How To Train Your Robot

2021-10-312021-10-31

Makerfaire is coming up!

The past 18 months or so have been somewhat different as far as availability of in person gatherings, meetups and Makerfairs, etc. but this year there are some changes for the better… If you are interested in Machine learning and computer-vision projects, come look at a couple demos at the booth at Central Oregon Maker Fair, Nov 13-15th!

2021-10-252021-10-25

Github Copilot Technical Preview Edition Review

If you have had the opportunity to be added to the Github Copilot preview, you may have seen the great new extension of auto complete they advertise – but is it all it claims to be?

2021-10-202021-10-20

Optical Illusions and Considering Minimal Examples to Explain

There is a very old “disappearing cyclist” puzzle, by Sam Loyd, you may have seen or seen a variation upon the theme. In Ben Sparks‘ video he gives a great overview:

2021-10-102021-10-10

Scientists find the other ski after seven years

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!

2021-10-062021-10-06

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:

2021-10-02

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?

2021-09-292022-02-15

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…)

2021-09-282023-03-14

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? In his words:

2021-09-032021-09-03

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:

2021-08-28

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!