on any system capable of interacting with its physical environment. Algorithms apply to computational systems, but ecorithms can apply to biological organisms or entire species. The concept draws a computational equivalence between the way that individuals learn and the way that entire ecosystems evolve. In both cases, ecorithms describe adaptive behavior in a mechanistic way.
- Dataflow/Beam vs Spark (Google Cloud) — To highlight the distinguishing features of the Dataflow model, we’ll be comparing code side-by-side with Spark code snippets. Spark has had a huge and positive impact on the industry thanks to doing a number of things much better than other systems had done before. But Dataflow holds distinct advantages in programming model flexibility, power, and expressiveness, particularly in the out-of-order processing and real-time session management arenas.
Four short links: 1 February 2016
Curation & Search, Developer Tenure, AI/IA History, and Catapulting Drones
- Curation & Search — (Twitter) All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation.—Benedict Evans. (via Lists are the New Search)
- Average Developer Tenure (Seattle Times) — The average tenure of a developer in Silicon Valley is nine months at a single company. In Seattle, that length is closer to two years. (via Rands)
- An Interview with John Markoff (Robohub) — the interview will give you a flavour of his book, Machines of Loving Grace, a sweet history of AI told through the stories of the people who pioneered and now shape the field.
- Catapult Drone Launch (YouTube) — utterly nuts. That’s an SUV off its rear wheels! (via IEEE)
Four short links: 27 January 2016
Generative Text, Open Source Agriculture, Becoming Better, and GA Slackbot
- Improv — a javascript library for generative text.
- The Food Computer (MIT) — open source controlled-environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems to control and monitor climate, energy, and plant growth inside of a specialized growing chamber. Climate variables such as carbon dioxide, air temperature, humidity, dissolved oxygen, potential hydrogen, electrical conductivity, and root-zone temperature are among the many conditions that can be controlled and monitored within the growing chamber. Operational energy, water, and mineral consumption are monitored (and adjusted) through electrical meters, flow sensors, and controllable chemical dosers throughout the growth period. (via IEEE Spectrum)
- 10 Golden Rules for Becoming a Better Programmer — what are your 10 rules for being better in your field? If you haven’t built a list, then you aren’t thinking hard enough about what you do.
- Statsbot — Google Analytics bot for Slack from NewRelic.