News Archives - Page 10 of 10 - How To Train Your Robot

2020-10-082020-10-08

Slide rule enters the 21st century

Some time ago I came across this online tool in a newsletter article – this is a very cool slide-rule-emulator that will not just let you move two slides, but actually slide it for you as you run an equivalent digital calculator calculation to the right!

If you haven’t ever used a slide rule before, it works on properties of logarithms, and the principle that log(a)+log(b) = log(a*b). Now it wouldn’t be very interesting to just have two normal rulers together, as sliding and adding would just let you do problems like 5+5 = 10 or 50+50 = 100 if you scale the numbers. With logarithmic scale, the spacings are off and it allows you to do multiplication in adding the numbers.

2020-10-042020-10-04

Matt Parker explains professional online videography

In the past few months due to Coronavirus many people have been working from home… live streaming or meeting from home, even live TV shows from home..? In this video, the famous Youtube mathematician Matt Parker shows some interesting tips on how one might be more professional at making videos.

2020-09-17

Librem announces Anbox working on Librem 5 phone

Yesterday Librem announced in a blog post that the Android compatibility layer, Anbox, is runnable in the Librem 5 Linux phone. They reportedly had to fix a few bugs, and they show a screenshot of a listing of apps – it is odd to notice that most apps shown (Firefox, Music, Camera…) really should have a native Linux application that works.

2020-09-022020-09-02

Hacktoberfest is coming up!

Hacktoberfest is coming up, online this time (well, the core of hacktoberfest always has been online collaboration…), and there are several projects I’ve worked on that welcome contributions:

Repeater-START – a useful tool for any ham radio enthusiast looking for repeaters.
Hearham Listener – also connects to hearham.com, this is an experimental listener to listen for audible callsigns on the ham radio.
Anti-Auto-correct, very useful for students in these remote times!
Tunesviewer
iosTransferGUI – I had used this for transferring files to iDevices, on Ubuntu.
Pylympus – for certain Olympus cameras with wifi-remote, a pure Python remote program.

There are many others and probably plugins or software you use every day that may need contributions or bug fixes, so with less than a month before the start, be thinking about what projects you might contribute to! Check out the full details at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/events

2020-08-162020-08-16

Removing old PPA from Ubuntu for stability and latest features

Once in awhile a package hangs out at an old version even after a system upgrade or two. This can cause odd things like that software portion not working like it should. In my case, an old salbabix ios PPA that was long defunct as Ubuntu 18.04 and later have no problem just plugging in updated iOS devices.

2020-08-082020-08-09

MutationObserver as a clever javascript workaround

For this weekend’s hackathon I worked on a hackathon project I had thought about for awhile… an anti auto correct that should be more like natural paper and pencil, and not automatically show the answer when you click on a misspelled word (not great for learning, Google Docs!) This should be useful for learners especially during a pandemic.

2020-06-272020-06-27

Google sued over Android’s tracking, revises options.

Last month we heard Google was getting sued again for collecting location data tied to user accounts. This is yet another reason it’s good to keep your Google account separate, away from your Google device if you have one. But last week Google announced that they will be changing this, auto deleting data after 18 months… but only for new Google accounts.