Google is expanding its Google Offers service, which reminds users via a mobile app or email whenever there’s a limited-time deal at a nearby business, so that users can now see, save and share promotions from within their Google+ stream.
Only a select number of brands and companies will be able to share Google Offers through their respective Google+ accounts to begin with. NOOK, Hello Kitty, Art.com and Adafruit Industries have already started sharing exclusive deals through the service, although there could be more waiting in the wings.
Yes, we know these digitally-fabricated pegboards by boston architectural firm NADAAA are being used to display high end bath products, but imagine if they were used to display your arduinos, your tesla coils and your LED projects as you please. via designboom. (more…)
Here are the first 20 years of Wired covers in less than 30 seconds. I first met Mark in 1993 when we both worked at Wired. I was Mark’s intern! My first day on the job, Mark brought me downstairs to meet his wife Carla Sinclair who was editor of bOING bOING the print ‘zine that I had been reading since 1990. Mark and Carla assigned me an article on the spot, handed me a half-empty bottle of Vasopressin, and we quickly became best pals. Ah, the good ol’ daze.
At lots of tech conferences we’ve seen the waterfall signs with logos and more, but this is the first use we’ve seen “in the wild” for practical use, a stop sign on a tunnel before a large truck jams itself in.
The ability to design and create your own working, electronic gadgets is now within reach. Creating a hardware device or interactive sculpture involves many skills. Programming, electronic circuit design, interface design, and fabrication, to name a few.
In this class we will learn the basics you need to create your own devices by taking a project from beginning to end. We will create an interactive night light. Our light will have an Arduino for a brain, a light sensor, a touch sensor, as well as several LEDs.
This will be a studio class where we will learn by doing. The final form the light takes can be set by you or you can follow one of the provided, pre-set patterns. We will begin by learning some basic electronics. We will learn basic programming with the Arduino and then create the final circuit and design the user interface. Finally we will build the exterior and put it all together.
In the end you will have an interactive light that you can expand by adding sensors, buttons, speakers and other components. You will also have an understanding of how an interactive device is created.
Discover the Ouya: “a new kind of game console.” This Android-powered system is the first of its kind. It’s specifically designed to be open to professional and amateur game designers alike, with free software development tools included with every console.
Full disclosure: The folks at Ouya tout this to be “the first totally open video game console.” They have so much confidence in the Ouya, in fact, that they sent us a retail unit to take apart. Game on, folks.
Join us as we take them up on their offer and delve deep into the hardware that powers this little device.
A native of Haifa, Israel, where “my grandmother’s garden was the world,” Neri Oxman, assistant professor of media arts and sciences, grew up fascinated by nature. She even considered becoming a doctor, but after three years of medical school, she took up architecture. “There is a productive synthesis between my love of medical science and nature, and the world of synthetic design. I definitely see design as a field where those two brains interact,” says Oxman, whose multidisciplinary background has enabled her to launch a new research area at MIT — material ecology — that merges architecture with engineering, computation, and ecology.
It was the 1960′s, and people were building some very interesting digital computers. One of them was the Digi-Comp II, which we have written about extensively: a binary mechanical computer based on rolling marbles and flip-flop gates.
For an entirely different approach, look no further than How to Build a Working Digital Computer (1967) by Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips, and Allen M. Wolk. You can download it as a free e-book (PDF, EPUB, Kindle) at Archive.org, thanks to the BitSavers PDF Document archive.
NeXT Computer (the original 68030 cube) was a high end workstation that was manufactured between 1988 – 1990. Back then it was a very expensive machine as a complete system would start at $6500 (in 1988 dollars). The machine is a 1 foot cube magnesium case that houses the computer. At the time, its performance was impressive, with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, a dedicated floating point CPU, and a digital signal processor built into the system. NeXT cubes featured a magneto-optical drive that stored a whopping 256 Megabytes (by comparison, high end Mac systems at the time might have featured a 20 Megabyte hard drive.) In its day, this was the “Ferrari” of desktop systems!
NeXT championed many technologies into the workstation arena, such as object oriented programming principles, UNIX with a refined user interface, and the ability to work with CD quality sound files. The Operating System evolved into Apple’s MAC OS X, portions of which exist in the iPhone and iPad. The development language, Objective-C, is still the same programming language used for iPhone Apps. A few GUI icons from the NeXT era remain in today’s Macs, such as the small camera icon displayed when performing a screen capture.
A claim to fame is that the world’s first web server and browser was written by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN using a NeXT cube, marking the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1990. That same cube has been restored and a I understand it’s at MIT today.
While NeXT was a technological success, it was a commercial failure (at the time), focused on the academic market with a price point that was simply too high. Ultimately however, NeXT may have been a huge commercial success, as its technical incorporation into Apple became OS X and further evolved into today’s iOS platforms.
Ladyada and pt had an old NeXT keyboard with a strong desire to get it running on a modern computer. These keyboards are durable, super clicky, and very satisfying to use! However, they are very old designs, specifically made for NeXT hardware:, pre PS/2 and definately pre-USB. That means you can’t just plug the keyboard into a PS/2 port (even though it looks similar). In fact, I have no idea what the protocol or pinout is named, so we’ll just call it “non-ADB NeXT Keyboard”
There is no existing adapter for sale, and no code out there for getting these working, so we spent a few days and with a little research we got it working perfectly using an Arduino Micro as the go between. Now this lovely black deck works like any other USB keyboard. Sure it weighs more than our Macbook, but its worth it!
Printable catalog (PDF)
FEED
