There’s a fascinating article by Gary Wolf in this month’s Wired titled “Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm” about using software to help optimize an individuals memorization process. We’re all familiar with the notion that memorizing facts takes persistence, time and repetition. What isn’t so obvious is that there’s an […]
If you allow user-contributed content in your site, you run into the problem of dealing with user supplied HTML in a safe manner. The most secure way of dealing with things, of course, is to strip or escape all HTML from user input fields. Unfortunately, there are many situations where it would be nice to […]
YouTube user kwakhed23 pushed out this video showing before and after imagery of the Moon. In the “before” part of the video, you can see the effects of the atmosphere warping the Moon’s image as it passes over the frame. In the “after” video, a temporal noise reduction filter is applied using the open source […]
Kalanda sent in this 7×5 dot matrix LED scroller based on the Attiny2313 AVR microcontroller. It looks like a fun little project, but the part I really dug was the way the animation is programmed. The author created a simple LED Composer HTML/Javascript page that lets you visually construct the layout of the animation, its […]
Erica Sadun put together a great tool for iPhone users who’d like to keep tabs on their iPhone’s location. Instead of GPS tracking, a small binary called ‘findme’ is used to geolocate the device based on nearby cell towers. Combined with a simple curl shell script, a private Twitter account, and a scheduled launch daemon, […]
Here’s an excellent tutorial that’ll show you how to build and program a bike computer using a PIC and a homemade PCB, all from scratch using free tools: The bulk of the article that follows is to try and take the mystique out of the many steps involved in going from an idea to a […]
Now this looks like fun: The Open GPS Tracker is a small device which plugs into a $20 prepaid mobile phone to make a GPS tracker. The Tracker responds to text message commands, detects motion, and sends you its exact position, ready for Google Maps or your mapping software. The Tracker firmware is open source […]
