Next Thing's CHIP is a $9 computer — kind of like a Raspberry Pi, but even cheaper. Well, not as cheap as the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, which was launched after CHIP blew up Kickstarter, but cheaper...
Cosimo Galluzzi

⁂
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
No title available
taylor price
One Nice Bug Per Day

tannertan36
🪼
cherry valley forever
YOU ARE THE REASON
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Keni

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Xuebing Du

blake kathryn

if i look back, i am lost

pixel skylines
Mike Driver
ojovivo
KIROKAZE

seen from United States

seen from Australia

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from Norway
seen from Netherlands
seen from Türkiye

seen from Malaysia

seen from Singapore

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from New Zealand

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Brazil

seen from United Kingdom
@acabalofdarkshadowyfigures
Next Thing's CHIP is a $9 computer — kind of like a Raspberry Pi, but even cheaper. Well, not as cheap as the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, which was launched after CHIP blew up Kickstarter, but cheaper...
A 'Battery-Free Computer' Powered by Radio Waves #RFID
Engineered with the 16-bit MSP430 microcontroller, the ‘WISP’ (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform) is a battery-less circuit that is powered by converting harvested radio waves into electricity. A project of the Sensor Systems Laboratory at the University of Washington, you can find documentation and publications about WISP here at the UW website.
But what if you could leave the battery out of the equation entirely? That’s just what the University of Washington’s Sensor Lab has done. Researchers there created the WISP, or Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform: a combination sensor and computing chip that doesn’t need a battery or a wired power source to operate. Instead, it sucks in radio waves emitted from a standard, off-the-shelf RFID reader—the same technology that retail shops use to deter shoplifters—and converts them into electricity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvtyZIPyXMs via FastCo Design.
Pacemakers and Piracy: The Unintended Consequences of the DMCA for Medical Implants [PLEASE SHARE!]
As networked computers disappear into our bodies, working their way into hearing aids, pacemakers, and prostheses, information security has never been more urgent – or personal. A networked body needs its computers to work well, and fail even better.
Graceful failure is the design goal of all critical systems. Nothing will ever work perfectly, so when things go wrong, you want to be sure that the damage is contained, and that the public has a chance to learn from past mistakes.
That’s why EFF has just filed comments with the FDA in an open docket on cyber-security guidelines for medical systems, letting the agency know about the obstacles that a species of copyright law – yes, copyright law! – has put in the way of medical safety.
The problem is Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits tampering with “effective means of access control” that restricted copyrighted works. The law was a creature of the entertainment industry, which saw an opportunity to create new business models that transferred value from their customers to their shareholders. CDs didn’t have digital locks, so was easy to convert the music you bought on CD to play on your digital home stereo, phone, and car. DVDs have digital locks, so all you can legally do with the movies you buy on DVD is watch them. If you want to get at that latent value in your discs – the value of watching a movie on a phone, or backing it up in case you scratch your disc, for example – you have to buy the movie again.
To keep these business models intact, large content holders sued and threatened security researchers who disclosed flaws in systems with digital locks, arguing that sharing research that required circumvention violated the DMCA. As a result, systems with digital locks became a no-go zone for security research, meaning that their flaws fester for longer before being brought to light and fixed.
And then it got weird.
Increasingly, every machine and device has a computer inside it, from cars to thermostats to fancy new lightbulbs. Manufacturers realized that merely by shellacking the minimum plausible digital lock around these devices, they could use the DMCA to enforce the same high-profit restrictions that had been the purview of the entertainment industry until then.
First it was phones that would only run software from the manufacturer’s app store. Then it was cars that could only be diagnosed and repaired by authorized service centers that only used the manufacturer’s official, high-priced replacement parts. Then it was everywhere: thermostats and lightbulbs, yes, and tractors and voting machines, too.
And, of course, medical devices.
Manufacturers who use digital locks to restrict the configurations of their devices get a lot of commercial benefit. They can force doctor’s offices to pay recurring license fees for the diagnostic software that works with these gadgets. They can restrict access to service and even consumables – why allow just anyone’s insulin to be installed on your pacemaker when the inkjet printer people have demonstrated a way to charge vintage Champagne prices for something that costs pennies a gallon?
But a profit motive that might conflict with users’ best interests isn’t the worst problem. The great danger is safety. Medical implants are increasingly equipped with wireless interfaces, because:
a) they’re cheap; and
b) it’s hard to attach a USB cable to a device that’s been implanted in your chest cavity.
That means that bugs in medical implants can be exploited over their wireless interfaces, too. For example: lethal shocks from implanted pacemakers and defibrillators. It was not for nothing that former VP Dick Cheney had the wireless interface on his pacemaker deactivated (future software updates for Mr Cheney’s heart-monitor will thus involve general anaesthesia, a scalpel, and a rib-spreader).
However you feel about copyright law, everyone should agree that copyright shouldn’t get in the way of testing the software in your hearing aid, pacemaker, insulin pump, or prosthetic limb to look for safety risks (or privacy risks, for that matter). Implantees need to know the truth about the reliability of the technology they trust their lives to.
That’s why today, EFF asked the FDA to require manufacturers to promise never to use the DMCA to attack security research, as a condition of certifying their devices. This would go a long way to protecting patients from manufacturers who might otherwise use copyright law to suppress the truth about their devices’ shortcomings. What’s more, it’s an approach that other groups have signed up for, as part of the normal process of standardization.
We think Congress should modify the DMCA to make it clear that it doesn’t apply to devices that have no nexus with copyright infringement, but patients can’t wait for this long-overdue reform. In the meantime, agencies like the FDA have a role to play in keeping patients safe from devices that work well, but fail badly.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/pacemakers-and-piracy-why-dmca-has-no-business-medical-implants
Graceful failure, when other options aren’t viable.
Content - Most marketers get very excited about user-generated content (UGC) because it can boost brand awareness and business. But beware: Some UGC can actually damage your brand.
Thoughts on managing complexity
Just wash the damn spoon! Image: Max Temkin http://ift.tt/1SzN7aV
This looks useful but honestly my eyes glazed over. TL;DR secure, lots of protocols, packages, documentation.
Why conversational UI fails in practice and what the West can really learn from Asian messaging apps.
The start of this article really nails what’s wrong with the bot model, illustrated with current day examples. It then goes a bit of the rails with QR code stuff, but recovers with a strong finish about what needs to happen next in the world of apps / real user pain points.
As a user, I want my apps — whether they’re native or web-based pseudo-apps — to have some consistent concept of identity, payments, offline storage, and data sharing. I want to be able to quickly add someone in person or from their website to my contacts. The next time I do a startup, I want to spend my time specializing in solving a specific problem for my users, not getting them over the above general hurdles.
…But more than anything, rather than screwing around with bots, I want the tech industry to focus on solving these major annoyances and handling some of the common use cases I described that my phone ought to do better with by now.
When you don't want to cancel *all* the noise.
Headphones have come a long way in the past couple of years. Nowadays, it’s pretty easy to find a pair of noise-cancelling wireless earbuds that allow you to sink into your favourite songs, free from the noise of the outside world. But there’s a big problem: they cancel literally all of the sounds, and that can be dangerous, and at at times, just plain inconvenient.
While noise-cancelling headphones are perfect for ignoring some weird guy babbling on the bus, they can also cause you to miss the sounds you need to hear, like when your stop’s coming up or when your phone is ringing. To address this problem, researchers have announced a new type of earbud that allows you to pick which background noises get through.
Developed by a team from Curtin University in Western Australia, the new wireless earbuds, called IQbuds, use “augmented hearing technology” that allows the user to pick and choose which sounds they want to hear and which ones they don’t. And according to the team, these earbuds aren’t just for your music.
idk I just love how we Young People Today use ~improper~ punctuation/grammar in actually really defined ways to express tone without having to explicitly state tone like that’s just really fucking cool, like
no = “No,” she said.
no. = "No,” she said sharply.
No = “No,” she stated firmly.
No. = “No,” she snapped.
NO = “No!” she shouted.
noooooo = “No,” she moaned.
no~ = “No,” she said with a drawn-out sing-song.
~no~ = “No,” she drawled sarcastically.
NOOOOO = “No!” she screamed dramatically.
no?! = “No,” she said incredulously.
I’ve been calling this “typographical nuance” and I have a few more to add:
*no* = “No,” she said emphatically.
*nopes on out of here* = “No,” she said of herself in the third person, with a touch of humorous emphasis.
~*~noooo~*~ = “No,” she moaned in stylized pseudo-desperation.
#no = “No,” she added as a side comment.
“no” = “No,” she scare-quoted.
wtf are you kidding no = “No,” she said flatly. “And I can’t believe I have to say this.”
no no No No NO NO NO NO = "No,” she repeated over and over again, growing louder and more emphatic.
nooOOOO = “No,” she said, starting out quietly and turning into a scream.
*no = “Oops, I meant ‘no,’” she corrected, “Sorry for the typo in my previous message.”
Virtual reality is posed to become a fundamental technology, and outfits like Magic Leap have an opportunity to become some of the largest companies ever.
IT and business have struggled over the idea of alignment for decades, and not always successfully. Members of the staff of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research have come up with what they think is a better way for business and IT to collaborate. Will it work?
With seemingly everything moving to the cloud these days, it’s important to know when setting up your own data management center can still be the right decision.
IT can harness the power of shadow IT services and solutions and mitigate associated risks by wrapping formal SLAs around them.
WingLights Bicycle LED Turn Signal Indicators
Activate your indicator lights when you’re Tour De Francing on the Streets!
CHECK IT OUT
Cool Things to Buy on COOL SH*T i BUY
“The great writer’s gift to a reader is to make him a better writer.”
If you're a beginner designer, you need to read this.