Have you ever lost one sock or one shoe after looking all over for days or weeks? Well don’t feel so bad, recently some scientists found their second ski at a research site after the ice melted for seven years!
Continue reading “Scientists find the other ski after seven years”Matt Parker’s new Video on Math Beeing Interesting
In Matt Parker’s recent video he looks into some interesting properties of the shapes commonly found in nature in bee’s hives:
Continue reading “Matt Parker’s new Video on Math Beeing Interesting”Hacktoberfest 2021 is here!
It’s been one year since the spammageddon of Hacktoberfest requests and issues with contributing to only accepted opted-in repositories – but this year there are some good changes:
You can now use Gitlab for PRs.
Monetary donations are also encouraged for open source projects.
You can either get a shirt or plant a tree, for completing 4 PRs with improvements to participating open source projects.
Also, of course if you have a project yourself you maintain, you can add “Hacktoberfest” tag to get participants to find your repo. 🙂 What are some of the projects you might consider helping?
Continue reading “Hacktoberfest 2021 is here!”Pine64 PineTime review
PineTime is one inexpensive yet very useful “smart watch”. If you want one that is open source, unlike those from Apple or Google, you will be glad to see this watch which is not only inexpensive but has software you can change (if you buy a dev kit version and know some wiring…)
Continue reading “Pine64 PineTime review”Book review – The Most Human Human
In Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human, he first explains some of the early experiments in human-like chatbots – Eliza the therapist and the more recent attempts to “understand” language through the vast equivalent documents the UN keeps record of.
He also goes in to the question that plagued early industrialism, will robots be getting our jobs with AI? Well, if something is a repetitive and arduous task, as he puts it, you are the robot. In the art world an actor may do a play for a weekend or two… and no more – is that a waste? I his words:
Continue reading “Book review – The Most Human Human”Turning a normal SVG into an Android Vector (Updated Repeater-START!)
If you have tried at building an Android app recently you might notice that there is a new icon shown on newer Android Oreo, Android 10, Android 11 devices… it shows the Android antenna head instead of the normal icon. The odd thing is that the “design” area of the .xml file will display it but not let you actually design and draw in it like you can change layout xml. You can however use Inkscape or your favorite .svg editor and convert that file to this Android format:
Continue reading “Turning a normal SVG into an Android Vector (Updated Repeater-START!)”Let your voice be heard for Librem Phone/Pinephone Apps!
As you may have noted if you have recently upgraded to Pinephone or Librem Phone, there are currently some missing spots as far as good and well built mobile apps for the platform. While this affords great opportunity for the first folks to build apps to profit from this growing segment, we also should encourage local app makers to fix their apps to work on Linux/Librem Phone!
Continue reading “Let your voice be heard for Librem Phone/Pinephone Apps!”Common Sense (and basic arithmetic) are not so common anymore
During the past year many have been able to give each other a good amount of grace and empathy and not judge them by their race, inability to wear a mask, or whether they go to the grocery store once a week or once a month to reduce their risk. Business owners have shown concern by giving special hours for the at risk or unvaccinated to come and shop early hours. And many have been using tools like microcovid.org to gauge the risk their household should budget. However not all has been as it should be.
Continue reading “Common Sense (and basic arithmetic) are not so common anymore”Chrome 93 brings a different way of thinking
If you are using Chrome 93, you may have noticed recently the “Your connection is always secure unless Chrome tells you otherwise” in the location bar. This raises an interesting question – should the system be telling you that any site that you visit is secure? Should we be trusting Chrome in this regard?
Continue reading “Chrome 93 brings a different way of thinking”Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history
In the chapter The Long Tail of the Law, in Alex Bellos’ book The Grapes of Math, he shows some different statistical patterns that share the same properties:
Continue reading “Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history”