flashingleds

A few months ago I posted a writeup about displaying a Gameboy video signal on an oscilloscope (http://www.flashingleds.wordpress.com). It did the rounds for a few days (kotaku, HN, hackaday, slashdot etc.), and I was slightly surprised at which sites generated the biggest numbers. Reddit was at the top by far, something like 25k in 24 hours without having even made their front page, followed by slashdot (7k) then HN (3k). For a site that usually ambles along at ~80 hits a day it was pretty crazy.

I completely see your point, and in many cases I agree with you. But there is sometimes a tendency for evolutionary biologists to assign deeper reasons to things that are just a consequence of physics. Occam's razor and all that.

In this particular case that fact that the phenomenon is not present when the nerves are severed does present a pretty relevant argument against simple biomechanics.

The LPC1768 is quite popular and you should never have problems with stock. I got started with a $30 development board from NGX (google "1768 blueboard") paired with a $30 USB jtag programmer from the same store. The older LPC2148 was also quite popular for hobbyists, but it's ARM7 not CM3.

Since I was more interested in learning the micro then screwing around with toolchains, I just spent the money and got a personal license for Rowley Crossworks ($150). It took me under an hour to go from software installation to flashing an LED, so I'm pretty happy with that decision.

"PIC vs. AVR" means two different things depending on your context. The intelligent context is discussing which family best suits somebody new to microcontrollers (which thankfully is what this link is about). The moronic context is entrenched hobbyists arguing about why the family they chose is superior.

Anybody who reads this headline and already understands what the acronyms mean is probably going to assume it's the latter.

Since this has attracted the attention of some very knowledgeable people, can anyone suggest a good textbook/site/paper discussing password security and encryption? Obviously I can google 'computer security' and find something, I just wondered if there was a well regarded standard reference (ala K&R or Art of Electronics). I don't understand the majority of the techniques being discussed here but would quite like to.

I'm actually pretty excited about this. I think anybody whose heart stirs a little when they see a calculator watch can understand the appeal. It's a gap in the market (if you can call it a market...) and an area the DIY community can't really tackle, since to get a practical form factor you need some pretty serious manufacturing capability.

An ipod nano on a watchstrap is not really any kind of competition; yes it has better specs but you're not intended to be able to reprogram it. TI's previous watch offering caught my attention, but the display on it was quite limited. There's really a lot of scope for imaginative projects on this thing.

That graph is screaming out for a log scale.

Quantum optics is outside my realm of expertise; to be honest my eyes kind of glaze over whenever these guys give a talk. The real life applications of this are not really teleportation in the "beam me up sense" but more along the lines of encryption.

If your transmission is based on quantum entangled photon states, it is physically impossible to eavesdrop without giving yourself away, since the act of eavesdropping 'collapses the quantum superposition' (like when you open the box with Schrodingers cat). They've actually already rolled out systems based on this technology in various places in the world, but there is a lot of work to improve bandwidth and so forth.

I won't say too much more as I'm well outside the field and will probably garble it.

Good work on skipping the forms; if you make me fill out a form before allowing me to download something I'm going to be mashing the keyboard with my palm.

Emailing people to solicit feedback seems a little bit weird. Just put a note somewhere (where it will be seen) reiterating that this is version one and you would really like any kind of feedback.

If that's not working, figure out some specific aspect you want feedback on and put the question out to a forum. For example I've seen some amazing UI design feedback come from cold-call requests on HN.

Some vertical error bars would have been helpful on that plot, but having read the original article (from behind the pay wall) I'm pretty satisfied that they thought about all the obvious problems being discussed in these comments. I am a practicing experimental scientist but with minimal knowledge of statistics, so factor that into whatever I say here.

They point out that a negative ruling ("no" or "almost - come back next time") is much easier to deliver. There is less thought involved, nobody will raise eyebrows and the paperwork is much lighter. So the trend is more about mental energy than grumpiness. They note the significance of the breaks, but do not attempt to disentangle the role of mood improvement / a blood sugar boost / rest.

They explicitly discuss the possibility of hidden variables: "A key aspect for interpreting the association ... is whether an unobserved factor determines case order in such a way that yields the pattern of results we obtain" The dip and spike patterns in the rulings are quite pronounced, and similar graphs in the article for parameters such as the gravity of the offense, presence of a rehabilitation plan and the number of previous incarcerations do not show any such trends. This addresses questions about case scheduling by the clerks. Besides which - even if the clerks did organize easier cases for later in the day, this would manifest as one long trend over the entire day, not the spike/decay sequence shown.

So I didn't see any gaping holes, and more importantly it seems quite a plausible conclusion to me. Surely you must have had a similar experience going Christmas shopping - you start out thinking very carefully about getting the perfect gift for every person, but after 3 hours trudging around in a mall you'll just buy any old shit so you can go home. As you get tired you just start taking the easiest options.

Because sometimes you can drop words without running the risk of being confusing, often because the context fills in the blanks.

For example, if I write something and John responds "That's interesting. Would love to talk to you further about it" -- it's not made explicit who would love to talk, but who else than John could it possibly be? If on the other hand John's reply reads more like: "I liked your post, and my friend Steve found it particularly interesting. Would love to talk you you further" -- in this case you risk being confusing, because would John or Steve like to talk to you?

There's a similar effect with a sentence like: "That's an interesting observation. Might be good to get some more data." You've shortened "It might be good...", but that's OK since there is no risk of confusion.

As a condensed matter researcher, agreed. I don't believe that somebody with that level of laboratory equipment (4 probe system, furnace, pellet press etc) can't afford a $150 journal submission fee.

Don't get me wrong - I love DIY science and I don't think a physics journal is the only path to being accepted, but it IS the fastest way to overcome skepticism.

The presentation threw up some suspicion alarms (in a similar way to the Journal of Cosmology for the recent meteor paper), it reads like some kind of weird stream-of-consciousness. I guess I'll reserve judgement until somebody a) I've heard of b) presents it logically.

I get the impression (albeit as somebody with nothing to do with the industry) that studios aren't very excited about another generation of hardware because it already takes a huge amount of resources to make a current-generation blockbuster, and profit is not alway guaranteed. The demo is completely amazing and I loved it, but if it "took about three months for 12 programmers and artists to build" this 2 minute scene, surely this is beyond the limit of what a studio will undertake for a full length production? Or am I underestimating the horsepower of the studios today?

It most certainly would, and you'd probably want to do the vertical sweep as that's the slowest.

You're welcome =)

As noted in the comments of that post, I'm doing a raster display with vector display techniques. Opamp sweeps are indeed a more sensible way of rastering, but the internal DACs on this microcontroller are fast enough to keep up anyway.

What's killing the refresh rate is the settling time for the (crappy) external dac doing the 4-shade colour. Your terminal application only deals with beam on/beam blanked so you can run it a lot faster.

By all means give it a go, it's a pretty satisfying project. I have no doubt you can improve on my version.