This is why I love Raspberry Pi (at large).
Meet Jasper, an open source project driven by two Princeton students, that’s a lot like Siri (and the Samsung-alike) and enables the tiny Raspberry Pi to operate through an USB-connected microphone with natural language.
Open APIs provide plenty of opportunities and lots of ready-to-use examples – mostly Python-based.
Check a Gmail account, have your Facebook timeline read… and more to come!
Give your RPIs a loud voice too!
Source: Jasper project
Raspberry Foundation has just annnounced the forthcoming “Compute Module”: a RPi on a ‘so-dimm-like’ module and plenty of power!
This may the ultimate solution for building RPi-based systems which feature:
- low-cost,
- low-power,
- low-profile,
- the best price/performance ratio for controller-based supercomputers or clusters of controllers.
Source: Raspberrypi.org
April Fools’ Day this year is bringing several new ideas for pranksters!
Google has created a video advertising an augmented reality Pokémon game loosely tied into Google Maps.
In Google’s vision, players would hold their smartphones out in front of them and see Nintendo’s cartoon creatures appear on screen before them, often ready to do battle.
March 6th 2014 is the World Book Day, a charity event first celebrated in 1995 organized by Unesco to promote reading, publishing and, yes, copyright.
This is the UK edition of the worldwide World Book Day, on April 23rd, and the good news is that all (UK and Irish) school children can get a token to be exchanged for a special free publication in their local bookshop.
Designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, World Book Day is marked in over 100 countries. It’s a partnership of publishers, booksellers and interested parties who work together to promote books with the aim of encouraging children to explore the pleasures of reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own.
It’s an interesting benchmark about best-sellers books among young readers.
As TheBookSeller reports, The Hunger Games
Coming in second in the film adaptation-dominated list is John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
The rest of the top ten is made up of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series (Bloomsbury), Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Penguin), The Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank (Penguin), A Streetcat Named Bob by James Bowen (Hodder), The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (HarperCollins), The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (Simon & Schuster), and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
Follow today’s best with this hashtag: #WorldBookDay.
Today’s Google Doodlec celebrates the 318th birthday of 18th century italian painter Giambattista Tiepolo.
Blame it on my venetian pride or something else, but I’m very happy that Google chose Tiepolo for today’s Doodle.
Remember those 50s SciFi themes and soundtracks? Those B-Movie horror scenes?
Well, most of them were made with a Theremin.
The instrument was invented by a young Russian physicist named Lev Sergeevich Termen in 1920.
Now you can play it on your browser (even on an iPad) thanks to Femur Design’s HTML5 Theremin.
Have fun (and play some scary tunes)!
(note that this works fine on Chrome and Safari and has some problems when running on Firefox)
Ok, two minutes sounds too little time to explain something so complex as the Higgs Boson but this is a task fine for Peter Higgs himself.
In this video [BBC], Higgs describes the particle and what it does in under 120 seconds. But without doubt the best bit is when physicist and radio presenter Jim Al-Khalili ask Higgs: “Could you encapsulate that description in, say, thirty seconds?”
“No,” comes the declarative answer.
It took a bit more than 30 seconds…
Well, this project really deserves our attention!
Blogger Smittytone recently published part I of his a href=”http://smittytone.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/the-sinclair-zx81-a-raspberry-pi-retro-restyle-part-1/” title=”Sinclair ZX81 Raspberry Pi Arduino” target=”_blank”>”Sinclair ZX81 reviving“ project using a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.
In a nutshell: the Raspberry Pi works as the ZX81 brains and Arduino does the ‘keyboard job’ of translating the odd-4×10-matrix keyboard of the Sinclair tiny wonder.
Kindly, the author added the Arduino code required to glue together the ZX keyboard and the Raspberry Pi.
Last goal is to put all this stuff together INTO A Sinclair ZX81 original case!
Looking forward for second part!
Decentralized internet?
A more user-centric network?
This is what some Bitcoin creators are trying to model…
“We will have to start by decentralizing the current Internet, and then we can create a new Internet to replace it.” Called Bitcloud, they propose a peer to peer system for sharing bandwidth. Individual users would complete computing tasks such as routing, storing, or computing in exchange for cash. As the BBC explained, “Just as Bitcoin miners provide computing power and are rewarded for solving complex mathematical equations with the virtual currency, so individual net users would be rewarded based on how much bandwidth they contribute to the Bitcloud network.”
In their own words:
Bitcloud is a Distributed Autonomous Corporation
What to find out for yourself?
Check Bitcloud’s first non-technical white paper on Github.
[Source: Phys.org]
Here’s a post (and then some replies) that will sparkle a lot of flames about news, media and social networks.
Who does drive more traffic to news sites? Facebook or Twitter?
Journalists seem to love Twitter but Facebook drives more eyeballs to news sites (and Pinterest too).
Take your time and read this post by Ezra Klein.
The advent of social media has certainly boosted some journalists’ profiles and facilitated a growing movement of entrepreneurialism. But it also highlights how media outlets have to weigh whether catering to talent will be good for the company’s bottom line.
[Source: Mashable]
