Circuit Playground – An electronics reference app from Adafruit

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It’s not everyday that we review software around here, but the folks at Adafruit recently put together an iOS app that I figured might be of interest. Their iPad/iPhone compatible application is called “Circuit Playground”, and it includes all sorts of handy electronics reference tools. For the context of this review, it should be noted that I paid for the application myself, and that I have … [Read more...]

Using Google documents as a web proxy

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As weird as it might sound, there's a way to use Google documents as a web proxy. The image above is a screenshot of [Antonio] demonstrating how he can view text data from any site through the web giant's cloud applications. Certain sites may be blocked from your location, but the big G can load whatever it wants. If all you need is the text, then so can you. The hack takes advantage of … [Read more...]

How to add flair to a webpage that shows your project data

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This temperature display may not knock your socks off, but it's a simple demonstration of how you can used vector graphics as a web readout for data (translated). [Luca] wrote this four page tutorial to help others, he makes it look really easy, and the sky's the limit on eye candy once you get he basics in place. The first step is to create the dynamic SVG (vector graphic) file using Inkscape … [Read more...]

Real-time depth smoothing for the Kinect

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[Karl] set out to improve the depth image that the Kinect camera is able to feed into a computer. He's come up with a pre-processing package which smooths the depth data in real-time. There are a few problems here, one is that the Kinect has a fairly low resolution, it is also depth limited to a range of about 8 meters from the device (an issue we hadn't considered when looking at Kinect-based … [Read more...]

Doom for your calculator gets a color upgrade

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You're not still playing nDoom in black and white, are you? What decade do live in? Thankfully, the Doom port for TI-nspire calculators has been upgraded to support color. That is if you've got the hardware to run it. The video after the break (and the image above) shows a TI-nspire CX running the popular first-person-shooter. It's seen several upgrades since the beta version which we saw … [Read more...]

Forget Siri – make Wolfram Alpha your personal assistant

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So you can spend a bundle on a new phone and it comes with a voice-activated digital assistant. But let's be honest, it's much more satisfying if you coded up this feature yourself. Here's a guide on doing just that by combining an Asterisk server with the Wolfram Alpha API. Asterisk is a package we are already familiar with. It's an open source Private Branch Exchange suite that lets you build … [Read more...]

Help [Chris] boot his Cray-1 supercomputer

[Chris Fenton] needs your help. After constructing a 1/10th scale, cycle accurate Cray-1 supercomputer and finding a disk with Cray software on it, he's ready to start loading the OS. There's a small problem, though: no one knows how to boot the thing. [Chris] posted a disk image for a Cray-1/X-MP with the help of the people at archive.org. Now he needs your help - if you think you can … [Read more...]