While pundits routinely predict the end of e-mail, we still get a ton of it and we bet you do too. E-mail has been around for a very long time and back in the day, it was pretty high-tech to be able to shoot off a note asking everyone where they wanted to go to lunch. What we had on our computers back then was a lot different, too. Consider that the first e-mail over ARPANET was in 1971. Back then some people had hardcopy terminals. Graphics were unusual and your main storage was probably a fraction of the smallest flash drive you currently have on your desk. No one was sending photographs, videos, or giant PDF files.
Today, things are different. Our computers have gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage. We produce and consume richly formatted documents, photographs at high resolutions, and even video. Naturally, we want to share those files with others, yet e-mail has turned up woefully short. Sure, some systems will offer to stash your large file in the cloud and send a link, but e-mailing a multi-megabyte video to your friend across town is more likely to simply fail. Why?
There’s no single recipe for creativity, as far as I know. But this week on the Podcast, Tom Nardi and I were talking about a number of hacks that were particularly inventive, out-of-the-box, or just simply “how did they think of that?”. One possible route to something new is learning from other disciplines.
We were talking about an inspiring video about 3D printing fabrics. At the moment, the design world is going crazy for all things 3DP, so it’s no surprise to see someone with a design background asking herself how to make stuff that comes off the 3D printer more flexible, and fit her needs a little bit better. But what if those of us on the building-purely-functional side of things took what the fabric folks learned and applied it to our work? You’d get something like this hybrid approach to folding mechanisms, or this approach to remove supports from your prints.
I’m continually surprised by how much the home-gamer can learn from industry, and this week was also no exception. [Anne Ogborn]’s piece on handling bulk material draws mostly on the hard work of engineers who are worried about properly emptying gigantic grain silos or feeding tons of screws into small boxes to ship out to customers. But the same physics are at work when you’re designing an automatic dry cat food dispenser for your next vacation, just on a smaller scale.
How about you? What things have you learned from other disciplines, possibly entirely unrelated ones, that have helped you with your hacking?
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The rise of streaming services on the Internet was a revolutionary shift when it came to the world of media. No more would content be pumped in to homes in a one-way fashion, broadcast by major conglomerates and government-run organizations. Instead, individuals would be free to hunt for content suiting their own desires on an all-you-can-watch basis.
It’s led to a paradigm shift in the way we consume media. However, it’s also led to immense frustration thanks to the overwhelming amount of content on offer. Let’s take a look at why that is, and some creative ways you can get around the problem.
The Paradox of Choice
Many find the masses of content on streaming services to be overwhelming to choose from. Credit: author screenshot
Traditionally, when it came to media, there were two major arms of delivery: broadcast, and home media. One might listen to the radio, or flick on the TV, or alternatively, spin up a record, or select a movie to watch on tape. If none of those options sufficed, one might take a walk down to the local video store to rent something more appealing.
Fundamentally, it was an era in which choices were limited. There were a handful of TV stations to choose from, and if nothing good was on, you could go as far as finding something watchable on tape or going without. Many will remember afternoons and evenings spent watching reruns or a Friday night movie that had been on a million times before. Some shows went as far as becoming legends for their seemingly endless replay, from The Simpsons to M*A*S*H.
As the Internet grew, though, the game started to change. Torrent websites and streaming services came along, offering up the sum total of the world’s cultural output for free, or for a nominal cost for those averse to piracy. Suddenly when it came to choosing a movie to watch, one wasn’t limited to the five or so films on at the local cinema, nor what was left on the shelves at the local video rental. Instead, virtually any movie, from the invention of the format, could be yours to watch at a moment’s notice.
With so many options on the table, many of us find it harder to choose. It’s an idea popularly known as the Paradox of Choice, a term popularized by US psychologist Barry Schwartz in 2004. When our options are limited to a select few, choice is easy. They can quickly be compared and ranked and an ideal option chosen.
Add thousands of choices to the pile, and the job escalates in complexity to the point of becoming overwhelming. With so many different choices to contrast and compare, finding the mythical right choice becomes practically impossible. Continue reading “The Joy Of Broadcast Media Vs. The Paradox Of Choice”→
You might think you’re lucky when one of your problems has multiple solutions, and you get to pick and choose, but you’re even luckier when one solution has many problems! This week I stumbled on an old solution in a new place. The project was a fantastic old MIDI guitar build, the Tryndelka by [Aleksandr Goltsov]. And the old solution? Switch matrix diodes.
You see, [Aleksandr] is making an electric guitar where the strings are pulled up to a certain voltage and then make contact with metal frets. Each fret is cut into six pieces, so that the strings can be read out individually, and the microcontroller scans each string in succession to test if it’s pressed down or not. Done, right? Wrong! The problem comes when two or more strings are pressed at once — the electrical path from the string you want will travel through the closed switch on a string that you’re not scanning. The solution is a ton of diodes.
I learned this problem the hard way in wiring up a MAME cabinet, at about 3 A.M. the night before we were going to bring it to Shmoocon. We finally got the whole USB/button code working, so we played some celebratory rounds of Street Fighter. We eventually noticed that hitting one button, or even moving the joystick in a particular direction, would block some of the other buttons from working, or change their function entirely. Quick Internet search later, and we were hand soldering 64 diodes until dawn. Good times!
But the fact that switch matrices need diodes, and exactly why, is forevermore burned in my brain. It’s fun to see it pop up in all sorts of contexts, from DIY keyboards to MIDI guitars, to Charliplexing. (It’s the “D” in LED!) It’s one of the classics — a solution to many problems.
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This is a story about two dogs I know. It is also a story of the U.S. Navy, aviation, and nuclear weapons. Sometimes it is easy to see things in dogs or other people, but hard to see those same things in ourselves. It’s a good thing that dogs can’t read (that we know of) because this is a bit of an embarrassing story for Doc. He’s a sweet good-natured dog and he’s a rather large labradoodle. He occasionally visits another usually good-natured dog, Rocky — a sheltie who is much smaller than Doc.
I say Rocky is good-natured and with people, he is. But he doesn’t care so much for other dogs. I often suspect he doesn’t realize he’s a dog and he is puzzled by how other dogs behave. You would think that when Doc comes to visit, the big dog would lord it over the little dog, right? Turns out, Doc doesn’t realize he’s way bigger than Rocky and — apparently — Rocky doesn’t realize he should be terrified of Doc. So Rocky bullies Doc to the point of embarrassment. Rocky will block him from the door, for example, and Doc will sit quaking unable to muster the courage to pass the formidable Rocky.
Big Doc…
Somewhat smaller Rocky….
It makes you wonder how many times we could do something except for the fact that we “know” we can’t do it. Or we believe someone who tells us we can’t. Doc could barge right past Rocky if he wanted to and he could also put Rocky in his place. But he doesn’t realize that those things are possible.
You see this a lot in the areas of technology and innovation. Often big advances come from people who don’t know that the experts say something is impossible or they don’t believe them. Case in point: people were anxious to fly around the start of the 1900s. People had dreamed of flying since the dawn of time and it seemed like it might actually be possible. People like Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Wright brothers, Clément Ader, and Gustave Whitehead all have claimed that they were the first to fly. Others like Sir George Cayley, William Henson, Otto Lilienthal, and Octave Chanute were all experimenting with gliders and powered craft even earlier with some success.
Yesterday, we ran a post on NVIDIA’s announcement of open-source drivers for some of its most recent video cards. And Hackaday being huge proponents of open-source software and hardware, you’d think we’d be pouring the champagne. But it’s trickier than that.
Part of the reason that they are able to publish a completely new, open-source driver is that the secrets that they’d like to keep have moved into the firmware. So is the system as a whole more or less open? Yeah, maybe both.
With a more open interface between the hardware and the operating system, the jobs of people porting the drivers to different architectures are going to be easier. Bugs that are in what is now the driver layer should get found and fixed faster. All of the usual open-source arguments apply. But at the same time, the system as a whole isn’t all that much more transparent. The irony about the new NVIDIA drivers is that we’ve been pushing them to be more open for decades, and they’ve responded by pushing their secrets off into firmware.
Secrets that move from software to firmware are still secrets, and even those among us who are the most staunch proponents of open source have closed hardware and firmware paths in our computers. Take the Intel Management Engine, a small computer inside your computer that’s running all the time — even while the computer is “off”. You’d like to audit the code for that? Sorry. And it’s not like it hasn’t had its fair share of security relevant bugs.
And the rabbit hole goes deeper, of course. No modern X86 chips actually run the X86 machine language instructions — instead they have a microcode interpreter that reads the machine language and interprets it to what the chip really speaks. This is tremendously handy because it means that chip vendors can work around silicon bugs by simple pushing out a firmware update. But this also means that your CPU is running a secret firmware layer at core. This layer is of course not without bugs, some of which can have security relevant implications.
This goes double for your smartphone, which is chock-full of multiple processors that work more or less together to get the job done. So while Android users live in a more open environment than their iOS brethren, when you start to look down at the firmware layer, everything is the same. The top layer of the OS is open, but it’s swimming on top of an ocean of binary blobs.
How relevant any of this is to you might depend on what you intend to do with the device. If you’re into open source because you like to hack on software, having open drivers is a fantastic resource. If you’re looking toward openness for the security guarantees it offers, well, you’re out of luck because you still have to trust the firmware blindly. And if you’re into open source because the bugs tend to be found quicker, it’s a mix — while the top level drivers are made more inspectable, other parts of the code are pushed deeper into obscurity. Maybe it’s time to start paying attention to open source firmware?
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Today, most of us carry supercomputers in our pockets that happen to also take instantly-viewable pictures.This is something that even the dumbest phones do, meaning that we can reasonably draw the conclusion that photographic capability has become a basic feature of everyday carry, a necessity of 21st century life.
Despite the unwashed masses of just-plain-bad photographs clouding the digital landscape, photography itself remains as important as ever so we can retain and disseminate information as history unfolds. In a sense, the more instant, the better — unless it comes at the cost of image quality. The invention of photography is on par with the printing press or with language itself in that all three allow us to communicate within our own time as well as preserve The Way Things Were in frozen silence. And no invention made vivid preservation more convenient than the instant camera.
