Article note: One built for the CyKey chordset instead of the BAT chordset.
I think I prefer the BAT chordset (despite years of never getting good at it), but it's nice to see people trying things and keeping reasonably-successful designs alive.
Article note: Oh Internet of Shit. A major vendor shuts down and their cloud back-end and renders all their gadgets inert.
This shit is all irrelevant until there are reasonable interop standards and local hubs.
Enlarge/ The lighting puns write themselves. (credit: Insteon)
The smart home company Insteon has vanished.
The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.
As Internet of Things reporter Stacey Higginbotham points out, high-ranking Insteon executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, have scrubbed the company from their LinkedIn accounts. In the time it took to write this article, Lilleness also removed his name and picture from his LinkedIn profile. It seems like that is the most communication longtime Insteon customers are going to get.
Article note: Neat! It's more-or-less the way I've thought experimented out doing it but never had any need to try.
Input devices consisting of optical readers for punched paper tape have been around since the earliest days of computing, so why stop now? [Jürgen]’s Paper Tape Reader project connects to any modern computer over USB, acting like a serial communications device. Thanks to the device’s automatic calibration, it works with a variety of paper materials. As for reading speed, it’s pretty much only limited to how fast one can pull tape through without damaging it.
Stacked 1.6 mm PCBs act as an enclosure, of sorts.
While [Jürgen]’s device uses LEDs and phototransistors to detect the presence or absence of punched holes, it doesn’t rely on hardware calibration. Instead, the device takes analog readings of each phototransistor, and uses software-adjusted thresholds to differentiate ones from zeros. This allows it to easily deal with a wide variety of tape types and colors, even working with translucent materials. Reading 500 characters per second isn’t a problem if the device has had a chance to calibrate.
Interested in making your own? The build section of the project has all the design files; it uses only through-hole components, and since the device is constructed from a stack of 1.6 mm thick PCBs, there’s no separate enclosure needed.
Article note: All Intel's recent transactional memory and hardware security stuff has not actually worked for their intended purpose, so this is better than bullshitting and doubling down.
AFIK SPARC is the only current living (...ish) architecture with usable memory tagging of any sort at the moment (ADI features in Solaris), though Arm8.5 specifies Memory Tagging Extensions.
Having done an MS in the area, its sort of impressive how many times there have been memory tagging efforts to varying degrees of ambition in computer designs, how useful they can be, and how few of them have panned out.
Article note: Because we're building exploitative trinkets instead of technologies. All the mutually incompatible streaming gadgets would be better for consumers if they were just endpoints for a decent agreed upon protocol. But nooo. (and for what used to be called PAN applications, Bluetooth is just awful at everything and sucked all the air out of the room)
Article note: ...speaking of bad trends in infrastructure.
Atlassian has been big on the "We're going to transition all our on-prem customers to ~~serfdom~~ cloud" annnnd multi-week outage.
Article note: Gaming metrics gets rewarded over intended behaviors until it drives out the intended behaviors: the tragedy of society.
Academia is _deep_ in it these days.
It ought always to be remembered, that literary institutions are founded and endowed for the common good, and not for the private advantage of those who resort to them for education. It is not that they may be enabled to pass through life in an easy or reputable manner, but that their mental powers may be cultivated and improved for the benefit of society.
