Backblaze has released new data from its hard drive reliability survey. Seagate has recovered dramatically since BB pulled their 3TB drives, but HGST leads the pack in minimum failure rates.
Source: Backblaze releases billion-hour hard drive reliability report | ExtremeTech
Movidius is also introducing the Fathom Neural Compute Stick — the first product of its kind — a modular deep learning accelerator in the form of a standard USB stick. Featuring a full-fledged Myriad 2 VPU, the Fathom Neural Compute Stick not only enables rapid prototyping, but also delivers high levels of neural network compute to existing devices via a USB port.
Source: Fathom | Machine Vision Technology | Movidius
This HTML 5 applet has loads of circuit elements you can use to set up a circuit and see in animated form how the current is running, measure the voltage, amperage and resistance at any point. Very nice to predesign your electronics.
Source: Circuit Simulator Applet
“There is a best time to buy notebooks, and it is exactly when you think it is, between the last week in July and the first three weeks in August, when the back-to-school merchandising frenzy is in full force,” said Analyst Stephen Baker, who studies laptop pricing and sales for the NPD Group, a market intelligence firm. He noted that this time frame applies to both Macs and PCs.
[…]
Bottom Line: You’ll find more deals in the July/August and November/December time frames and will see new model releases in early spring, midsummer and fall.
Source: The Best Time to Buy a Laptop
oneM2M is the global standards initiative that covers requirements, architecture, API specifications, security solutions and interoperability for Machine-to-Machine and IoT technologies. oneM2M was formed in 2012 and consists of eight of the world’s preeminent standards development organizations: ARIB (Japan), ATIS (North America), CCSA (China), ETSI (Europe), TIA (North America), TSDSI (India), TTA (Korea), and TTC (Japan), together with six industry fora or consortia (Broadband Forum, Continua Alliance, GlobalPlatform, HGI, Next Generation M2M Consortium, OMA) and over 200 member organizations. oneM2M specifications provide a framework to support applications and services such as the smart grid, connected car, home automation, public safety, and health.
Why is Philips not a member?
But in the case of the biocomputer, the city is a chip measuring about 1.5 cm square in which channels have been etched. Instead of the electrons that are propelled by an electrical charge and move around within a traditional microchip, short strings of proteins (which the researchers call biological agents) travel around the circuit in a controlled way, their movements powered by ATP, the chemical that is, in some ways, the juice of life for everything from plants to politicians.Because it is run by biological agents, and as a result hardly heats up at all, the model bio-supercomputer that the researchers have developed uses far less energy than standard electronic supercomputers do, making it more sustainable. Traditional supercomputers use so much electricity that they heat up a lot and then need to be cooled down, often requiring their own power plant to function.
Source: Building living, breathing supercomputers | Newsroom – McGill University
Harvard researchers have designed a new type of foldable material that is versatile, tunable and self actuated. It can change size, volume and shape; it can fold flat to withstand the weight of an elephant without breaking, and pop right back up to prepare for the next task.
Source: A foldable material that can change size, volume and shape
Researchers have successfully demonstrated how it is possible to interface graphene – a two-dimensional form of carbon – with neurons, or nerve cells, while maintaining the integrity of these vital cells. The work may be used to build graphene-based electrodes that can safely be implanted in the brain, offering promise for the restoration of sensory functions for amputee or paralysed patients, or for individuals with motor disorders such as epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease.
Source: Graphene shown to safely interact with neurons in the brain
We integrate the elasticity and plasticity into a single polymer network. Rational molecular design allows these two opposite behaviors to be realized at different temperature ranges without any overlap
Source: Shape memory polymer network with thermally distinct elasticity and plasticity
Basically you can save different shapes and recover to those different shapes hundreds of times.
Haven’t they learned from Apple? Closing your system makes users run for more open products. Not a good idea, Philips, I’m not buying this anymore!
De laatste firmware-update voor de Philips Hue bridge brengt een onaangekondigde wijziging. Slimme lampen van andere fabrikanten kunnen niet langer gekoppeld
Source: Philips Hue wordt een gesloten systeem
The researchers based the new process on a combination of two existing techniques. Using the stamping technique ‘Substrate Conformal Imprint Lithography’, which originates from a collaboration between Philips and AMOLF, they stamped a pattern in a thin layer of plastic on top of a glass substrate. The result looks much like a nanoscale landscape: a surface that is crisscrossed with interconnecting channels. The researchers subsequently filled the minuscule channels with silver using a chemical process known as the ‘Tollens’ reaction’. After removing the plastic, a conductive silver grid remains on the glass substrate. The patterns of this conductor are smaller than the wavelength of light; as a result, they do not reflect any colours from the visible spectrum. This property makes the conductor transparent. […] the technique has a conductivity three times as high as a conventional method based on the evaporation of metals
Source: Physicists make transparent conductors by means of stamping and growing
A 28-year-old who has been paralyzed for more than a decade as a result of a spinal cord injury has become the first person to be able to “feel” physical sensations through a prosthetic hand directly connected to his brain, and even identify which mechanical finger is being gently touched.The advance, made possible by sophisticated neural technologies developed under DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics points to a future in which people living with paralyzed or missing limbs will not only be able to manipulate objects by sending signals from their brain to robotic devices, but also be able to sense precisely what those devices are touching.“We’ve completed the circuit,” said DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez. “Prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by thoughts are showing great promise, but without feedback from signals traveling back to the brain it can be difficult to achieve the level of control needed to perform precise movements. By wiring a sense of touch from a mechanical hand directly into the brain, this work shows the potential for seamless bio-technological restoration of near-natural function.
These guys have launched a wildly succesfull kickstarter to produce what is basically a large touchpad. You can print 3D overlays which magnetically lock into place. Programming new overlays shouldn’t be too tough. It’s sensitive enough to detect paint brushes. Now let’s hope it can be a keyboard with the pinch and zoom and multifinger gestures the guys at Fingerworks invented before it was bought up (and then commercially killed) by Apple!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1152958674/the-sensel-morph-interaction-evolved
3 Ports USB 3.0 Hub with RJ45 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Converter LAN Wired Network Adapter for Laptops, Ultrabooks and Tablet PCs with USB Ports
Awesome plan!
Bij online veilinghuis Catawiki kunt u elke week meebieden op meer dan 12.000 bijzondere en unieke objecten in de meer dan 100 wekelijkse veilingen.
Source: Catawiki – Veilinghuis en catalogus voor verzamelaars
Redesigning a laptop with the black rubberised outside, using the old style, non-chicklet keyboard, with red dot and forward and back buttons next to the arrow keys – all the best they got rid of after the 520, but then thin and powerful! Hope they also consider a serial port on it, as well as a built in optical drive and seperate buttons from the mousepad. I might forgive their spyware policy – hey, I reinstall linux on it anyway!
A group of chemists and engineers who work with nanotechnology published a paper this month in Nature Nanotechnology about an ultra-fine mesh that can merge into the brain to create what appears to be a seamless interface between machine and biological circuitry. Called “mesh electronics,” the device is so thin and supple that it can be injected with a needle — they’ve already tested it on mice, who survived the implantation and are thriving. The researchers describe their device as “syringe-injectable electronics,” and say it has a number of uses, including monitoring brain activity, delivering treatment for degenerative disorders like Parkinson’s, and even enhancing brain capabilities.
Source: Scientists Just Invented the Neural Lace
This is the last ThinkPad with the old keyboard, before they introduced the chicklet style. Of course, the backlighting they got with the new keyboard of the T530 was nice, and the replacement of the page up / pagedown / escape keys was debated, but the spacing between the keys and the lower quality was a turn off for most people.
Source: lenovo thinkpad t520 | eBay
Of course the T530 keyboard was built in different qualities:
“New FRU for keyboard that is great: 04W3063
Old FRU of keyboard that was lousy: 04W3137
It’s also easy to tell which one you have – remove the trackpoint cap:
04W3063 = yellow under trackpoint
04W3137 = blue under trackpoint”
from https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/Thinkpad-T520-vs-T530-keyboard/td-p/787997/page/2
One way to improve your T520 is to upgrade the screen for under $100,- to full HD
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Upgrading+the+Lenovo+ThinkPad+T520+Display/9763
And there is a way to get the T520 keyboard onto a T530. You can remap a lot of the keys and get quite a way, but not all the way…
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Classic_Keyboard_on_xx30_Series_ThinkPads
Good luck!
The technique required the men to have their lower arms amputated and fitted with a robotic replacement which responds to electrical impulses when the muscles contract in the same way as a real hand.
“In effect, brachial plexus avulsion injuries represent an inner amputation, irreversibly separating the hand from neural control,” said Professor Oskar Aszmann, Director of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Restoration of Extremity Function at the Medical University of Vienna, who pioneered the technique.
via Watch: Star Wars-style ‘bionic hand’ fitted to first patients – Telegraph.
These are 2 tiny dots that connect from a distance without WiFi at 6Gbit per second. This sounds like a wonderful replacement of USB / Firewire cabling you have to fidget to plug in.
