At The Lab This Week I Made Some printed Circuit Boards With My New Collaborator Jonathan Bobrow. I

MNT Reform DIY Laptop

Modern laptops have secret schematics, glued-in batteries, and mystery components all over. But Reform is the opposite – it invites both curious makers and privacy aware users to take a look under the hood, customize the documented electronics, and 3D-print their own parts.

A free and open source modular laptop that respects your rights

Customize and repair it yourself with 3D printed and standard parts

Reclaim your privacy and security: No microphone, camera or management engine

Interchangeable and customizable motherboard, slim mechanical keyboard and trackball, each with open firmware

We are currently finishing the limited beta shipment of Reforms to collect feedback from early adopters that will feed into the final design for the campaign model.

Read more…

A controllable prosthetic hand using electromyography to detect the gestures and muscle activities. The project is aimed to be affordable, upgradable, repairable, and flexible. To make it affordable, it consists of 3D printed parts for structure and only common electronic parts are being used. The hand is controlled through EMG signals read by muscle activities on upper forearm. These EMG signals are then transmitted via Bluetooth to Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi then processes these signals and move servo motors accordingly. The project is still in early state with many areas could be improved.

courtesy: Kenneth V.

MIT’s Slick New UI Lets Your Phone and Desktop Screens Behave as One

By Liz Stinson at Wired. You can read the full article here.

For all the ways the influx of new devices has streamlined our harried lives, it’s produced a parallel problem: the fracturing of our digital ones. What happens on your phone or tablet or computer are siloed experiences that rarely overlap in any meaningful or helpful way. But just think, what if your devices could interact with each other so seamlessly that one screen essentially becomes the other?

This scenario is inching closer to reality with THAW, the newest project out of MIT’s Media Lab. THAW is a program that allows your smartphone and desktop computer to interact with each other so fluidly it’s as though they share the same silicon brain. In the video you watch as files are dragged from a desktop computer and dumped onto an iPhone. In another scene you see a Mario-like video game being played on the desktop only to transfer to the iPhone without skipping a beat. It’s totally trippy, and a little bit surprising. Which is weird because interaction like this is about as intuitive as it comes.

This is really, really cool. If you don’t read the short article, at least check out the video.

fractals!! :D or at least patterns :P

Johann Eduard Jacobsthal, “Süd-italienische Fliesen-Ornamente”, South italian tile ornaments, 1886. Chromolithography. Published by Ernst Wasmuth, Tübingen, Germany. Source: archive.org. Via frizzifrizzi

the strongest

Summary:

online trainings on how to use NASA Earth science data, regarding:

air quality,

climate,

disaster,

health,

land,

water resources and

wildfire management.

Everyone (Even You!) Can Use Satellite Data

At NASA we’re pretty great at putting satellites and science instruments into orbit around Earth. But it turns out we’re also pretty great at showing people how to get and use all that data.

One of the top ways you can learn how to use NASA data is our ARSET program. ARSET is our Applied Remote Sensing Training program and it helps people build skills that integrate all these Earth science data into their decision making.

ARSET will train you on how to use data from a variety of Earth-observing satellites and instruments aboard the International Space Station.

Once you take a training, you’ll be in GREAT company because thousands of people have taken an ARSET training.

We hold in person and online trainings to people around the world, showing them how to use NASA Earth science data. Trainings are offered in air quality, climate, disaster, health, land, water resources and wildfire management.

For example, if you’re trying to track how much fresh drinking water there is in your watershed, you can take an ARSET training and learn how to find satellite data on how much precipitation has fallen over a certain time period or even things like the ‘moistness’ of soil and the quality of the water.

Best yet, all NASA Earth observing data is open and freely available to the whole world! That’s likely one of the reasons we’ve had participants from 172 of the approximately 190 countries on Earth.

Since its beginning 10 years ago, ARSET has trained more than 30 thousand people all over the world. They’ve also worked with people from more than 7,500 different organizations and that includes government agencies, non-profit groups, advocacy organizations, private industry.

And even though 2019 is ARSET’s 10th birthday – we’ve only just begun. Every year about 60% of the organizations and agencies we train are new to the program. We’re training just about anyone who is anyone doing Earth science on Earth! 

Join us, learn more about how we train people to use Earth observing data here, and heck, you can even take a training yourself: https://arset.gsfc.nasa.gov/.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Never interrupt a programmer

I don't think other coworkers understand how complicated and stressful it is to explain what's going on in your head when you don't even understand specific problems when coding. Hence, I don't want anyone to disrupt me. Same thought in comic format:

Do you agree? Let me know in the comments below.

Credit

Adafruit / Beagle Bone Black / Proto Plate / 2013

If you're ever asking an autistic person to do something, be sure to explain why you want them to do it.

When I was a kid, I always kept the windows open when it rained. I saw no reason to close them even though my mom kept asking me to. She never gave a reason, so I never listened. She'd say it let the rain in and I'd think "no shit" and continue to keep them open. Eventually, she explained that it could cause mold. That made sense to me, so I started closing the windows. Simple as that.

When we first got cats, they kept jumping onto the counters. Once again, I saw no issue with this. My mom kept chasing them down and I couldn't figure out why. She'd get annoyed whenever I let them stay up there. Once she told me that it was unsanitary, I thought that made sense so I stopped letting them stay on the counter.

To an outsider (and probably to my mom at the time) it may have seemed like I didn't understand the instructions or was being intentionally difficult. But I can't just follow an order without a reason. I must decide for myself if the order makes sense before I follow it, and I need the logic behind it to do that.

So if you're asking an autistic person to do something, explain why it needs to be done. It's very hard for a lot of us to override that part of our brains.

Scan Select Attack Packet Monitor Clock