Snap, Inc., the company behind Snapchat, is branding itself as a hardware company. What hardware does Snap make? Spectacles, or a camera attached to a pair of sunglasses. Snap, Inc. has a market value of around $30 Billion USD.
For his Hackaday Prize entry, [William Glover] is building a device that’s easily worth $100 Billion. It’s called SnappCat, and it’s a machine learning, AI, augmented reality, buzzword-laden camera that adds memes to pictures of cats. Better get in on the Series A now because this is ????????????.
Here’s the use case for SnappCat. Place a small device containing a camera and some sort of WiFi chip. During the day, this device will take pictures. If the device recognizes your cat in a picture, it adds a meme (we assume this means text, probably using the Impact typeface), and sends it to your mobile device. Just imagine sitting in a meeting at work. Your phone buzzes, you look at the message, and you laugh uproariously. Yes, you can has fud Mr. Pibbles, you can has so much fud.
This is the height of technology. That’s not to say landing on the moon or building a civilization on Mars isn’t a superior technological achievement. SnappCat is simply the best technology humanity will every produce because it’s all downhill from here.
That said, this is a pretty interesting problem. A small, cheap device that does image recognition is hard, and adding memes is just the cherry on top. We can’t wait to see where this project goes, and it’s a great entry to the Best Product portion of the Hackaday Prize.
Oh, for cryin’ out loud. That’s the last straw. We’ve seen one dangerous YouTube video too many. Are we honestly cursed with a false feedback system that unequitably rewards dangerous behavior in online videos? Obviously the answer is ‘yes’. Now the real question becomes, can we do anything about it?
Professional Driver on a Closed Course
Marketing is all about putting something in front of a consumer and getting their brain to go “awesome!”. The fast, loud, shiny, burny, and sharp things are all on the table for that task. It’s the primal part of your brain that gives you jolt, as if your amygdala forgot how to run from sabertooths (saberteeth?) and learned how to like and subscribe.
Back in the day, people were hurt and even killed when replicating stunts they saw done on television. To protect from litigation, companies started adding disclaimers — Don’t Try this at Home or my favorite: Professional Driver on a Closed Course.
But the thing is, commercials are big business. If someone gets hurt, there’s money to be had by assigning blame in a court of law. When the ability to produce and distribute video content was democratized by the coming of the Internet we lost those warnings and the common sense that went with them.
Going way back to this remote-control-a-real-car hack in 2009 I haven’t been able to shake the lack of consideration for danger in a project like this. I included it in the title, which ends with “(dangerously)”. While I wasn’t taken to task in the comments for that title, I have been chided for advocating for things as controversial as helmets when strapping your body to a moving object. Do a Ctrl-F on “helmet” in this article to see what I mean.
The people pulling off these hacks were doing it because it felt awesome and they wanted to document how that felt. They weren’t stars, they were hackers and the world mostly ignored them except in places like Hackaday. We might debate the lack of safety measures but most assumed anyone with skills to do this would take a beat to consider the risks. This was probably a false assumption.
It’s All About the Subs
Things have gotten worse since then. I can’t blame all of this on YouTube, but I’m going to try. One day, YouTube changed everything. They put together a perfect mix of easy uploading, great discoverability, and (most importantly) advertising revenue sharing. For some people, this became a business and not just a way to connect with the rest of the hacker community.
This is the rise of the subscriber base. It’s a vicious cycle — you need more people to like and subscribe so that their influence will push your channel to more people to like and subscribe. The problem is, the fastest way to this is that tricky amygdala again. For some, this is being funny, but for others this is speed, fireballs, and loud bangs, with no regard for life, limb, or eyeball.
We’re Far From Blameless
I like fireballs and fast cars as much as the next person. And we’ve certainly run a lot of articles on the escalatingly dangerous hacks out there for all to see. For instance, we’ve covered several hacks from [kreosan], like microwaving things outside of a microwave and then building a microwave gun.
But even the more mainstream content appears to be getting more and more dangerous. Our beloved [Colin Furze] is guilty of dangerous behavior. Not only did he burn himself testing a jet engine out without any safety gear, but turned the aftermath into another ad-supported video.
Which brings me to the straw that broke the camel’s back. Here’s a hack that’s based on the idea of hurting people. It’s what is (luckily) a crappy robot designed to recognize faces and shine lasers into any eyes it detects. Literally it’s conceived to shoot your eyes out. It’s using a red laser that likely won’t cause eye damage unless you intentionally stare into it without blinking, but that’s not discussed in the video, and someone who doesn’t know better replicating this with a different laser could easily cause irreparable damage to their sight.
Rocket Scientists Use Common Sense and So Should You
I was going to use the heading “This Isn’t Rocket Science”, but you don’t see rocket scientists testing new engine designs by lighting a fuse as they run away giggling in short sleeves and flip-flops. Those brilliantly intelligent people are tucked safely in a bunker at a safe distance with their hands hovering over the emergency kill switch as fire fighting equipment hangs out at arms reach. Rocket scientists know a lot about safety and so should you.
This is simple. We don’t have to invent anything to add safety to our hacks. Use common sense. Dress appropriately for your demo — as the situation dictates use reasonable fire-resistant clothing, helmet, etc. Wear protective glasses, laser spec’d goggles, and ear plugs; each whenever called for. Take fumes and particulates seriously and wear respiratory gear. Keep a fire extinguisher around. And if you’re making a video or posting images about it — which you should definitely do — snap a picture or give us a quick video cut to the safety precautions you’ve chosen.
I still want to see awesome projects on YouTube. But I also want to see the trend towards danger for clicks stopped. Let’s do dangerous stuff safely. And let’s be conspicuous about those safety measures. That combination is truly awesome.
Now get off my lawn, and wear your seat belt while doing so.
It was a dark and stormy afternoon, the kind you get on the east side of the country. I was drinking a coffee, sitting in a camping chair in front of my door, and watching like a hawk for the treacherous cable man to show up. This day there would be no escape. There would be no gently rapping the door with a supple sheepskin leather glove before scurrying away for another union mandated coffee break. I was waiting, I was kind of grumpy, and by God today would be the day. Today would be the day that after hours on hold, after three missed appointments, after they lost my records twice; I would get an answer on whether or not they could actually service internet to my apartment. If I was lucky, and the answer was yes, then approximately two to three thousand years later they would run a cable from the telephone pole to my house and I could stop commandeering WiFi from the pizza shop across from me.
It’s important to note that I was in the middle of the city. I wasn’t out in the boonies. Every house on the block but mine had cable. While this is dumb, it begins to make more sense when you dive into the history. Louisville, Kentucky is a strange place. It used to be the gateway to the west. Ships would crawl up its river until they reached the falls. Then porters would charge an exorbitant fee to carry all those goods down to the bottom of the falls where they would be loaded on a ship and be sent ever westward. Resulting in every rich merchant, captain, and manufacturer in the region having a nice house there. Ever wonder why the Derby is in Louisville and the Queen comes to visit sometimes? It probably has something to do with it having the highest concentration of Victorian buildings and mansions outside of New York City.
Stirling engines are really cool machines, invented by Reverend Dr. Robert Stirling in 1816 to rival the steam engine, they are one of the most efficient engines ever conceived. Building one is a very rewarding experience, but it has a certain level of difficulty. However, [Attila Blade]’s version of a free-piston type Stirling engine is simple enough to be built in a matter of minutes.
To build the engine you only need a test tube, steel wool, a latex glove, an O ring and some wire. The construction is straightforward as you can see in the video. The whole engine rocks on the wire frame which also makes it different to most other Stirling engines that you can watch on the net. The free piston is just one type of several possible configurations for a Stirling. The most common one, is the beta type, usually made with soda cans, but it is much more difficult to build than [Attila Blade]’s engine.
This is definitely a fun project that you may want to try, and is also a great way to learn thermodynamics concepts. Even if you don’t build this particular version, there are many other possibilities using mainly household items, or you can also check the very interesting history behind the Stirling engine.
This Herald is in much better condition than my 12/50 was. Philafrenzy [CC BY-SA 4.0]What was your first car? Mine was a 1965 Triumph Herald 12/50 in conifer green, and to be frank, it was a bit of a dog.
The Triumph Herald is a small saloon car manufactured between about 1959 and 1971. If you are British your grandparents probably had one, though if you are not a Brit you may have never heard of it. Americans may be familiar with the Triumph Spitfire sports car, a derivative on a shortened version of the same platform. It was an odd car even by the standards of British cars of the 1950s and 1960s. Standard Triumph, the manufacturer, had a problem with their pressing plant being owned by a rival, so had to design a car that used pressings of a smaller size that they could do in-house. Thus the Herald was one of the last British mass-produced cars to have a separate chassis, at a time when all other manufacturers had produced moncoques for years.
My 12/50 was the sporty model, it had the high-lift cam from the Spitfire and a full-length Britax sunroof. It was this sunroof that was its downfall, when I had it around a quarter century of rainwater had leaked in and rotted its rear bodywork. This combined with the engine being spectacularly tired and the Solex carburetor having a penchant for flooding the engine with petrol made it more of a pretty thing to look at than a useful piece of transport. But I loved it, tended it, and when it finally died irreparably I broke it for parts. Since then I’ve had four other Heralds of various different varieties, and the current one, a 1960 Herald 948, I’ve owned since the early 1990s. A piece of advice: never buy version 0 of a car.
If you’re looking for a high entertainment value per byte of code, [Nardax] has you covered with his wearable spellcasting controller. With not much effort, he has built a very fun looking device, proving what we’ve always known: a little interaction can go a long way.
[Nardax] originally intended his glorified elbow-mount potentiometer to be a fireworks controller. Ironically, he’s now using it to throw virtual fireballs instead. Depending on the angle at which he holds his elbow before releasing it, he can cast different spells in the game World of Warcraft. We’re not at all sure that it helps his gameplay, but we’re absolutely sure that it’s more fun that simply mashing different keys.
There’s a lot of room for expansion here, but the question is how far you push it. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. It looks like [Nardax] is enjoying his product-testing research, though, so we’ll keep our eyes out for the next iterations of this project.
Newborn humans are both amazingly resilient and frighteningly fragile creatures. A child born with a 40 full weeks of gestation has pretty good odds of surviving the neonatal period these days, and even if he or she comes along a few weeks early, things usually go smoothly. But those babies that can’t wait to get out and meet the world can run into trouble, and the earlier they’re born, the greater the intervention needed to save them.
We’ve all seen pictures of remarkably tiny babies in incubators, seemingly dwarfed by the gloved hands of an anxious parent who just wants that first magical touch of their baby’s skin. As common as such an intervention is now and as technologically advanced as neonatology is, care for premature infants as a medical discipline has a long and interesting history of technical and social hacks that’s worth looking at.
Back in the day, people were hurt and even killed when replicating stunts they saw done on television. To protect from litigation, companies started adding disclaimers — Don’t Try this at Home or my favorite: Professional Driver on a Closed Course.
![This Herald is in much better condition than my 12/50 was. Philafrenzy [CC BY-SA 4.0]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/triumph_herald_southgate_london.jpg)
