"toys" entries

Four short links: 13 March 2015

Four short links: 13 March 2015

Sad Sysadminning, Data Workflow, Ambiguous "Database," and Creepy Barbie

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 13, 2015
  1. The Sad State of Sysadmin in the Age of Containers (Erich Schubert) — a Grumpy Old Man rant, but solid. And since nobody is still able to compile things from scratch, everybody just downloads precompiled binaries from random websites. Often without any authentication or signature.
  2. Pinball — Pinterest open-sourced their data workflow manager.
  3. Disambiguating Databases (ACM) — The scope of the term database is vast. Technically speaking, anything that stores data for later retrieval is a database. Even by that broad definition, there is functionality that is common to most databases. This article enumerates those features at a high level. The intent is to provide readers with a toolset with which they might evaluate databases on their relative merits.
  4. Hello Barbie — I just can’t imagine a business not wanting to mine and repurpose the streams of audio data coming into their servers. “You listen to Katy Perry a lot. So do I! You have a birthday coming up. Have you told your parents about the Katy Perry brand official action figurines from Mattel? Kids love ’em, and demo data and representative testing indicates you will, too!” Or just offer a subscription service where parents can listen in on what their kids say when they play in the other room with their friends. Or identify product mentions and cross-market offline. Or …
Four short links: 15 August 2013

Four short links: 15 August 2013

Audio Visualization, 3D Printed Toys, Data Center Computing, and Downloding Not Yet Beaten

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 15, 2013
  1. github realtime activity — audio triggered by github activity, built with choir.io.
  2. Makies Hit Shelves at Selfridges — 3d printing business gaining mainstream distribution. Win!
  3. The Datacenter as Computer — we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC). We describe the architecture of WSCs, the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base. We hope it will be useful to architects and programmers of today’s WSCs, as well as those of future many-core platforms which may one day implement the equivalent of today’s WSCs on a single board. (via Mike Loukides)
  4. Illegal Downloads Not Erased By Simultaneous Release — Data gathered by TorrentFreak throughout the day reveals that most early downloaders, a massive 16.1%, come from Australia. Down Under the show aired on the pay TV network Foxtel, but it appears that many Aussies prefer to download a copy instead. The same is true for the United States and Canada, with 16% and 9.6% of the total downloads respectively, despite the legal offerings. Unclear whether this represents greater or less downloading than would have happened without simultaneous release.
Four short links: 23 November 2011

Four short links: 23 November 2011

Inside-Out Libraries, Cleaner YouTube, Kid Tablet, Facetracking Toy

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 23, 2011
  1. Massive Wikimedia Donation — I missed it when it happened, but the State Library of Queensland made the 4th largest ever donation of high-resolution out-of-copyright images to the Wikimedia Foundation. The image metadata are available through Wikimedia under liberal licensing terms, too. This is what your national and state libraries should be doing!
  2. Clea.nr — strip all the crap from around YouTube pages. (via Ed Tech Ideas)
  3. Nabi Tablet (Toys R Us) — ruggedized Android tablet for kids, $199 price point. (via Mark Osborne)
  4. Face-Tracking KiddyZoom Video Cam (YouTube) — I’m always startled most when the future turns up in kids’ toys. Tablets and face-tracking? Soon it’ll be face recognition (“hello mommy!” says the doll), brainwave-triggered activity, and 3D printers. (via BERG London)
Four short links: 6 April 2011

Four short links: 6 April 2011

Timelines, Hardware Pilgrimage, Ubiquitous Play Computing, Eye-Tracking

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 6, 2011
  1. Timeline Setter — ProPublica-released open source tool for building timelines from spreadsheets of event data. See their post for more information. (via Laurel Ruma)
  2. Return to Shenzhen Part 1 — Nate from SparkFun makes a trip to component capital of the world. It’s like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for geeks. a special market that dealt exclusively with bulk cell phones. That’s right, you could buy a pile of cell phones. […] This market was truly amazing. It was one of most dense I’ve been to, shoulder to shoulder with very little standing room. Every device imaginable was available (checkout the pile of iPads) and people were literally negotiating a spot price minute by minute. The raw phones were sold for cash and then taken to other parts of the market for parts, resale, or recycling.
  3. Suwappu Toys in Media (BERG London) — a concept video for a toy project. This is not primarily a technology demo, it’s a video exploration of how toys and media might converge through computer vision and augmented video. We’ve used video both as a communication tool and as a material exploration of toys, animation, augmented reality and 3D worlds.
  4. Predator Eye-Tracking Video (YouTube) — neat technology. The source was released, retracted, reposted to GitHub by a third party, then retracted but rumours are it will be properly released soon.
Four short links: 24 September 2010

Four short links: 24 September 2010

Crawlable Ajax, Security Lessons, Graph Database, and Toy Hardware

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 24, 2010
  1. Making Ajax Applications Crawlable (Google) — Google’s system for allowing Ajax applications to provide HTML snapshots for search engines. (via alexdong on twitter)
  2. Security Lessons Learned from the Diaspora Launch — great explanation of the programming mistakes that were in the Diaspora code, and the security risks that resulted. Again, I recommend the OWASP site if you aren’t aware of the types of security mistakes you are making.
  3. A Brief Tour of Graphd — the triplestore behind Freebase. Want. (via timclicks on Twitter)
  4. Toybots — startup working on Internet-aware hardware for toymakers: 3G, WiFi, GPS, and accelerometer waiting to be embedded in toys.