Author: Al Williams

4508 Articles

Morse Code Catches Google Swiping Lyrics

June 18, 2019 by 60 Comments

We think of Morse code in terms of dots and dashes, but really it’s a kind of binary code. Those symbols might as well be 0s and 1s or any other pair of characters. That attribute is exactly what led to a sting operation a music lyric site called Genius.com pulled on Google. At issue was a case of song lyrics that had allegedly been stolen by the search giant.

Song lyric sites — just like Google — depend on page views to make revenue. The problem is that in a Google search the lyrics appear on the search page, so there is no longer much incentive to continue to the song lyric site. That’s free enterprise for you, right? It is, but there was a problem. It appears that Google — or, according to Google, one of their partners — was simply copying Genius.com’s lyrics. How does Genius know the song lyrics were copied? According to news reports in the Wall Street Journal and other sources, they used Morse code.

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Before Computers: Notched Card Databases

June 18, 2019 by 33 Comments

It is hard to remember that practical computers haven’t been around for even a century, yet. Modern computers have been around an even shorter period. Yet somehow people computed tables, kept ledgers, and even wrote books without any help from computers at all. Sometimes they just used brute force but sometimes they used little tricks that we’ve almost forgotten. For example, only a few of us remember how to use slide rules, but they helped send people to the moon. But what did database management look like in, say, 1925? You might think it was nothing but a filing cabinet and someone who knew how to find things in it. But there was actually a better system that had fairly wide use.

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Game Builder Lets Kids — Even Old Kids — Build Games

June 17, 2019 by 4 Comments

One rite of passage back in the good old days of owning a TRS-80, Commodore 64, or similar vintage computer was writing your own game. It probably wouldn’t be very good, but it wouldn’t be much worse than most of the stuff that was out there, either. Today, trying to get a kid interested in “hunt the wumpus” is probably not going to fly and having them create a modern-looking game is out of the question. Or is it? Disguised as a game itself, Game Builder offers an interactive way to create interesting games without having to get too detailed into programming. On the other hand, it supports JavaScript, so you can get to programming if you need to or want to. We could easily see a kid — or even an adult — easing into programming using this game which is free, from Google.

In the old days, hardware was a limiting factor and Basic made it pretty easy to whip out some text or crude graphics. Our favorite was a high low game that guesses your number. But everyone had some little game they’d create so they said they could. Today’s games, though, have good graphics and music and 3D shapes and a host of other things you didn’t have to contend with back then. Game Builder, though, makes it pretty simple. You can work on a game by yourself, or with friends, or with the general public. Everyone involved can play the game, but they can also edit the game. The tool runs under Steam so even though it is marked for PC or Mac, it will also run on Linux if you have Steam installed properly.

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Play Dough Simplifies Interferometer Build

June 16, 2019 by 7 Comments

An interferometer sounds like something complicated, and in a way, it is. But it is also pretty easy to build one with some common materials. [Let’s Innovate] has instructions for how to make an interferometer using a green laser pointer, some mirrors, and a CD case. one of the most mundane parts, though, might be the most important: Play Dough.

The very sensitive device needs very precise alignment of the mirrors that reflect the beam. Using Play Dough it is easy to adjust the mirrors to the spot that is just right and then have it stay there.

For the best result, the mirrors really need to be first surface mirrors and not the more common kind with the reflective part on the back. Apparently, a green laser gives better results than a red one, too. If you don’t want to hack up a CD jewel case, a DVD player may give up a beam splitter.

So what do you use it for? Well, most of us use it to see the pretty patterns. But the instrument actually has wide-ranging applications to measure very small distances in fields as diverse as astronomy, optics, and photomicroscopy. To do anything really practical, you might need to add a detector of some sort.

If you want a more robust build, this one is similar. If you have a well-stocked test bench, you might be able to get by with even less.

Gigapixel Microscope Reveals Tiny Parts Of The Big Picture

June 14, 2019 by 31 Comments

[JBumstead] didn’t want an ordinary microscope. He wanted one that would show the big picture, and not just in a euphemistic sense, either. The problem though is one of resolution. The higher the resolution in an image — typically — the narrower the field of view given the same optics, which makes sense, right? The more you zoom in, the less area you can see. His solution was to create a microscope using a conventional camera and building a motion stage that would capture multiple high-resolution photographs. Then the multiple photos are stitched together into a single image. This allows his microscope to take a picture of a 90x60mm area with a resolution of about 15 μm. In theory, the resolution might be as good as 2 μm, but it is hard to measure the resolution accurately at that scale.

As an Arduino project, this isn’t that difficult. It’s akin to a plotter or an XY table for a 3D printer — just some stepper motors and linear motion hardware. However, the base needs to be very stable. We learned a lot about the optics side, though.

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Hyperlinking Comes To GitHub Via Extension

June 14, 2019 by 8 Comments

If you are browsing GitHub it is very tempting to open up the source code to some project and peek at how it works. The code view is easy to read, but the viewer lacks one important feature: the ability to click on an included file and find it. The Octolinker extension fixes that oversight.

If you want to try it without installing the extension, there is a mock-up demo available. Even though the demo wants you to click on specific things, if you don’t play by the rules it will still do the right thing and take you to either the code on GitHub or an appropriate page. You can even substitute the demo URL for github.com and try it out on any GitHub page without the extension.

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A Tetris Clock

June 13, 2019 by 6 Comments

We have had no shortage of clock projects over the years, and this one is entertaining because it spells the time out using Tetris-style blocks. The project looks good and is adaptable to different displays. The code is on GitHub and it relies on a Tetris library that has been updated to handle different displays and even ASCII text.

[Brian] wanted to use an ESP8266 development board for the clock, but the library has a bug that prevents it from working, so he used an ESP32 board instead. The board, a TinyPICO, has a breakout board that works well with the display.

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