Category Archives: Technology
Technology Science TechnologyProtei – Opensource Autonomous Sailing Robot
October 28, 2013 – 11:18 am
Protei is an articulated, opensource autonomous sailing robot, initially designed to cleanup oilspills by puling a long oil absorbent boom.
Mind boggling innovations:
- Steerage at the bow, which sounds crazy to my mind, but actually enables the boat to steer while towing a long, heavy object, like the oil absorbent boom.
- Articulated hull so that the boat can maintain power while tacking into the wind.
Crazy, brilliant stuff.
Robo-Gymnast
October 24, 2013 – 11:45 am
Truth be told, It doesn’t look like much, really just some dude’s basement, and the music leaves much to be desired, but hot damn, can that robot do the highbar!
And a double back handspring!
Here’s a quintuple backflip:
There’s more on hinamitetu’s youtube channel
Aquaduct Mini Planters
May 9, 2013 – 10:37 am
3d printed hangable mini planters that funnel excess water down to the planters below. Buy a 10 pack at Shapeways.
oscillate
May 8, 2013 – 5:41 pm
My goal with “Oscillate” was to visualize waveform patterns that evolve from the fundamental sine wave to more complex patterns, creating a mesmerizing audio-visual experience in which sight and sound work in unison to capture the viewer’s attention.
Propellerheads Balance
April 25, 2013 – 12:03 pm
With all of what you need, and none of what you don’t the Propellerheads Balance is a sleek, cool little recording console.
Symbolset
April 23, 2013 – 2:33 pm
A Startup Development Plan
April 1, 2013 – 6:43 pm
- Continuous Integration, use it.
- All code must have tests. Lower coverage == CI fail
- Tests must run fast. Slower average test speed == CI fail
- Code quality regression == CI fail.
- Vagrant and Chef for your development environment. A new dev machine is a “git clone” and “vagrant up” away. (this means good seed data!)
- Any and All strings that a user could ever see must be internationalized, resource file in {native language} first, of course.
- Github is the hub: pull requests for code review. One other person signs off on code before it goes to staging
- Deployment, Rollback, and Scaling are all one command away.
- Build for horizontal scaling. Start with multiple instances of every server/database/application/service type. Plan on your servers/apps/services being fungible, unreliable, and innumerable. Discovery over configuration. (etcd, zookeeper, ironfan, doozerd)
- Faster response to the user is always better. Anything that doesn’t need an immediate response, queue it up and do it in the background. Cache and pre-compute as much as possible.
- If someone else has made a library that does most of what you want, use it. (Submit patches so it does all of what you want)
- If you can abstract the solution out of the app into a standalone library, do so and make it open source. Open source is the great code review in the sky. More eyes means better code.
- A service is better than a solution. A solution is better than a hack. A hack is better than nothing at all.
- Done is the engine of more.
- Perfect is the enemy of the good.
Hotel Coffee Salvation
March 13, 2013 – 12:41 pm
The Thing: a Soviet analogue listening bug
October 16, 2012 – 12:20 pm
In the American Embassy in the Soviet Union, installed in the Great Seal of the United States, was a secret, analogue bug that transmitted sound from inside the embassy without any electronics or batteries. Oh, and the it was invented by the same guy that made the Theremin instrument, Leon Theremin. Amazing.
The Thing, designed by Léon Theremin,[2] was very simple by today’s standards. It consisted of a tiny capacitive membrane connected to a small quarter-wavelength antenna; it had no power supply or active electronic components. The device, a passive cavity resonator, became active only when a radio signal of the correct frequency was sent to the device from an external transmitter. Sound waves caused the membrane to vibrate, which varied the capacitance “seen” by the antenna, which in turn modulated the radio waves that struck and were retransmitted by The Thing. A receiver demodulated the signal so that sound picked up by the microphone could be heard, just as an ordinary radio receiver demodulates radio signals and outputs sound.
WordPress cache priming for great justice
October 9, 2012 – 12:52 pm
Lets say you’ve got this awesome wordpress blog, and you’ve tuned the hell out of it, even though no one visits. You’re using w3-total-cache, nginx with fastcgi caching, the works. Unless your cache is primed, it’s just not as fast as it could be. This sucks on multiple levels, but mostly insofar as the googlebot ranks on performance and is most likely the first thing to load any given page on your site. How do you solve this problem?
Prime your cache.
Optimus Cache Prime is a tremendously handy little script that reads your sitemap.xml and will regularly prime your cache, loading each page in your sitemap.xml, keeping your cache hot and your blog speedy.
The Best WordPress Backup Plugin
July 3, 2012 – 12:39 pm
Hands down, Backwpup wins.
Supports WordPress network, backs up to multiple different endpoints (dropbox, s3, rackspace, ftp, filesystem, email), and most importantly backs up everything, files, uploads, themes and the whole database.
So full of win.
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