Formerly a separate Gadget/Tech blog, now all the old posts are integrated into Pattern Recognition.
Hey librarians: You think you’re good at finding things? Try this test on for size:
Daniel Russell stood in front of a crowd of investigative journalists in Boston last week and showed us this picture of a random skyscraper in an unknown city:
Russell posed a riddle:What’s the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped?
via How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques.
I’ve said it before, but the rise of the cheap sensor, combined with ubiquitous connectivity, is going to do more to change the way we interact with our world than you can imagine.
The coolest thing at Google I/O this year isn’t a cheap tablet or a pair of overpriced glasses or even a killer keyboard. It is, believe it or not, an alarm clock. But not just any alarm clock — this is an alarm clock with potential. What you see above, and demonstrated in the video after the break, is the gadget that was handed out to attendees who went to learn about the Android Accessory Development Kit.
Inside Google’s amazing Accessory Development Kit demo hardware (video) — Engadget.
7 | Burritobot: A 3-D Printer That Spits Out Burritos | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.
Although the Burritobot’s canisters make it a robot cousin to Taco Bell’s sour cream guns, the idea of using 3-D printers for food is not new at all. A growing movement of geeks, makers, academics, and startups have been playing with the idea of personal fabricators for home use. The Fab@home Project over at Cornell University has developed 3-D printers in conjunction with the French Culinary Institute that create a wide range of foods. Fast Company has previously written about Cornell’s 3-D printed scallop nuggets that resemble tiny space shuttles; other foods successfully created inside 3-D printers include cakes, cookies, ramen noodles, and beef patties. Various startups, such as Essential Dynamics, are also working on the technology. These printers all work by creating “inks” out of edible ingredients that can then be turned into real foods via a few hours in the 3-D printer.
With a single CSS stylesheet, publishers can take XHTML source content and turn it into a laid-out, print-ready PDF. You can take your XHTML source, bypass desktop page layout software like Adobe InDesign, and package it as an ePub file. It’s a lightweight and adaptable workflow, which gets you beautiful books faster.
And we are one step closer to a Daniel Suarez novel.
One of the downsides of electronic text is its verifiability against the original. Do we need an MD5 style hash verification system for ebooks?
Google’s Project Glass product lead Steve Lee walks us through his experience with the development of the company’s sci-fi-inspired eyewear–from his team’s “hundreds of variations and dozens of early prototypes” to his vision of the future.
I was totally into this stuff in the 90’s, reading Wired and Mondo2000 whenever I could find them, and devouring Gibson and Sterling like candy. I’m a product of the cyberpunk age.
Yet another new business emerging from the drop in cost of 3D printing. Makie is a company that lets you design your own doll digitally, which they then will print, dress, and send to you. They look incredible, and this is just the beginning of the massively-customizable toy explosion that is headed our way.
Yet another Kickstarter for cheap and connected sensors that record and report things about your environment. Seriously, people, these are going to be everywhere.
