[ x ] task complete.
2,090 karma · joined February 27, 2011
Is it really so hard to empathize with people who have different skill sets than yourself? Yes, C would be more efficient. Yes, this wouldn't be very cost effective used in a high volume product. Yes, it's a little funky to write a web page just to plonk your script tag in there.
But, if you spend all day doing front-end dev with jQuery and just want to prototype some blinky lights or a flood sensor in your basement, now you've already got all the skills you need. You're not producing a million units, you're not worried about power so much as it'll be plugged in. An evening with a soldering iron and your text editor and off you go.
Anyways. For prior art on this ecosystem, see janOS:
which is basically stripped down firefoxOS which runs your app only (none of the launcher crud and such) in god-mode. It's actually quite fun to go grab a $30 phone off of ebay, and have a nice programmable screen and sensor suite with wifi, gps, and cell connectivity. Indeed, I find it more compelling than this board they're releasing, because I like taking advantage of the cheapness of mass manufacturing. The only downside is it's difficult to impossible to break out any GPIO on phones.
It will be interesting to see how they compete and position vs. all the VR gear coming out. I hope it doesn't end up as "Dungeons and Dragons players over here, First Person Shooters over there".
I hope autonomous cars can help re-enable the peaceful co-existence of multiple modes of transportation on our streets.
[1]: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...
After doing all this manually, I found a writeup by Chris Adams where he talks about a process for using computer vision to automatically extract figures from pages of text [3]. So that's my current side-project.
Finally, after all of this, I was searching the Flickr Commons for imagery and noticed that the Internet Archive already has gobs of book illustrations extracted and posted to Flickr [4]! There's so many it must be an automated process, but I haven't found any details. They don't seem to be uploaded with the best quality possible, and the captions aren't included, so I think I'll continue on my quest (which is currently focused on generating high-quality public domain beekeeping-related imagery).
[1]: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/
[2]: https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig-phillips
[3]: http://chris.improbable.org/2013/08/31/extracting-images-fro...
[4]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/
edit: formatting
I don't know the details, but it sounds like Chromebooks can now run Android apps: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6088175?hl=en
Maybe that's only Android apps that have been "ported" and placed in the Chromebook app store though.
Either way, clearly you're already calculating this value for billing, no? Or are you just using laser run-time for the bill, and estimating that based on the user's guesstimated path length?
"Challenges" or "programming challenges" sounds good to me.
The textfile was a fun read, best of luck!
I didn't know Blue Origin's goal was 4 minute suborbital floaty experiences for rich people though. Has that been common knowledge? Are they even interested in going orbital with non-human payloads?
Or an alternate theory: bank owners used to be local businesspeople, who would have been (rightly) embarrassed and ashamed to erect a shoddy and short-lived structure in their hometown. Now banks are at least regional, if not national or global, and care more about saving a few pennies for shareholders than they do about the communities they inhabit.
Combine this with the fact that consumers and "fellow citizens" don't give a crap about good buildings and good urbanism, and here we are with crackerbox drivethrough shite that nobody gives a damn about because it'll be bulldozed in 30 years, after a brief stint as a laser tag venue.
That's true... somehow I completely overlooked that word in the original post. Still: there are certainly some friends of mine where I'd rather eat the food of a stranger any day of the week.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/419277966/the-things-ne...
They seem to have set up an open LoRa network in Amsterdam.
But you just said you do it all the time when your friends cook. Is the only difference the profit motivation? As the article says, this is often more of a hobby than a "real" business... personally, I'd sooner suspect a restaurant – with their notoriously thin margins – to cut corners. I think with a decent reputation system (word of mouth, or some established online source) I'd be comfortable taking a chance at one of these establishments.