hardware Archives - O'Reilly Radar

Four short links: 26 December 2012

Remote-Controlled Arduino, JS Notifications, Device Numbers, and Network Hostility

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 26, 2012

Arduino IR Remote Control — control your Arduino project via your TV’s remote control. (via Arduino)
holler — WTFPL-licensed Javascript library for real-time in-app notifications via the commandline (uses node). (via Javascript Weekly)
First Tweets — numbers of “first tweet from my new {X}” giving indications of the popularity of each. Not good for Surface, alas.
It’s Clear Verizon is Blocking Google Wallet Anti-Competitively — Verizon blocked Google’s mobile payments app until Verizon’s own was available. One irony of course is that in conjunction with Verizon, Google worked to gut meaningful network neutrality rules that would have prevented this very thing from happening on wireless networks.

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Four short links: 25 December 2012

Regressive Future, Data Viz, Sterile Pump, and Javascript App Kit

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 25, 2012

RebelMouse — aggregates FB, Twitter, Instagram, G+ content w/Pinboard-like aesthetics. It’s like aggregators we’ve had since 2004, but in this Brave New World we have to authenticate to a blogging service to get our own public posts out in a machine-readable form. 2012: it’s like 2000 but now we have FOUR AOLs! We’ve traded paywalls for graywalls, but the walls are still there. (via Poynter)
Data Visualization Course Wiki — wiki for Stanford course cs448b, covering visualization with examples and critiques.
Peristaltic Pump — for your Arduino medical projects, a pump that doesn’t touch the liquid it moves so the liquid can stay sterile.
Breeze — MIT-licensed Javascript framework for building rich web apps.

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Interoperating the industrial Internet

If we're going to build useful applications on top of the industrial Internet, we must ensure the components interoperate.

by Mike Loukides | @mikeloukides | +Mike Loukides | December 17, 2012

One of the most interesting points made in GE’s “Unleashing the Industrial Internet” event was GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s statement that only 10% of the value of Internet-enabled products is in the connectivity layer; the remaining 90% is in the applications that are built on top of that layer. These applications enable decision support, the optimization of large…

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Four short links: 10 December 2012

Regular Expressions, Mobile Diversions, UX Pitfalls, and DIY Keyboarding

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 10, 2012

RE2: A Principled Approach to Regular Expressions — a regular expression engine without backtracking, so without the potential for exponential pathological runtimes.
Mobile is Entertainment (Luke Wroblewski) — 79% of mobile app time is spent on fun, even as desktop web use is declining.
Five UX Research Pitfalls (Elaine Wherry) — I live this every day: Sometimes someone will propose an idea that doesn’t seem to make sense. While your initial reaction may be to be defensive or to point out the flaws in the proposed A/B study, you should consider that your buddy is responding to something outside your view and that you don’t have all of the data.
Building a Keyboard: Part 1 (Jesse Vincent) — and Part 2 and general musings on the topic of keyboards. Jesse built his own. Yeah, he’s that badass.

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Four short links: 6 December 2012

What You Do, Wordnik Branches, 5 Whys, and Hardware Hackathon

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 6, 2012

You’re Saving Time — can you explain what you do, as well as this? Love the clarity of thought, as well as elegance of expression.
Related Content, by Wordnik — branching out by offering a widget for websites which recommends other content on your site which is related to the current page. I’ve been keen to see what Wordnik do with their text knowledge.
How to Run a 5 Whys with Humans, Not Robots (Slideshare) — gold Gold GOLD! (via Hacker News)
Open Computer Project Hackathon — have never heard of a hardware hackathon before, keen to see how it works out. (via Jim Stogdill)

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Four short links: 3 December 2012

Manufacturing Returns, Android Mystery, 3D Printing Novelties, and Dropping Drones

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 3, 2012

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.

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To eat or be eaten?

What's interesting isn't software as a thing in itself, but software as a component of some larger system.

by Mike Loukides | @mikeloukides | +Mike Loukides | November 30, 2012

One of Marc Andreessen’s many accomplishments was the seminal essay “Why Software is Eating the World.” In it, the creator of Mosaic and Netscape argues for his investment thesis: everything is becoming software. Music and movies led the way, Skype makes the phone company obsolete, and even companies like Fedex and Walmart are all about software: their core…

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Four short links: 22 November 2012

Urine Checkins, News Summaries, Zombie Ideas, and Scanner Plans

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 22, 2012

Mark Your Territory — Urine integration for Foursquare. (via Beta Knowledge)
TL;DR — news summaries. Finally.
Zombie Ideas and Online Instruction — The repeated return of mistaken ideas captures well my experiences with technologies in schools and what I have researched over decades. The zombie idea that is rapidly being converted into policies that in the past have been “refuted with evidence but refuse to die” is: new technologies can cure K-12 and higher education problems of teaching and learning. The most recent incarnation of this revolving-door idea is widespread access to online instruction in K-12 education cyber-charter schools, blended schools where online instruction occurs for a few hours a day, and mandated courses that children and youth have to take.
Google Open Sources Their Book Scanner — hardware designs for their clever system for high-throughput non-destructive book-scanning. (via Hackaday)

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Four short links: 12 November 2012

Motivated Learning, Better Hadoopery, Poignant Past Product, and Drone Imagery

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 12, 2012

Teaching Programming to a Highly Motivated Beginner (CACM) — I don’t think there is any better way to internalize knowledge than first spending hours upon hours growing emotionally distraught over such struggles and only then being helped by a mentor. Me, too. Not struggle for struggle’s sake, but because you have built a strong mental map of the problem into which the solution can lock.
Corona (GitHub) — Facebook opensources their improvements to Hadoop’s job tracking, in the name of scalability, latency, cluster utilization, and fairness. (via Chris Aniszczyk)
One Man’s Trash (Bunnie Huang) — Bunnie finds a Chumby relic in a Shenzhen market stall.
Dronestagram — posting pictures of drone strike locations to Instagram. (via The New Aesthetic)

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Four short links: 8 November 2012

Local Competitive Intelligence, Journalism Doesn't Scale, Winning With Big Data, Predicting the Future

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 8, 2012

Closely — new startup by Perry Evans (founder of MapQuest), giving businesses a simple app to track competitors’ online deals and social media activity. Seems a genius move to me: so many businesses flounder online, “I don’t know what to do!”, so giving them a birds-eye view of their competition turns the problem into “do better than them!”.
The FT in Play (Reuters) — very interesting point in this analysis of the Financial Times being up for sale: [Traditional] journalism doesn’t have economies of scale. The bigger that journalistic organizations become, the less efficient they get. (via Bernard Hickey)
Big Data Behind Obama’s Win (Time) — huge analytics operation, very secretive, providing insights and updates on everything.
How to Predict the Future — This is the story of a spreadsheet I’ve been keeping for almost twenty years. Thesis: hardware trends more useful for predicting advances than software trends. (via Kenton Kivestu)