As the holiday season approaches and New Year’s and its inevitable fitness-related resolutions draw near, wearables makers are scrambling. Major brands like Apple and Samsung have realized that smartwatches need to at least be good activity trackers…
Source: Engadget – Samsung Gear Sport review: A versatile fitness-first smartwatch
Monthly Archives: October 2017
How to Feel Productive Without Being Productive
Most people are interested in getting something done. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe you just want to feel productive, or efficient, or hard-working, without having to actually accomplish something. You can’t just start doing that. First you need to plan, and first you need to plan to plan.
Source: LifeHacker – How to Feel Productive Without Being Productive
Photo: Vulpes vulpes is the original silver fox
Our foxy photo of the day comes from Manitoba, Canada.
Source: TreeHugger – Photo: Vulpes vulpes is the original silver fox
Why Do People See Ghosts?
You live and then you die and then you rot in a hole—or so say the elites, with their glasses, and their PhDs in neuroscience. This bummer reality has never appealed much to Americans, 72% of whom believe in some kind of afterlife. It’s a comparatively rarer, though still sizable, breed of American who believe in some…
Source: Gizmodo – Why Do People See Ghosts?
Prank your friends with the WhooPi Cushion
Learn about using switches and programming GPIO pins while you prank your friends with the Raspberry Pi-powered whoopee WhooPi Cushion!
Whoopee cushion PRANK with a Raspberry Pi: HOW-TO
Explore the world of Raspberry Pi physical computing with our free FutureLearn courses: http://rpf.io/futurelearn Free make your own Whoopi Cushion resource: http://rpf.io/whoopi For more information on Raspberry Pi and the charitable work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, including Code Club and CoderDojo, visit http://rpf.io Our resources are free to use in schools, clubs, at home and at events.
The WhooPi Cushion
You might remember Carrie Anne and me showing off the WhooPi Cushion live on Facebook last year. The project was created as a simple proof of concept during a Pi Towers maker day. However, our viewers responded so enthusastically that we set about putting together a how-to resource for it.
When we made the resource available, it turned out to be so popular that we decided to include the project in one of our first FutureLearn courses and produced a WhooPi Cushion video tutorial to go with it.
Our FutureLearn course attendees love the video, so last week we uploaded it to YouTube! Now everyone can follow along with James Robinson to make their own WhooPi Cushion out of easy-to-gather household items such as tinfoil, paper plates, and spongy material.
Build upon the WhooPi Cushion
Once you’ve completed your prank cushion, you’ll have learnt new skills that you can incorporate into other projects.
For example, you’ll know how to program an action in response to a button press — so how about playing a sound when the button is released instead? Just like that, you’ll have created a simple pressure-based alarm system. Or you could upgrade the functionality of the cushion by including a camera that takes a photo of your unwitting victim’s reaction!
Building upon your skills to increase your knowledge of programming constructs and manufacturing techniques is key to becoming a digital maker. When you use the free Raspberry Pi resources, you’re also working through our digital curriculum, which guides you on this learning journey.
FutureLearn courses for free
Our FutureLearn courses are completely free and cover a variety of topics and skills, including object-oriented programming and teaching physical computing.
Regardless of your location, you can learn with us online to improve your knowledge of teaching digital making as well as your own hands-on digital skill set.
The post Prank your friends with the WhooPi Cushion appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Source: Raspberry Pi – Prank your friends with the WhooPi Cushion
EK Supremacy EVO Threadripper TR4 Waterblock Review
EK is one of the most heralded names in the enthusiast computer cooling industry. It has been building waterblocks for custom CPU cooling since 2003. It has now thrown its hat into the AMD Threadripper waterblock ring. Does the Supremacy EVO waterblock have the performance to back up its reputation against tough competition?
Source: [H]ardOCP – EK Supremacy EVO Threadripper TR4 Waterblock Review
ADATA Premier and XPG SDXC and microSDXC Cards Review
Digital cameras and camcorders employ memory cards (flash-based removable media) for storage of captured content. There are different varieties of memory cards catering to various performance levels. CompactFlash (CF) became popular in the late 90s, but, has now been overtaken by Secure Digital (SD) cards. Many computing systems (PCs as well as smartphones) also support SD cards for augmenting local storage capabilities. We recently started in-depth evaluation of the performance of various memory cards. ADATA sent over a representative bunch of their SD card portfolio for review. Read on for a look at some of their SD and microSD cards.
Source: AnandTech – ADATA Premier and XPG SDXC and microSDXC Cards Review
Seriously Google, No One Builds A Cheeseburger Like That
When it comes to covering the tech industry, we’re usually tasked with covering topics that are for the most part serious topics. Be it Apple’s iPhone X or NVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce GTX 1070 Ti or perceived shortcomings with Google’s Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. However, Google came under fire for something this weekend that to many is likely downright
Source: Hot Hardware – Seriously Google, No One Builds A Cheeseburger Like That
Fill Up Your Board Game Cabinet For the Holidays With This One-Day Amazon Sale
The holidays are coming soon, and with them, extended family time. So you could all sit in a circle on your phones with a football game blaring in the background, or you could pick out some board games or puzzles from today’s Amazon Gold Box, and enjoy those together instead (probably with football still blaring in…
Source: LifeHacker – Fill Up Your Board Game Cabinet For the Holidays With This One-Day Amazon Sale
Essential Phone Can Be Had For $299 With Newly Activated Friends And Family Codes
The cost of an Essential Phone just keep getting cheaper. About a week ago, Andy Rubin and company slashed $200 off the price of the Essential Phone, knocking it down to $499. The price cut made it one of the more affordable flagships phones on the market, but on top of that, Rubin’s outfit is running a promotion that saves buyers an additional
Source: Hot Hardware – Essential Phone Can Be Had For 9 With Newly Activated Friends And Family Codes
Thousands of Videogame-Playing Soldiers Could Shape the Future of War
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic:
As far as video games go, Operation Overmatch is rather unremarkable. Players command military vehicles in eight-on-eight matches against the backdrop of rendered cityscapes — a common setup of games that sometimes have the added advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars in development budgets. Overmatch does have something unique, though: its mission. The game’s developers believe it will change how the U.S. Army fights wars. Overmatch’s players are nearly all soldiers in real life. As they develop tactics around futuristic weapons and use them in digital battle against peers, the game monitors their actions.
Each shot fired and decision made, in addition to messages the players write in private forums, is a bit of information soaked up with a frequency not found in actual combat, or even in high-powered simulations without a wide network of players. The data is logged, sorted, and then analyzed, using insights from sports and commercial video games. Overmatch’s team hopes this data will inform the Army’s decisions about which technologies to purchase and how to develop tactics using them, all with the aim of building a more forward-thinking, prepared force… While the game currently has about 1,000 players recruited by word of mouth and outreach from the Overmatch team, the developers eventually want to involve tens of thousands of soldiers. This milestone would allow for millions of hours of game play per year, according to project estimates, enough to generate rigorous data sets and test hypotheses.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Thousands of Videogame-Playing Soldiers Could Shape the Future of War
Purdue Researchers Develop Exotic Intrachip Microchannel Liquid Cooling For Supercomputers
When it comes today’s high-end processors and graphics cards, it’s a well-known fact that cooling is crucial to maintaining performance and preventing your hardware from having a premature meltdown. In the case of modern chips, that cooling comes in the form of heatsinks or water-cooling blocks that are directly attached to the wick away heat.
However,
Source: Hot Hardware – Purdue Researchers Develop Exotic Intrachip Microchannel Liquid Cooling For Supercomputers
Nintendo Profit Outlook Doubles Thanks To Booming Switch Sales
Nintendo is riding high on the success of its newest game console releases, the biggest of those being its hybrid Switch system that is suitable for both gaming on the go, and when sitting in front of a big screen TV. The company’s gamble on a dual-purpose console is paying off handsomely, prompting Nintendo to adjust its full-year forecast
Source: Hot Hardware – Nintendo Profit Outlook Doubles Thanks To Booming Switch Sales
Neural network creates photo-realistic images of fake celebs
While Facebook and Prisma tap AI to transform everyday images and video into flowing artworks, NVIDIA is aiming for all-out realism. The graphics card-maker just released a paper detailing its use of a generative adversarial network (GAN) to create h…
Source: Engadget – Neural network creates photo-realistic images of fake celebs
The strangest things archaeologists have found on the ancient Silk Roads
One of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world wasn’t contained in a nation or a city. It was a series of trade routes that crisscrossed Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Swahili Coast of Africa, and dubbed the “Silk Road” by modern explorers. For centuries, these routes passed through wealthy cities whose vibrant cultures were hybrids of Eastern and Western culture, joined by the spirit of trade and knowledge exchange. The Silk Road civilization thrived because it had no borders.
In this episode of Ancient People Did Stuff, we talk about some of the more unusual discoveries that archaeologists have made at excavation sites along the ancient Silk Roads. One of the great medieval cities of the Silk Road was Samarkand, located today in Uzbekistan. Its people were called Sogdians, and their language was the lingua franca of the Silk Road during roughly the 4th through the 8th centuries. And yet one of the only remaining examples we have of written Sogdian is in an angry letter that an abandoned wife sent to her husband, which was lost in a mailbag and found over a millennium later.
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Source: Ars Technica – The strangest things archaeologists have found on the ancient Silk Roads
Intrinsic Continues Advancing As An Open-Source, Graphically-Rich Vulkan Game Engine
Intrinsic is one of the best looking open-source Vulkan game engines we have seen to date…
Source: Phoronix – Intrinsic Continues Advancing As An Open-Source, Graphically-Rich Vulkan Game Engine
NVIDIA Neural Network Generates Photorealistic Faces With Downright Disturbing Results
Imagine playing a game like Skyrim or a sports title where the characters you encounter look like real people or creatures, and not rendered graphics. If implemented correctly, it could add a new level of immersion to gaming. It may not be far off, either. NVIDIA released a paper over the weekend detailing a new training methodology for generating
Source: Hot Hardware – NVIDIA Neural Network Generates Photorealistic Faces With Downright Disturbing Results
Linux 4.14-rc7 No Longer Clashes With AppArmor To Break Networking
Earlier this month I warned about using Linux 4.14 with AppArmor can cause headaches, namely with the stock rules on distributions like Ubuntu and Debian you can find your networking support broken. That work has now been reverted after Linus Torvalds realized this issue as well…
Source: Phoronix – Linux 4.14-rc7 No Longer Clashes With AppArmor To Break Networking
Etnaviv Gallium3D Reaches OpenGL 2.1
It was just days ago that the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver made it to OpenGL 2.0 while now it’s reached the OpenGL 2.1 threshold…
Source: Phoronix – Etnaviv Gallium3D Reaches OpenGL 2.1
Total Nintendo Switch Sales Might Surpass The Wii U's By Next April
As of September 30, Nintendo has sold 13.56 million Wii U consoles worldwide since it was released in 2012. By next April, the Kyoto-based game company is forecasting that it will have sold 14 million Switches.
Source: Gizmodo – Total Nintendo Switch Sales Might Surpass The Wii U’s By Next April