Microsoft Excel World Champion
I didn’t even know an Excel world championship even existed, but Andrew Ngai, a 37-year-old Australian actuary, has won for the 3rd straight time.
He gives us mere mortals some tips
I didn’t even know an Excel world championship even existed, but Andrew Ngai, a 37-year-old Australian actuary, has won for the 3rd straight time.
He gives us mere mortals some tips
Todd Pierce was a hard drinking, hard fighting, top-tier professional bronc rider that now teaches a lot about God through his work with wild horses. I think a lot of the struggles he went through are ones we all know – especially dealing with childhood hurt, loneliness, and the emptiness of the world despite success. His clarity came when he realized how he wasn’t that different than the wild horses he trained and embraced a higher truth in God.
The amazing lessons he learned through horses should not surprise us. We’re are part of a whole universe full of beauty that all echoes the wisdom of God. Definitely worth a listen.
There’s lots of different door locks out there that use manual keypads, RFID card, biometric device, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. Mirko Pavleski shows off an arduino powered door lock that works by correctly timing a light pulse for an exact number of milliseconds.
I wouldn’t call it the most secure kind of lock since it only requires a single timed light pulse. A more secure solution would be a pattern of on/off lights. While clever, it’s likely vulnerable to ‘shoulder surfing’ by others watching from a distance with a detector (even if it was UV). This would be true at night when the light would be quite visible. But it’s a fun idea.
Interesting visual effect where objects animated on a random field of black and white pixels are only visible when they are moving. Still images just look like random noise. Maybe this is how animals with highly motion based vision experience the world?
A game called Lost in the Static uses a very similar effect: https://silverspaceship.com/static/ Lost in the Static dev Sean Howard wrote a blog entry on how it works.
The graphics for the youtube video were generated by a simple Win32/C++ app at https://github.com/ChrisBLong/POV
VR and AR have been on a tear lately. But one of the things missing from VR is actual physical feedback when interacting with objects. Haptic feedback isn’t new; but the methods used so far are pretty crude. Currently developed/in development systems from Meta and Haptx use tubes with compressed air. The physical limitations of these systems make them expensive, noisy, and bulky. (A recent Apple patent also hints at their methods)
Enter Fluid Reality. They have developed a system that utilizes an electro-osmotically powered array of pixels that are placed on the fingertips in the gloves. These give a sensation of touch feedback by physically raising/lowering the pixels to simulate the surface (rough, smooth, ridges/edges, etc). But they don’t use air, they use liquid. That method means they can use much smaller, solid state osmatic pumps. This means the entire apparatus can likely fit entirely on the hand instead of needing bulky air systems.
Harrison’s team uses liquid to create touch sensations, resulting in a more precise and quieter system compared to conventional VR gloves that run on pressurized air. This technology can generate more complex touch sensations and is based on the principle of electromagnetic induction, using an electromagnetic field to move liquid within the glove’s liquid chambers. A small battery and standard printed circuit board (PCB) hardware are sufficient for the operation of this technology.
They use solid state, electro-osmatic pumps which means they are much cheaper and all the electronics can fit on the hand instead of needing connection to larger external apparatus.
Read more about it in their paper.
Links:
The Nopia is a midi chord generator from Martin Grieco that lets you play around with different parts of tonal harmony theory to build really cool musical chords and arpeggios. It seems like a great beginner tool for building up great backing sounds.
It’s a beautiful little device that almost looks like something right out of original Star Trek. Perhaps they took some inspiration from Teenage Engineering.
Teenage Engineering is a funky little product design company. They have an eclectic collection of beautifully designed products from a desk, to bags and clothes, to a flat pack computer case – but primarily focus on audio devices. What they’re really known for above the products themselves – is there incredible design.
One of the coolest new devices is probably the TP-7 audio recorder. These devices do a top-notch job technically; and are even more striking for their design. This one features a spinning wheel while recording and playing back that you can hold to stop playback or shuttle back and forth like a mixing dj.
The devices aren’t for everyone. They come at eye-watering prices that relegate them to lifestyle purchasers that care more about looks than price. As an example, the TP-7 is $1499. And less you think that’s ridiculous for a hand-held audio recorder – it is currently sold out.
There seems to be a trend towards interesting new designs for our gadgets. It reminds me a bit of the Nopia.
Stacksmashing demonstrates that the communication between the CPU and TPM is unencrypted and can be snooped by attaching wires to the traces between them. This is not new, but now has all the source/board design to make it easier – on old systems with a long known security flaw of exposed traces.
This isn’t really new info. It requires numerous things to be right: physical access to the device and non-integrated TPM with a design flaw. Modern CPUs don’t have this easily exploitable design given the TPM is integrated into the die now. This was somewhat common in early days. At one point just connecting a firewire cable into a Mac let you read the encryption keys out of memory from a sleeping or running Apple.
Additionally, Bitlocker using TPM without pin was cracked years ago using fairly common electronic components. Any secure Bitlocker deployment has long been understood to be using TPM and a pin.
A reminder that security is only as good as its weakest link
Links:
This is what New Years looked like in Paris this year.
Tetris is a tremendously fun 2D game, but 3D Tetris (Block Out, Virtual Boy 3D Tetris, Tetrix) never caught on. It was a lot more difficult to visualize and play.
But it looks like FedEx is up to the challenge. They are developing a two-armed robot from Dexterity AI called DexR to help pack some of the millions of boxes they get each day into delivery trucks.
Give it a read on Wired