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"radio" entries
Decentralised Software, Slow Chemistry, Spectrum Maps, and RF Interference
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Popcorn Time — interview with the creator. All the elements we used already existed and had done so for a long time. But nobody had put them together in an interface that talked to the user in a nice way, said Abad. Very Anonymous approach to software: Who are you going to sue? The first? The second? The third? I did the design. Was it illegal? I didn’t link the various parts together. There is no comprehensive overview of who did what. For we don’t have any business. We don’t have any headquarters or a general manager.
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Slow Chemistry (Nature) — “lazy man’s chemistry”: let a mix of solid reactants sit around undisturbed while they spontaneously transform themselves. More properly called slow chemistry, or even just ageing, the approach requires few, if any, hazardous solvents and uses minimal energy. If planned properly, it also consumes all the reagents in the mix, so that there is no waste and no need for chemical-intensive purification.
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Mapping the Spectrum in the Mission — SDR scanner to make a map of spectrum activity.
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Electronic Noise is Drowning Out the Internet of Things (IEEE Spectrum) — (paraphrasing) increases deployment costs, decreases battery life, creates interference, ruins policies of spectrum allocation, is expensive to trace, and almost impossible stop.
Internet Broadband, Open Radio, Excel Formulae in JS, and Block Chains
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Observations of an Internet Middleman — Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers. Relevant as competition works for gigabit fibre to consumers.
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Open TX — open source firmware for RC radio transmitters. The firmware is highly configurable and brings much more features than found in traditional radios.
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formula.js — Excel formulae in Javascript. Waiting for someone to write a Apple 1 emulator in them.
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Minimum Viable Block Chain — The block chain is agnostic to any “currency”. In fact, it can (and will) be adapted to power many other use cases. As a result, it pays to understand the how and the why behind the “minimum viable block chain”.
Camera Heart Rate, Low Power Location, Quantified Self Radio, and a Multi Sensor
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Measuring Heart Rate with a Smartphone Camera — not yet realtime, but promising sensor development.
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iBeacons — low-power, short-distance location monitoring beacons. Any iOS device that supports Bluetooth Low Energy can become an iBeacon, and can detect other iBeacons when they are nearby. Apps can be notified when iBeacons move in and out of range of the device, and can monitor the proximity of iBeacons as their proximity changes over time.
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Analysis: The Quantified Self (BBC) — radio show on QS. Good introduction for the novice.
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Tinke — heart rate, blood oxygen, respiration rate, and heart rate variability in a single small sensor that plugs into your iOS device.
Wind Viz, CS For Fun, Software Defined Radio, and Copyright's Collateral Damage
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Wind Map — beautiful visualization of the winds across America.
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Computer Science for Fun — magazine for beginning students of computing.
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Cheap SDR — software defined radio for as little as $11. (via Slashdot)
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The Missing 20th Century (The Atlantic) — check out those graphs for a glaring hole caused by an overdose of copyright.
Brand in China, Radio Apps, Valued Free Text, and Brain TV
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E-Commerce Booming in China (Economist) — bad time for Google to be leaving, just as online sales take off. Chinese consumers in stores check quality by hand but buying online requires trust, aka brands. This is a turn towards Western-style commerce built on trademarks and brand promise of quality, and away from the prevalent wild East style of commerce built on cut corners, deception, and mistrust.
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Comprehensive GNU Radio Archive Network — collection of GNU Radio applications. (via Hacker News)
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The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book (Steven Johnson) — essay on connected useful text vs frozen glass-walled text. As with paywalls, I am not dogmatic about these things. I don’t think it’s incumbent upon the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal to allow all their content to flow freely through the infosphere with no restrictions. I do not pull out my crucifix when people use the phrase “Digital Rights Management.” If publishers want to put reasonable limits on what their audience can do with their words, I’m totally fine with that. As I said, I think the Kindle has a workable compromise, though I would like to see it improved in a few key areas. But I also don’t want to mince words. When your digital news feed doesn’t contain links, when it cannot be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a paragraph and paste it into another application: when this happens your news feed is not flawed or backwards looking or frustrating. It is broken.
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Charlie Rose Brain Series — streaming video of the TV shows about the brain. (via Mind Hacks)