- UK Government to Sell Its Students’ Data (Wired UK) — The National Pupil Database (NPD) contains detailed information about pupils in schools and colleges in England, including test and exam results, progression at each key stage, gender, ethnicity, pupil absence and exclusions, special educational needs, first language. The UK is becoming patient zero for national data self-harm.
- It’s Insanely Easy to Hack Hospital Equipment (Wired) — Erven won’t identify specific product brands that are vulnerable because he’s still trying to get some of the problems fixed. But he said a wide cross-section of devices shared a handful of common security holes, including lack of authentication to access or manipulate the equipment; weak passwords or default and hardcoded vendor passwords like “admin” or “1234″; and embedded web servers and administrative interfaces that make it easy to identify and manipulate devices once an attacker finds them on a network.
- Postman — API testing tool.
- App Controlled Hearing Aid Improves Even Normal Hearing (NYTimes) — It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the latest crop of advanced hearing aids are better than the ears most of us were born with. Human augmentation with software and hardware.
"mobile" entries
Theming in Kivy
Adding consistency to Kivy's Python UI tools
Kivy has a wonderful set of built-in widgets that can be extended in numerous ways. They have very useful behaviors, but their look and feel may not integrate well with your App or the platforms you are targeting. Kivy doesn’t support theming out of the box right now, but if you poke around enough, there are a range of options you can use to customize the default look of widgets without having to define your own inherited versions of them.
I’ll first introduce you to Kivy’s image atlases, which are less mysterious than they sound, and are important groundwork for understanding theming in Kivy. Then you’ll learn two different ways to do manual theming in Kivy, with an eye to future automation.
Introducing Atlases
To understand theming, you must first understand atlases. An atlas is essentially a collection of distinct images combined into a single image file for loading efficiency. A JSON file describes the location of the separate images inside that master image file so that Kivy can access them directly. If you’ve ever worked with CSS sprites, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, the following example should explain everything.
Four short links: 28 April 2014
Retail Student Data, Hacking Hospitals, Testing APIs, and Becoming Superhuman
Four short links: 23 April 2014
Mobile UX, Ideation Tools, Causal Consistency, and Intellectual Ventures Patent Fail
- Samsung UX (Scribd) — little shop of self-catalogued UX horrors, courtesy discovery in a lawsuit. Dated (Android G1 as competition) but rewarding to see there are signs of self-awareness in the companies that inflict unusability on the world.
- Tools for Ideation and Problem Solving (Dan Lockton) — comprehensive and analytical take on different systems for ideas and solutions.
- Don’t Settle for Eventual Consistency (ACM) — proposes “causal consistency”, prototyped in COPS and Eiger from Princeton.
- Intellectual Ventures Loses Patent Case (Ars Technica) — The Capital One case ended last Wednesday, when a Virginia federal judge threw out the two IV patents that remained in the case. It’s the first IV patent case seen through to a judgment, and it ended in a total loss for the patent-holding giant: both patents were invalidated, one on multiple grounds.
5 ways to improve battery life in your app
Tips and tricks to squeeze the most out of your mobile UI
Editor’s Note: Mobile HTML5 is a book by front-end engineer and frequent speaker Estelle Weyl. It is packed with hands-on examples to make you a stronger web developer–including best practices for SVG, Canvas, and CSS3 tailored to fit mobile devices. In the excerpt below, Estelle walks you through five easy things you can do to improve battery life in your mobile web apps. As throughout the book, the tips she provides come from her own real-life experience with these technologies.
Unlike desktop computers that are tethered to the wall at all times, and even laptop computers that are generally used by stationary users, mobile users do not recharge their devices throughout the day. Mobile users expect their devices to last, at a minimum, 24 hours between recharging.
Your users do realize that calls and GPS usage consume battery power. However, if they think they’re just using their browser to surf the Web, they don’t consider that different websites will drain their battery faster than other sites. It is our job, as developers, to manage the power consumption of our code. Read more…
Four short links: 9 April 2014
Internet of Listeners, Mobile Deep Belief, Crowdsourced Spectrum Data, and Quantum Minecraft
- Jasper Project — an open source platform for developing always-on, voice-controlled applications. Shouting is the new swiping—I eagerly await Gartner touting the Internet-of-things-that-misunderstand-you.
- DeepBeliefSDK — deep neural network library for iOS. (via Pete Warden)
- Microsoft Spectrum Observatory — crowdsourcing spectrum utilisation information. Just open sourced their code.
- qcraft — beginner’s guide to quantum physics in Minecraft. (via Nelson Minar)
Four short links: 26 March 2014
Better Fonts, Speaking Javascript, Arduinos & Phones, and Averaging Streams in Go
- brick — uncompressed versions of popular web fonts. The difference between compressed and uncompressed is noticeable.
- Speaking Javascript — free online version of the new O’Reilly book by Axel Rauschmayer.
- micio.js — clever hack to communicate between Arduino and mobile phones via the microphone jack.
- Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages for Go — Go implementation of algorithm useful for dealing with streams of data.
Four short links: 19 March 2014
Legal Automata, Invasive Valley, Feature Creep, and Device Market Share
- The Transformation of the Workplace Through Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Automation — fascinating legal questions about the rise of the automated workforce. . Is an employer required to bargain if it wishes to acquire robots to do work previously performed by unionized employees working under a collective bargaining agreement? does the collective bargaining agreement control the use of robots to perform this work? A unionized employer seeking to add robots to its business process must consider these questions. (via Robotenomics)
- The Invasive Valley of Personalization (Maria Anderson) — there is a fine line between useful personalization and creepy personalization. It reminded me of the “uncanny valley” in human robotics. So I plotted the same kind of curves on two axes: Access to Data as the horizontal axis, and Perceived Helpfulness on the vertical axis. For technology to get vast access to data AND make it past the invasive valley, it would have to be perceived as very high on the perceived helpfulness scale.
- Coffee and Feature Creep — fantastic story of how a chat system became a bank. (via BoingBoing)
- The Rise and Fall of PCs — use this slide of market share over time by device whenever you need to talk about the “post-PC age”. (via dataisugly subreddit)
Four short links: 17 March 2014
Wireframe Quiz, Business Values, Mobile Dev, and the Bad Guy Mindset
- De-Design the Web — quiz, can you recognise common websites from just their wireframes? For the non-designer (like myself) it’s a potent reminder of the power of design. Design’s front of mind as we chew on the Internet of Affordances. (via USvsTHEM)
- Words I Hold Dear (Slideshare) — short but effective presentation on values in business. If you are confident that you can bear responsibility, and will not do anything immoral, illegal, or unethical, then it is not too hard to choose the path that promises the most adventure.
- Android Development for iOS Devs — in case you had forgotten that developing for multiple mobile platforms is like a case of fire-breathing butt warts. (not good)
- The World Through the Eyes of Hackers (PDF) — I’ve long thought that the real problem is that schools trains subordinates to meet expectations and think like a Nice Person, but defence is only possible when you know how to break expectations and think like a Bad Guy.
Four short links: 6 March 2014
Repoveillance, Mobiveillance, Discovery and Orchestration, and Video Analysis
- Repo Surveillance Network — An automated reader attached to the spotter car takes a picture of every license plate it passes and sends it to a company in Texas that already has more than 1.8 billion plate scans from vehicles across the country.
- Mobile Companies Work Big Data — Meanwhile companies are taking different approaches to user consent. Orange collects data for its Flux Vision data product from French mobile users without offering a way for them to opt-out, as does Telefonica’s equivalent service. Verizon told customers in 2011 it could use their data and now includes 100 million retail mobile customers by default, though they can opt out online.
- Serfdom — a decentralised solution for service discovery and orchestration that is lightweight, highly available, and fault tolerant.
- Longomatch — a free video analysis software for sport analysts with unlimited possibilities: Record, Tag, Review, Draw, Edit Videos and much more! (via Mark Osborne)
Four short links: 5 March 2014
Cheap Gesture Sensor, Ignorance as Strength, Android Malware Resistance, and Security Talks
- $1 Gesture-Recognizing Device (GigaOm) — the AllSee is the size of a quarter, harvests RF for power, and detects the variations in signal strength caused by gestures.
- A Conversation with Sydney Brenner — The thing is to have no discipline at all. Biology got its main success by the importation of physicists that came into the field not knowing any biology and I think today that’s very important. I strongly believe that the only way to encourage innovation is to give it to the young. The young have a great advantage in that they are ignorant. Because I think ignorance in science is very important. If you’re like me and you know too much you can’t try new things. I always work in fields of which I’m totally ignorant.
- Android Almost Impenetrable to Malware — multiple layers of defence, including signatures of known-bad systems found in the wild, necessary to retain an “open” marketplace vs Apple’s lock-down.
- TrustyCon (YouTube) — video of the speakers at the conference that was set up by speakers who withdrew from the RSA conference. (via BoingBoing)