- beaglepilot (Github) — open source open hardware autopilot for Beagleboard. (via DIY Drones)
- IFR Robot Sales Charts (PDF) — 2013: all-time high of 179,000 industrial robots sold and growth continues in 2014. (via Robohub)
- The Top 5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible (EFF) — great Mythbusting.
- Netflix’s New Error Message — instead of “buffering”, they point the finger at the carrier between them and the customer who is to blame for slow performance. Genius!
"UI" entries
Four short links: 5 June 2014
Open Autopilot, Record Robot Sales, NSA Myths Busted, and Informative Errors
Four short links: 26 May 2014
Statistical Sensitivity, Scientific Mining, Data Mining Books, and Two-Sided Smartphones
- Car Alarms and Smoke Alarms (Slideshare) — how to think about and draw the line between sensitivity and specificity.
- 101 Uses for Content Mining — between the list in the post and the comments from readers, it’s a good introduction to some of the value to be obtained from full-text structured and unstructured access to scientific research publications.
- 12 Free-as-in-beer Data Mining Books — for your next flight.
- Dual-Touch Smartphone Concept — brilliant design sketches for interactivity using the back of the phone as a touch-sensitive input device.
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: 25 April 2014
IoT UX, Tilty Library, Local Govt Dashboard, and SF Dreams
- UX of the Internet of Things — a Pinterest board of IoT designs and experience.
- parallax.js — Javascript library for tilt, shake, etc. interactivity on iPad. NICE demo.
- Gov.UK Local Government Dashboard Prototype is Live — not glorious, but making the move from central to local government is super-important. (via Steve Halliday)
- How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors are Shaping Your Future (Smithsonian) — SF writers create our dreams. “Techno-optimists have gone from thinking that cheap nuclear power would solve all our problems to thinking that unlimited computing power will solve all our problems,” says Ted Chiang, who has explored the nature of intelligence in works such as The Lifecycle of Software Objects. “But fiction about incredibly powerful computers doesn’t inspire people the same way that fiction about large-scale engineering did, because achievements in computing are both more abstract and more mundane.”
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: 1 April 2014
Unimaginative Vehicular Connectivity, Data Journalism, VR and Gender, and Open Data Justice
- Connected for a Purpose (Jim Stogdill) — At a recent conference, an executive at a major auto manufacturer described his company’s efforts to digitize their line-up like this: “We’re basically wrapping a two-ton car around an iPad. Eloquent critique of the Internet of Shallow Things.
- Why Nate Silver Can’t Explain It All — Data extrapolation is a very impressive trick when performed with skill and grace, like ice sculpting or analytical philosophy, but it doesn’t come equipped with the humility we should demand from our writers. Would be a shame for Nate Silver to become Malcolm Gladwell: nice stories but they don’t really hold up.
- Gender and VR (danah boyd) — Although there was variability across the board, biological men were significantly more likely to prioritize motion parallax. Biological women relied more heavily on shape-from-shading. In other words, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on. Great article, especially notable for there are more sex hormones on the retina than in anywhere else in the body except for the gonads.
- Even The Innocent Should Worry About Sex Offender Apps (Quartz) — And when data becomes compressed by third parties, when it gets flattened out into one single data stream, your present and your past collide with potentially huge ramifications for your future. When it comes to personal data—of any kind—we not only need to consider what it will be used for but how that data will be represented, and what such representation might mean for us and others. Data policies are like justice systems: either you suffer a few innocent people being wrongly condemned (bad uses of open data0, or your system permits some wrongdoers to escape (mould grows in the dark).
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)
Four short links: 14 February 2014
Bitcoin Analysis, 3D Crime Scenes, 3D Display, and Cloud API
- Bitcoin: Understanding and Assessing Potential Opportunities (Slideshare) — VC deck on Bitcoin market and opportunities, long-term and short-term. Interesting lens on the development and gaps.
- Queensland Police Map Crime Scenes with 3D Scanner (ComputerWorld) — can’t wait for the 3D printed merchandise from famous trials.
- Atheer Labs — An immersive 3D display, over a million apps, sub-mm 3D hand interaction, all in 75 grams.
- libcloud — Python library for interacting with many of the popular cloud service providers using a unified API.
Four short links: 13 February 2014
Open Web Ranking, Quantified Self Gadgets, Armband Input, and Bitcoin Exchanges Threatened
- The Common Crawl WWW Ranking — open data, open methodology, behind an open ranking of the top sites on the web. Preprint paper available. (via Slashdot)
- Felton’s Sensors (Quartz) — inside the gadgets Nicholas Felton uses to quantify himself.
- Myo Armband (IEEE Spectrum) — armband input device with eight EMG (electromyography) muscle activity sensors along with a nine-axis inertial measurement unit (that’s three axes each for accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer), meaning that you get forearm gesture sensing along with relative motion sensing (as opposed to absolute position). The EMG sensors pick up on the electrical potential generated by muscle cells, and with the Myo on your forearm, the sensors can read all of the muscles that control your fingers, letting them spy on finger position as well as grip strength.
- Bitcoin Exchanges Under Massive and Concerted Attack — he who lives by the network dies by the network. a DDoS attack is taking Bitcoin’s transaction malleability problem and applying it to many transactions in the network, simultaneously. “So as transactions are being created, malformed/parallel transactions are also being created so as to create a fog of confusion over the entire network, which then affects almost every single implementation out there,” he added. Antonopoulos went on to say that Blockchain.info’s implementation is not affected, but some exchanges have been affected – their internal accounting systems are gradually going out of sync with the network.
Four short links: 4 February 2014
UX Fundamentals, Mozilla Persona, Pi Tests, and The Holodeck
- UX Fundamentals, Crash Course — 31 posts introducing the fundamental practices and mindsets of UX.
- Why We Love Persona And You Should Too — Mozilla’s identity system is an interesting offering. Fancy that, you might have single-sign on without Single Pwn-On.
- Raspberry Pi As Test Harness — Pi accessory maker uses Pis to automate the testing of his … it’s Pis all the way down.
- The Holodeck Begins to Take Shape — displays, computation, and interesting input devices, are coming together in various guises.