"...the idea is to try to give all of the information to
help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the
information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or
another."
The world’s first web page, created 20 years ago by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has returned to it’s birthplace at CERN.
This is part of a project by CERN to recreate the earliest days of the Web. From the BBC:
According to Dan Noyes, the web manager for Cern’s communication group, re-creation of the world’s first website will enable future generations to explore, examine and think about how the web is changing modern life.
“I want my children to be able to understand the significance of this point in time: the web is already so ubiquitous – so, well, normal – that one risks failing to see how fundamentally it has changed,” he told BBC News
“We are in a unique moment where we can still switch on the first web server and experience it. We want to document and preserve that”.
The hope is that the restoration of the first web page and web site will serve as a reminder and inspiration of the web’s fundamental values.
At the heart of the original web is technology to decentralise control and make access to information freely available to all. It is this architecture that seems to imbue those that work with the web with a culture of free expression, a belief in universal access and a tendency toward decentralising information.
This is the mini quad with the NanoFlyer 2.0 board. The board has the newer MPU6050 Gyro/Accel and HMC5883L magnetic sensors. There are total of 5 LEDs on the board to show different indications, on board pcb antenna which has good sensitivity for indoor flights. The microcontroller is the ATMEL ATMega128RFA1 8-bit microcontroller with built-in 2.4GHz transceiver SoC. The flight control software is based on MultiWii 2.2.
We introduce the term shape resolution, which adds to the existing definitions of screen and touch resolution. We propose a framework, based on a geometric model (Non- Uniform Rational B-splines), which defines a metric for shape resolution in ten features. We illustrate it by comparing the current related work of shape changing devices. We then propose the concept of Morphees that are self-actuated flexible mobile devices adapting their shapes on their own to the context of use in order to offer better affordances. For instance, when a game is launched, the mobile device morphs into a console-like shape by curling two opposite edges to be better grasped with two hands. We then create preliminary prototypes of Morphees in order to explore six different building strategies using advanced shape changing materials (dielectric electro active polymers and shape memory alloys). By comparing the shape resolution of our prototypes, we generate insights to help designers toward creating high shape resolution Morphees.
Sarah Allen has been the only woman on a team of computer programmers a few times over the more than two decades she’s worked in the field. Most notably, she led the team — as the lone female programmer — that created Flash video, the dominant technology for streaming video on the Web.
Since only about 20 percent of all programmers are women, her experience isn’t uncommon, and now she’s trying to bring more women into the field.
For no practical purpose at all, I wanted to see if I could make a screwdriver into a car key. What fun it would be to impersonate the look of a stolen car with a screwdriver jammed into the ignition! And maybe I could empty my glove box all over the seat so it looks like I was scrounging for spare change and prescription drugs too!
I made this during spring break in March but didn’t have time to upload the Videos and pictures of it until now. This is my “Drill-Extension Rotary Pool Cleaner”. I made it using Channel and Bearing parts from ServoCity and shafting from McMaster-CARR as well as my trusty Milwaukee hand-drill. My goal was to come up with a way to clean the pool without killing my hands and arms as I have in years past without spending a trillion bucks.
The solution I came up with is a light-weight extension to a common hand-drill (and drill would do) and using a shoulder strap for ergonomics. I had some spare pistol-grips laying around that I wasn’t going to use, so I bolted 3 of them onto the Channel to create multiple holding options (3D printed handles would work even better!). This way I can brush the floor while standing upright, and yet brush the walls while holding the tool closer to me with a shoulder strap, all without generating nearly the fatigue that I have in the past using other methods.
“EuropaCity will be an experimental hybrid between urbanism and landscape design,” said Bjark Ingels in a statement. “Center and periphery overlapped in simultaneous coexistence of a recreational open landscape of rolling hills superimposed on an urban neighborhood of walkable streets, plazas, and parks.”
The future of thermostats has a name, and that name is Nest. The 2nd Generation Nest Learning Thermostat is the thermostat that never stops learning. With hardware this smart, it’s important for us to keep a watchful eye on it, so we naturally had to open it up!
The original machine with googly eyes… Looking at what you’ve done to your pick’n'place makes me. wonder if you guys used to watch Bertha on TV when you were kids? Here’s the intro sequence that shows the original machine with googly eyes. It’s been a long time since there was a kids TV show about manufacturing! Youtube has full episodes too.
Bertha, lovely Bertha, You are a lovely machine! And anyone who works with you, Will know just what I mean! Woh! Bertha, lovely Bertha, Sometimes I think you’re a dream! And when we work out what you have to do, You can always churn the goods out, Always churn the goods out, We can depend upon you! Clicking the day, flashing the night, Your computer is shining brightly, Some people say you’ve a mind of your own, And I think that’s very likely…. likely!
In October it moved into an 1100-square-meter manufacturing and warehouse space in lower Manhattan. Two months later, Fried appeared on the cover of Entrepreneurmagazine as its Entrepreneur of the Year. And in February she grilled President Obama, via Google Hangout, on what his administration was doing to support inventors and tech entrepreneurs and to encourage girls to study science, math, and engineering.
Fried didn’t set out to become a successful CEO or a de facto spokeswoman for the loose-knit maker community of technically inclined do‑it-yourselfers. But now that she is, she’s making the most of it. And if her shock-your-granny hair and facial piercings challenge people’s image of engineers, well, so much the better.
Forty years ago this month, Martin Cooper placed the first ever cell phone call. In this video he looks back on his invention and explains that cell phones have a long way to go before they reach their potential.
This is a great little pump! It’s positive displacement and self priming. The best part is, it’s reversible!
In the vid, we use this pump to actuate a syringe plunger back and forth.
Out of the box it’ll provide 1.3 Bar of pressure (19 PSI for our American friends). We used hook-up wire to clamp the tiny tubes and got it up to 1.8 Bar (26 PSI). On a 1″ diameter syringe (a big one) that’s enough pressure to lift nearly 10 kg!!!!
Recently, I paid $12 at Mingtong Digital Mall for a complete phone, featuring quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, MP3 playback, and an OLED display plus keypad for the UI. Simple, but functional; nothing compared to a smartphone, but useful if you’re going out and worried about getting your primary phone wet or stolen.
Also, it would certainly find an appreciative audience in impoverished and developing nations.
$12 is the price paid for a single quantity retail, contract-free, non-promotional, unlocked phone — in a box with charger, protective silicone sleeve, and cable. In other words, the production cost of this phone is somewhere below the retail price of $12. Rumors place it below $10.
This is a really amazing price point. That’s about the price of a large Domino’s cheese pizza, or a decent glass of wine in a restaurant.
Now here are some wedding vows that the Adafruit crowd can get behind — soldering a project together that lights up to say “I DO” as a metaphor for the marriage contract. Fascinating! From Bill Porter’s blog:
When it came time for Mara and I to draft our wedding ceremony we pondered how we could incorporate an element from our theme. We had 4 days to go and only some vague ideas. Mara bought some wood letters to spell out ‘I Do’ and wanted to use them in the ceremony. We also joked about using a soldering iron during the ceremony; but how could we do it tastefully? Then it hit us, a common wedding ceremony know as the “Fishermen’s Knot” could be reworded for something a little more geeky. Yes, we really did solder some wires together in the middle of our wedding, with a Weller soldering iron Mara bought me for a past birthday no less. And you won’t believe what PCBs came in handy for the build…
Ok, this post will be short because this project was thrown together 4 days before the wedding and we didn’t have time to stop and document the steps. We were set to get married and still had a lot to do, as evident by the mini-maker space we created in my parents house (see below).
Mara bought the letters at a local hobby store. I sketched out a rough outline of evenly spaced LEDs and went to work creating the holes with a drill press. A coat of blank paint and then my best man Dan went to work soldering wires to all those LEDs. Next we had to figured out a way to control those LEDs. In a pleasant case of coincidence, the boards I hijacked to ask my bride to marry me 2 years ago were designed to control large numbers of LEDs. Yes, the boards that asked “Mara Will You Marry Me?” were used to run letters that said ‘I Do’ during our wedding ceremony.
Printable catalog (PDF)
I made it using Channel and Bearing parts from ServoCity and shafting from McMaster-CARR as well as my trusty Milwaukee hand-drill. My goal was to come up with a way to clean the pool without killing my hands and arms as I have in years past without spending a trillion bucks. 
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