"makers" entries

Four short links: 16 February 2016

Four short links: 16 February 2016

Full-on Maker, Robot Recap, Decoding Mandarin, and Sequencing Birds

  1. Washers and Screws (YouTube) — this chap is making his own clock from scratch, and here he is making his own washers and screws. Sometimes another person’s obsession can be calming. (via Greg Sadetsky)
  2. ROScon 2015 Recap with Videos (Robohub) — Shuttleworth suggests that robotics developers really need two things at this point: a robust Internet of Things infrastructure, followed by the addition of dynamic mobility that robots represent. However, software is a much more realistic business proposition for a robotics startup, especially if you leverage open source to create a developer community around your product and let others innovate through what you’ve built.
  3. Getting Deep Speech to Work in Mandarin (Baidu SVAIL) — TIL that some of the preprocessing traditionally used in speech-to-text systems throws away pitch information necessary to decode tonal languages like Mandarin. Deep Speech doesn’t use specialized features like MFCCs. We train directly from the spectrogram of the input audio signal. The spectrogram is a fairly general representation of an audio signal. The neural network is able to learn directly which information is relevant from the input, so we didn’t need to change anything about the features to move from English speech recognition to Mandarin speech recognition. Their model works better than humans at decoding short text such as queries.
  4. Sequencing Genomes of All Known Kakapo — TIL there’s a project to sequence genomes of 10,000 bird species and that there’s this crowdfunded science project to sequence the kakapo genome. There are only 125 left, and conservationists expect to use the sequenced genomes to ensure rare genes are preserved. Every genome in this species could be sequenced … I’m boggling. (via Duke)
Four short links: 12 November 2015

Four short links: 12 November 2015

Capsule Robots, Magnifying Deviations, Maker Books, and DevOps Theory

  1. Pillforge — open source software and hardware for Medical capsule robots aka cm-size mechatronic devices designed to perform medical tasks inside the body. Open sourced by Vanderbilt’s research team.
  2. Deviation Magnification — sweet image processing from MIT. Shares a researcher with this even more crazy paper on amplifying inconsistencies in rows of things. Mind: blown.
  3. Maker Humble Bundle — DIY bundle, pay what you want, optionally contribute to MakerEd.
  4. The O-Ring Theory of DevOps (Adrian Colyer) — Small differences in quality (i.e, in how quickly and accurately you perform each stage of your DevOps pipeline) quickly compound to make very large differences between the performance of the best-in-class and the rest.
Four short links: 30 January 2015

Four short links: 30 January 2015

FAA Rules, Sports UAVs, Woodcut Data, and Concurrent Programming

  1. FAA to Regulate UAVs? (Forbes) — and the Executive Order will segment the privacy issues related to drones into two categories — public and private. For public drones (that is, drones purchased with federal dollars), the President’s order will establish a series of privacy and transparency guidelines. See also How ESPN is Shooting the X Games with Drones (Popular Mechanics)—it’s all fun and games until someone puts out their eye with a quadrocopter. The tough part will be keeping within the tight restrictions the FAA gave them. Because drones can’t be flown above a crowd, Calcinari says, “We basically had to build a 500-foot radius around them, where the public can’t go.” The drones will fly over sections of the course that are away from the crowds, where only ESPN production employees will be. That rule is part of why we haven’t seen drones at college football games.
  2. Milestones for SaaS Companies“Getting from $0-1m is impossible. Getting from $1-10m is unlikely. And getting from $10-100m is inevitable.” —Jason Lemkin, ex-CEO of Echosign. The article proposes some significant milestones, and they ring true. Making money is generally hard. The nature of the hard changes with the amount of money you have and the amount you’re trying to make, but if it were easy, then we’d structure our society on something else.
  3. Woodcut Data VisualisationRecently, I learned how to operate a laser cutter. It’s been a whole lot of fun, and I wanted to share my experiences creating woodcut data visualizations using just D3. I love it when data visualisations break out of the glass rectangle.
  4. Why is Concurrent Programming Hard?on the one hand there is not a single concurrency abstraction that fits all problems, and on the other hand the various different abstractions are rarely designed to be used in combination with each other. We are due for a revolution in programming, something to help us make sense of the modern systems made of more moving parts than our feeble grey matter can model and intuit about.
Four short links: 26 January 2015

Four short links: 26 January 2015

Coding in VR, Git Workflows, Programming as Bookkeeping, and Valuing People

  1. How Might We Code in VR? — caught my eye because I’m looking for ideas on how to think about interaction design in the holoculus world.
  2. Git Workflows for Pros — non-developers don’t understand how important this is to productivity.
  3. All Programming is Bookkeeping — approach programming as a bookkeeping problem: checks and balances.
  4. Why I Am Not a Maker (Deb Chachra) — The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing — it’s almost always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to the Facebook community moderator to the social worker to the surgeon. Describing oneself as a maker — regardless of what one actually or mostly does — is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.
Four short links: 7 October 2014

Four short links: 7 October 2014

Chinese Makers, Code Projects, Distributed Data Structures, and Networked Games

  1. On the Maker Movement in China (Clay Shirky) — Hardware hacking hasn’t become a hot new thing in China because it never stopped being a regular old thing.
  2. A History of Apache Storm and Lessons Learned (Nathan Marz) — his lessons on building, promoting, releasing, maintaining, governance … all worth reading.
  3. Tango: Distributed Data Structures Over a Shared Logprovides developers with the abstraction of a replicated, in-memory data structure (such as a map or a tree) backed by a shared log. (via paper summary)
  4. Making Fast-Paced Multiplayer Networked Games is Hard (Gamasutra) — This may all sound like smoke and mirrors because that is exactly what it is – we are just maintaining the illusion the game is playing out in wall clock time even though updates are arriving from the past.
Four short links: 30 April 2014

Four short links: 30 April 2014

Critical Making, Torrent Filesystem, Testing Infrastructure, and Reproducible Research

  1. Critical Making — essays from 70 contributors looking at the politics, choices, and ethics of a lot of the makery going on.
  2. torrent-mount — mount a torrent as a filesystem in real time using Javascript. (via Joe McCann)
  3. Continuous Integration for Infrastructure — slides on the emerging tools for large-scale automated testing integrated into development and deployment workflow.
  4. Implementing Reproducible Research — book by Victoria Stodden and Johanna Cohoon on tools, practices, and platforms for making science that others can verify (another step in improving velocity and quality of scientific research).
Four short links: 3 February 2014

Four short links: 3 February 2014

Ouroborosification, Kid Curricula, Geeky Furniture, and Data Leakage

  1. How In-App Purchases Has Destroyed the Games Industry — fantastic before-and-after of a game, showing how it’s hollowed out for in-app-purchase upsell. the problem is that all the future generations of gamers are going to experience this as the default. They are going to grow up in a world, in which people actually think this is what gaming is like. That social engineering and scamming people is an acceptable way of doing business.
  2. Making Makers — kid-tested curricula for kids learning to code, to 3D print, stop motion animation, and more. (via BoingBoing)
  3. 555 Footstool in the Wild — awesome furniture in the shape of the ever-popular timing chip.
  4. What a Brand Knows About You When You Log In With Facebook (Twitter) — good lord. (via BoingBoing)

A NY state of hardware

The next Hardware Innovation Workshop from Maker Media will be September 18 in NYC at the Hall of Science.

This post was co-authored by Travis Good and Dale Dougherty

Every major trend was once a fringe curiosity embraced by the few with a sense of mission. The current surge of hardware innovation is no exception. A relatively small group of makers are taking advantage of inexpensive embeddable technology and new, powerful tools that are making the physical world smarter by connecting it to digital computing. Add to that the open-source sharing of code and design files, and we’re experiencing a new state of mind regarding hardware development. Rapid prototyping of new hardware ideas has never been easier or cheaper.

As more people catch on, ideas and ambitions spread. We’ve seen makerspaces grow from only a handful to now approaching 1,000 in eight years. We’ve seen funding of new hardware products go from small, rare and obscure to large, frequent and regularly capturing the limelight. As the community of modern makers expands, a professional class has emerged with ambitions of taking products to market. In many cases, these “maker pros” are able to act on their own to develop their ideas, rather than needing the material resources of a larger company to get to market. However, the road to market is not an easy one, and transitioning from prototype to a shipped product is a challenging path often wrought with difficulties.

New York has its own hardware development scene, reflected in the popularity of hardware startup Meetups, the NYC EDC’s Next Top Makers competition, and the newly announced RGA Accelerator program for connected devices. New York City (in Queens) will also be the location for the next Hardware Innovation Workshop from Maker Media on September 18 at New York’s Hall of Science, just before World Maker Faire. Read more…

Four short links: 22 August 2013

Four short links: 22 August 2013

Cryptanalysis Tools, Renaissance Hackers, MakerCamp Review, and Visual Regressions

  1. bletchley (Google Code) — Bletchley is currently in the early stages of development and consists of tools which provide: Automated token encoding detection (36 encoding variants); Passive ciphertext block length and repetition analysis; Script generator for efficient automation of HTTP requests; A flexible, multithreaded padding oracle attack library with CBC-R support.
  2. Hackers of the RenaissanceFour centuries ago, information was as tightly guarded by intellectuals and their wealthy patrons as it is today. But a few episodes around 1600 confirm that the Hacker Ethic and its attendant emphasis on open-source information and a “hands-on imperative” was around long before computers hit the scene. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Maker Camp 2013: A Look Back (YouTube) — This summer, over 1 million campers made 30 cool projects, took 6 epic field trips, and met a bunch of awesome makers.
  4. huxley (Github) — Watches you browse, takes screenshots, tells you when they change. Huxley is a test-like system for catching visual regressions in Web applications. (via Alex Dong)
Four short links: 26 June 2013

Four short links: 26 June 2013

Neural Memory Allocation, DoD Synthbio, Sierra Leone Makers, and Complex Humanities Networks

  1. Memory Allocation in Brains (PDF) — The results reviewed here suggest that there are competitive mechanisms that affect memory allocation. For example, new dentate gyrus neurons, amygdala cells with higher excitability, and synapses near previously potentiated synapses seem to have the competitive edge over other cells and synapses and thus affect memory allocation with time scales of weeks, hours, and minutes. Are all memory allocation mechanisms competitive, or are there mechanisms of memory allocation that do not involve competition? Even though it is difficult to resolve this question at the current time, it is important to note that most mechanisms of memory allocation in computers do not involve competition. Does the dissector use a slab allocator? Tip your waiter, try the veal.
  2. Living Foundries (DARPA) — one motivating, widespread and currently intractable problem is that of corrosion/materials degradation. The DoD must operate in all environments, including some of the most corrosively aggressive on Earth, and do so with increasingly complex heterogeneous materials systems. This multifaceted and ubiquitous problem costs the DoD approximately $23 Billion per year. The ability to truly program and engineer biology, would enable the capability to design and engineer systems to rapidly and dynamically prevent, seek out, identify and repair corrosion/materials degradation. (via Motley Fool)
  3. Innovate Salone — finalists from a Sierra Leone maker/innovation contest. Part of David Sengeh‘s excellent work.
  4. Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks — ebook series, conferences, talks, on network analysis in the humanities. Everything from Protestant letter networks in the reign of Mary, to the repertory of 16th century polyphony, to a data-driven update to Alfred Barr’s diagram of cubism and abstract art (original here).