Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
“So what’s going on here then?” I ask. “Two good friends just got even better [friends],” replies TransferWise co-founder Kristo Käärmann laughing, while Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield, who is also on the video call, smiles approvingly. “Sorry for spoiling your news,” I tell the pair, who I’m interviewing ahead of an announcement today that the […]
What do you do if you’re laying out a PCB, and you need to jump over a trace, but don’t want to use a via? The usual trick is using a zero Ohm resistor to make a bridge over a PCB trace. Zero Ohm resistors — otherwise known as ‘wire’ — are a handy tool for PCB designers who have backed themselves into a corner and don’t mind putting another reel on the pick and place machine. Here’s a new product from Keystone that is basically wire on a tape and reel. It’s designed to jump traces on a PCB …read more
If you are interested in deploying LoRa — the low power long-range wireless technology — you might enjoy [Rui Santos’] project and video about using the ESP32 with the Arduino IDE to implement LoRa. You can see the video below. He uses the RFM95 transceivers with a breakout board, so even if you want to use a different processor, you’ll still find a lot of good information.
In fact, the video is just background on LoRa that doesn’t change regardless of the host computer you are using. Once you have all the parts, getting it to work is fairly simple. …read more
Spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Preacher ahead.
Early in season 3 of the AMC series Preacher, Tulip (Ruth Negga) has a vision. Shes running down the road to the rural town of Angelville when she sees a man in a black-and-white spotted dog suit. The man-dog is ridiculous, but also eerie particularly when it tells Tulip shes been chosen for a divine purpose. It gestures with its floppy paws and stares at her with black, shiny, empty eyes.
Many television shows and movies use horror tropes as part of an action/comedy mix. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sleepy Hollow, and Wynonna Earp all sprinkle vampires or demons around their narratives. But while all these shows feature monsters, they arent working primarily to terrify or disturb the…
Some projects end up being more objet d’art than objet d’utile, and we’re fine with that — hacks can be beautiful too. Some hacks manage both, though, like this study in silicon and gallium under glass that serves as a bright and beautiful desk lamp.
There’s no accounting for taste, of course, but we really like the way [commanderkull]’s LED filament lamp turned out, and it’s obvious that a fair amount of work went into it. Five COB filament strips were suspended from a lacy frame made of wire, which also supports the custom boost converter needed to raise …read more
This years reboot of God of War on the PlayStation 4 was a wonderful surprise. It imbued the long-running series with an emotional core, turned Kratos into a likable character, and still managed to include some very satisfying action. It also looked gorgeous, as the series made the shift from Greek to Norse mythology with plenty of style. Now that style can live on your walls thanks to a new series of art prints from Cook & Becker.
If the Cook & Becker name sounds familiar, its because the art studio has slowly built up a reputation for offering some of the best game art around. In the past, that has included series for Fallout, Skyrim, Ni No Kuni, and even an absurdly large Final Fantasy XV art tome. The God of War collection…
Sphero, the maker of connected toys like BB-8, announced this week that its acquired Specdrums, a company that makes rings that produce music through taps on different colors. We dont know how much Sphero spent to acquire the companys technology, but Specdrums raised over $175,000 on Kickstarter last year and just finished shipping to all its backers. Its clear that Sphero plans on integrating the ring and color system into its proprietary toys.
Sphero CEO Paul Berberian tells The Verge that the company wants to get back to its roots, through toys that wont have as much branded, character-focused play.
We can already get an idea of what these future toys could do because Specdrums integrated its technology with Spheros open SDK…
It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.
There is a certain type of low-budget film that manages to tell a story in an unexpected way. It seems to come up most often with horror movies, where because of budget or time restraints, filmmakers are often forced to make choices they normally wouldnt. Like how in Clerks they could only shoot in the store after it closed and had to come up with an explanation for why the shutter was always down, or how the zombie movie Pontypool is set entirely in a small town radio station where theyre trying to piece together whats…
Yesterday, I saw a demo of the Homebiogas bioreactor: it’s essentially an artificial stomach that uses colonies of microbes to digest your home food waste (it can do poop, too, but people tend to be squeamish about this), providing enough clean-burning biogas to cook your next meal, heat your house, or run a generator — what’s left behind is excellent fertilizer.
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Patrick Costello (previously) writes, “I had to go through a 25 hr EEG, but I didn’t let the wires glued to my head stop me from posting my weekly frailing banjo workshop.”
The greatest challenge of robotics is autonomy. Usually, this means cars that can drive themselves, a robotic vacuum that won’t drive down the stairs, or a rover on Mars that can drive on Mars. This project is nothing like that. Instead of building a robot with a single shape, this robot is made out of several modules that can self-assemble into different structures. It’s an organized fleet of robots, all helping each other, like an ant colony, or our future as Gray Goo.
If the idea of self-assembling modular robots sounds familiar, you’re right. The Dtto won the Grand Prize …read more
The sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming is just over a year out from hitting theaters, but its star Tom Holland seems to have revealed the title in an Instagram post: Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Holland is at Ace Comic-Con in Seattle this weekend, appearing alongside other Marvel actors Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Mackie, and Elizabeth Olsen. While there, he posted a video to Instagram, and said that while there wasnt any announcements for the upcoming sequel, he did just get the script, and held it up on an iPad, revealing the title.
Spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War ahead.
Spider-Man: Far From Home is an apt…
While it’s fun to watch Hollywood action heroes hack into cameras to spy on their targets, the thought of an actual cybercriminal using our own security devices against us is chilling for most. That’s what makes the iPM World HD 360 Degree 1080p Wireless IP Camera essential for anyone looking to deter digital and physical intruders alike, and it’s available today for $44.99.
Completely encrypted and capable of rotating 360 degrees, the IPM World Wireless Camera lets you monitor your living space while keeping your feed under lock and key. You can view footage from your smartphone via the WiFi client and rotate it remotely to get the perfect angle. Plus, with infrared night vision built in, you can keep tabs when the lights are off.
The iPM World HD 360 Degree 1080p Wireless IP Camera is available in the Boing Boing Store today for $44.99.
If you were to make a list of the most important technological achievements of the last 100 years, advanced medical imaging would probably have to rank right up near the top. The ability to see inside the body in exquisite detail is nearly miraculous, and in some cases life-saving.
Navigating through the virtual bodies generated by the torrents of data streaming out of something like a magnetic resonance imager (MRI) can be a challenge, though. This intuitive MRI slicer aims to change that and makes 3D walkthroughs of the human body trivially easy. [Shachar “Vice” Weis] doesn’t provide a great …read more
Der frühe vogel fängt den wurm! Yikes, if were trotting out our tortured German to say the early bird catches the worm, it can mean only one thing, folks. Its time for all you European startup fans to go catch super early-bird tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. Our pricing tiers start at 595 […]
Have you ever wished that a laser could tell you the weather? If you have, then [tuckershannon] has you covered. He’s created a machine that uses a laser and some UV sensitive paper to draw the temperature and a weather icon! And that’s not all! It’s connected to the internet, so it can also show the time and print out messages.
Building on [tuckershannon]’s previous work with glow-in-the-dark drawing, the brains inside this machine is a Raspberry Pi Zero. The laser itself is a 5mw, 405nm laser pointer with the button zip-tied down. Two 28BYJ-48 stepper motors are used to …read more
This article will focus on debugging JavaScript code within Operas Developer Tools. Its important to note that since Opera switched to the Blink rendering engine (a fork of WebKit) in 2013 the debugging tools and process is identical to Chrome. This is great news, as there is a huge amount of resources published about Chromes Dev Tools which are 100% applicable to debugging in Opera.
Operas use of Blink means they share extremely powerful tools which will speed up your bug finding and fixing process!
How small could you make a computer? In a way, that’s a question that requires that a computer be defined, because you could measure the smallest computer simply in terms of the smallest area of silicon required to create a microprocessor. So perhaps it’s better to talk about a smallest working computer. Recent entries in the race for the smallest machine have defined a computer as a complete computer system which holds onto its program and data upon power-down, but this remains one that is hotly debated. You might for instance debate as to whether that definition would exclude machines …read more
In an interview with James Cameron, George Lucas reveals what he’d planed for the final three Star Wars films:
“[The next three ‘Star Wars’ films] were going to get into a microbiotic world,” he told Cameron. “There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force….” In terms of his storytelling, Lucas regarded individuals as “vehicles for the Whills to travel around in… And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.”
Lucas is confident that had he kept his company, the Whills-focused films “would have been done. Of course, a lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did ‘Phantom Menace’ and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told.”
Lucas acknowledges in the interview that “Everybody hated it in ‘Phantom Menace’ [when] we started talking about midi-chlorians,” prompting one Ars Technica editor to add “Because it was a really dumb idea.” He speculates that if the final three Star Wars movies followed Lucas’s original plan, “Imagine, if you can, our heroes shrinking down like the Fantastic Voyage to go meet some midi-chlorians.”
Knowing Lucas’s plans for the franchise “should make every Star Wars fan send a note of gratitude to whoever at Disney decided to buy the franchise and take it away and out from under Lucas’ control.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What do you do when you’re into trackball mice, but nothing out there is affordable or meets all your murine needs? You build one, of course. And if you’re like [Dangerously Explosive], who has a bunch of old optical mice squeaking around the shop, you can mix and match them to build the perfect one.
The mouse, which looks frozen mid-transformation into a rodential assassin, is a customized work of utilitarian art. Despite the excellent results, this project was not without its traps. [Dangerously] got really far into the build before discovering the USB interface chip was dead. Then he …read more