CodeMade is a user-generated collection of (mostly) physical computing products, complete with links to their source code. Projects are grouped by category, and range from basic Arduino projects that anyone can grasp, to more sophisticated ones that use artificial intelligence and deep learning. This makes it trivially easy for a beginner to find a cool project and start building.These projects are sourced from a variety of sources (GitHub, Instructables, Make Magazine, LifeHacker), and are aggregated into collections. I suppose you can think of it as being a bit like Pinterest, but for nerds. READ MORE: CodeMade.io is a place to find open-source Internet of Things Inspiration | The Next Web
Tag Archives: open source
Animation software used by Studio Ghibli will soon be free | engadget #animation #software #free #video #design #opensource
You may not have heard of Toonz animation software, but you’ve no doubt seen work it was used in: Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away and Tale of the Princess Kaguya (above), or the animated series Futurama. Now, the Toonz Ghibli Edition used by legendary Japanese filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki is going open-source, making it free to use by studios and novice animators alike.
Source: Animation software used by Studio Ghibli will soon be free | engadget
Experimental #Website Lets You Download Amazing #House #Blueprints for #Free | WIRED #residential #home #architecture #opensource #design
Architecture has long had an accessibility problem: You want a bespoke house? You’re gonna have to pony up a lot of money. In the process, good design has become a luxury; a snooty, out-of-reach idea that only the rich have access to, which is actually the exact opposite of what good design should be. But what if architecture behaved more like technology? Can you expand the reach of quality design by applying the same principles behind open source code to architecture? Ask Joana Pacheco, and the answer will be a resounding yes. “We’re trying to bring quality to open source,” Pacheco says. Pacheco, who heads up architecture firm UMA…launched Paperhouses, a platform [bringing] high-quality open source architecture to the masses. READ MORE: Experimental Website Lets You Download Amazing House Blueprints for Free | WIRED
Direct Link: paperhouses.co
Google’s Dream Robot Is Running Wild Across the Internet | Gizmodo #images #algorithms #visualizations
Remember a few weeks back, when we learned that Google’s artificial neural network was having creepy daydreams, turning buildings into acid trips and landscapes into Magic Eye pictures? Well, prepare to never sleep again, because last week, Google made its “inceptionism” algorithm available to the public, and the nightmarish images are cropping up everywhere.
The “Deep Dream” system essentially feeds an image through a layer of artificial neurons, asking an AI to enhance and build on certain features, such as edges. Over time, pictures can become so distorted that they morph into something entirely different, or just a bunch of colorful, random noise.
Now that the code for the system is publicly available, anyone can upload a photo of their baby and watch it metamorphose into a surrealist cockroach, or whatever. If you need some inspiration, or an excuse to crawl back into bed, pull the covers over your face, and wait for the world to end, just check out the hashtag ‘DeepDream’ on your social media platform of choice. READ MORE: Google’s Dream Robot Is Running Wild Across the Internet | Gizmodo.
Also See: DeepDream – A Code Example for Visualizing Neural Networks | Google Research Blog
This Massive, Open Source Map Makes the World More Wheelchair Friendly | Gizmodo #maps #accessibility #disabilities
The world is tough place to navigate in a wheelchair. But finding ramps and elevators can be easier thanks to this handy map app that anyone can edit.
It’s called Wheelmap, and it tells you the accessibility status of public places all over the world. It’s free and grades locations in a traffic light-style, red-yellow-green scale of wheelchair accessibility. Developed by German nonprofit SOZIALHELDEN e.V., it’s now celebrating five years since launch. Since 2010, users have added nearly half a million entries across the globe.
“Accessible” means you can enter the place without steps, and that all rooms inside a building can be entered without steps, as well. “Limited accessibility” refers to entrances with a max of one step no higher than seven centimeters, and that the “most important rooms” can be entered without steps.
Wheelmap launched back in 2010, and since then, has become available in 22 languages. It’s available for both iOS and Android users.
READ MORE: This Massive, Open Source Map Makes the World More Wheelchair Friendly | Gizmodo
Check Out This Coding Toy—For Grownups | ReadWrite @TeamKano #coding #diy #makerspaces #tech
I think its a very smart marketing move for Kano to launch products that are gender and age neutral. I volunteer with my public library’s CoderDojo program, which is for 9 to 17 year olds. One of the participant’s parents has actually stayed to learn as well. Its heartwarming to see parent and child learning new concepts together. Learning to code, makerspaces, hackfests, arduino…these activities are fun and instructive for all ages and can be a family activity too.
Kickstarted into existence in 2013, with a campaign that blasted through its $100,000 goal with $1.5 million in pledges, Kano now makes Raspberry Pi–based computer kits commercially available to children ages 6 to 14. Inspired by those young users, who founder Alex Klein says have created and shared as many as 5 million lines of code, he wants to spread that enthusiasm to a larger audience.
Engineering kits have been popular among kids and a natural fit in the educational space. Likewise, Kano set out following in the footsteps of companies like Little Bits, Adafruit, and Goldie Blox. But Klein now wants to extend Kano’s reach, taking it into grown-up territory. Simply put, he wants to appeal to everyone’s inner “inventor and tinkerer,” he said.
Klein wants to push into the adult maker market by putting out products that are both gender- and age-neutral. The core design, he hopes, speaks to fundamental human impulses: “Everyone has shared urges to look inside,” he said. “Everyone wants to take control. Everyone wants to make and play.”
Kano’s next stage of evolution will involve some fundamental shifts. The company is expanding its line-up with new add-on kits, and plans to open up Kano Blocks—its game-making arena—and online platform Kano World to community development.
All Kano products run on Kano OS, the open source operating system that sits on top of Raspberry Pi. It boasts high computational powers that let it run fast, boot quickly and offer clear graphical rendering. For developers, this means that they will have ample resources to jump on board and quickly create their own projects. Kano World allows for the Kano community to share their creations and add on to existing projects.
READ MORE: Check Out This Coding Toy—For Grownups | ReadWrite
C.H.I.P. — The super tiny computer that only costs $9 [@Kickstarter] | Mashable #makerspaces @nextthingco
If you thought the $35 Raspberry Pi 2 was a small and cheap computer, think again. Next Thing Co.’s open-source C.H.I.P. is an even smaller barebones microcomputer that only costs $9.
Like the Raspberry Pi, C.H.I.P. can be used in a variety of ways. Connect the necessary parts — a keyboard, mouse, and a display — to it and it becomes a personal computer. Otherwise, you can hack it into a retro games emulator, or robot, or whatever you can dream up. Next Thing Co. encourages users to learn how to code and make things with C.H.I.P.
Next Thing Co. is currently crowdfunding C.H.I.P. through a Kickstarter campaign. At the time of this writing, the project has successfully reached its $50,000 funding goal with 29 days to go. The first C.H.I.P computers are expected to start shipping in December.
READ MORE: C.H.I.P. — the super tiny computer that only costs $9 | Mashable
The NSA Is Funding a Project to Roll All Programming Languages Into One | Gizmodo
Why bother having to learn HTML5, JavaScript, PHP, CSS and XML, when you could just learn one? Well, thats exactly what an NSA-funded project at Carnegie Mellon University seeks to achieve.The “polyglot” programming language is called Wyvern—the name comes from a a mythical dragon-like reature with two legs instead of four—and is designed to help unify the way apps and websites are created.
READ: The NSA Is Funding a Project to Roll All Programming Languages Into One | Gizmodo
The Almost Completely Open Source Laptop Goes on Sale | WIRED
Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Sean “xobs” Cross want to sell you a laptop you can completely trust.
Earlier this year, the two Singapore-based engineers fashioned a laptop made almost entirely from open source hardware, hardware whose designs are freely available to the world at large. They called it Project Novena. Anyone could review the designs, looking for bugs and security flaws, and at least in theory, that meant you could be confident the machine was secure from top to bottom, something that’s more desirable than ever in the post-Edward Snowden age.
The original idea was simply to encourage others to build their own open source laptops at home. But now the pair are taking the project a step further. Starting today, you can order your own pre-built Novena laptop through the crowd-funding site Crowd Supply, and it will ship out in the coming months. Much like Kickstarter, Crowd Supply is place where you can put up money to help fund a company and then get a product in exchange.
The project is part of larger movement towards open source hardware. Open source software has become a mainstay across the web and inside many businesses, and now, open source hardware is beginning to find its own place in the world, not only among hobbyists but inside big companies such as Facebook. The idea is not only to improve security, but to help spur innovation. If you share designs, others can make them better. The new, commercial version of the Novena does include some parts that are closed source, such as the processor, but Huang and Cross have tried to minimize these as much as possible.
Read more: The Almost Completely Open Source Laptop Goes on Sale | Enterprise | WIRED.
This Grad Student Hacked Semantic Search To Be Better Than Google | Co.Labs
Full Post
Google may be the dominant search engine, but it’s far from ideal. One major problem: How do you search for things you don’t know exist?
Using Google’s own experimental algorithms, a graduate student may have build a solution: a search engine that allows you to add and subtract search terms for far more intuitive results.
The new search engine, ThisPlusThat.Me, similarly looks for context clues among the terms. For instance: Entering the arithmetic search “Paris – France + Italy” gives the top result as “Rome,” but if I search the same thing in Google, I’ll get directions between Paris and Italy, restaurants in France and Italy, and a depressing Yahoo Answers of whether Italy is in Paris (or vice versa). “Rome,” on the other hand, is an association you, a human, would make (I wantThis, without That but including Those)–and the engine makes that decision based on each answer’s semantic value compared to your search.
Until now, search has been stuck in a paradigm of literal matching, unable to break into conceptual associations and guessing what you mean when you search. There’s a reason Amazon and Netflix have scored points for their item suggestions: They’re thinking how you think.
The engine, created by Astrophysics PhD candidate Christopher Moody, uses Google’s own open-source word2vec algorithm research to take the terms you searched for and ranks the query results by relevance, just like a normal search–except the rankings are based on “vector distances” that have a lot more human sense. So in the above example, other results could have been, say, Napoleon or wine–both have ties with the above search terms, but within the context of City – Country + Other Country, Rome is the vector that has the closest “distance.”
All the word2vec algorithm needs is an appropriate corpus of data to build its word relations on: Moody used Wikipedia’s corpus as a vocabulary and relational base–an obvious advantage in size, but it also had the added benefit of “canonicalizing” terms (is it Paris the city, or Paris from the Trojan War? In Wikipedia, the first is “Paris” and the second “Paris_(mythology).” But millions of search-and-replaces in Wiki’s 42 GB of text was intensive, so Moody used Hadoop’s Map functions to fan those search-and-replaces to several nodes.
A search query then spits out an 8 GB table of vectors with varying distances; Moody tried out a few data search systems before settling on Google’s Numexpr to find the term with the closest vector distance.
via This Grad Student Hacked Semantic Search To Be Better Than Google | Co.Labs | code + community.
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