Real Time Trends Network

Decent laptop computers have been available for decades now. Despite this, there’s still something charming and enigmatic about a computer hidden within a briefcase. [MakeFailRepeat] wanted just such a rig, so did the maker thing and built one. The project began when [MakeFailRepeat] was donated a 15″ monitor that ran on 12V. Naturally, it needed to be used in an awesome project, and the build began. MDF panels were cut to mount the screen inside an aluminium briefcase, and covered in black felt for a pleasing look and feel. A Logitech wireless keyboard and touchpad combo is used for input. The brains of the operation is a Raspberry Pi, equipped with a UPS HAT to handle battery and mains power, and an Adafruit Speaker Bonnet for sound. The project was inspired by the classic video game Captive , released on Amiga, Atari, and MS-DOS platforms way back in 1990. While we’re pretty sure [MakeFailRepeat] isn’t trapped on a space station, his briefcase computer should nonetheless prove use

You feel that you’re unpopular and no one likes you. The bad news is that if that’s the case in the real world there’s no easy way to fix it. The good news is there’s a great substitute — your popularity on Instagram. With this vending machine you can replace your personality with followers on Instagram . It’s just a shame we have to wait a year until Coachella. This project is an interactive installation from [Dries Depoorter] that makes it possible to buy followers and likes in just a few seconds. It’s not limited to Instagram — you can get followers on FaceBook, YouTube, and Twitter, too. The hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi 3B+, an Arduino, coin acceptor, a few character LCDs running over I2C, and somewhat surprising for a one-off ‘art installation’, a lot of DIN rails mounted to a real industrial enclosure. Someone here knows what they’re doing;  there’s something resembling cable management inside this box and this vending machine is built to last. Using this vending machine

Like many of us, [Josef Adamčík] finds himself fascinated with so-called “freeform” electronic designs, where the three dimensional circuit makes up sections of the device’s structure. When well executed, such designs really blur the line between being a practical device and an artistic piece. In fact his latest design, an ESP8266 MQTT client, would seem to indicate there might not be much of a “line” at all . The inspiration for this project actually comes from something [Josef] had worked on previously: an ESP8266-based environmental monitoring system. That device had sensors to pick up on things such as humidity and ambient light level, but it didn’t have a display of its own; it just pushed the data out onto the network using MQTT. So he thought a companion device which could receive this environmental data and present it to him in a unique and visually appealing way would be a natural extension of the idea. As the display doesn’t need any local sensors of its own, it made the de

Gillette’s  ad  with a dad teaching his transgender son how to shave has infiltrated mainstream news and social media. It’s a great example of a brand riding a cultural wave. In this case, Gillette is leaning into a new consumer value, “inclusive is the new exclusive”, a cultural shift that describes the phenomenon of companies gaining social cred for going beyond being welcoming and diverse and embracing a level of inclusivity that was once only the terrain of groups like the ACLU. Gillette is still catering to the masses—or at least the younger generations who are aging into shaving. But they are doing it in a way that taps more into shared consumer values than shared consumer experiences. It’s a tricky line to navigate, but when done well, can yield huge payoffs. However, it requires a different kind of insight: cultural insight. Consumer culture as a leading indicator Cultural insight relies not on what a single consumer sees, feels or experiences, but upon examining the various

Gap Inc. tumbled as much as 16 percent—the most since 2016—after the clothing retailer reported a slump in sales at both its namesake line and Old Navy, threatening the potential appeal for a spinoff of the discount chain. Same-store sales, a key measure of a retailer’s performance, fell 4 percent companywide, worse than the estimate compiled by Consensus Metrix. Weakness at the Gap brand appears to be deepening, with comparable sales down 10 percent, more than double the projection. Another concern is Old Navy, a brand that the company refers to as a “powerhouse.” Same-store sales there fell 1 percent, while analysts had forecast growth of 0.8 percent. A turnaround doesn’t appear imminent: Gap Inc. now expects same-store sales for fiscal 2019 to be down in the low single digits after cold, wet weather weighed on the first quarter. Poonam Goyal, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, says the lowered guidance “implies continued weakness across all banners.” The shares fell to as l

Amazon has agreed to acquire the ad server business of Sizmek, a move which will have significant implications for both marketers and Google. Although terms of the deal were not disclosed, one person whose company was also bidding on Sizmek’s ad server believes the company was seeking about $30 million for its ad serving tech. Sizmek filed for bankruptcy on March 29, leaving its ad server, demand side platform and data management platform up for grabs. Sizmek was looking to capture between $50 million to $60 million for all its parts, but decided to offload the DSP and DMP to Zeta Capital for an estimated $36 million, the person involved in the bidding said.  Of the three businesses, the ad server was the only one that was profitable, as it generated between $75 million and $80 million last year, up nearly 10 percent year-over-year, this person said.  In a statement, Amazon said that once the deal closes, "Sizmek Ad Server and Sizmek DCO [Sizmek Dynamic Creative Optimization] w

Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots , new commercials tracked by iSpot.tv , the TV ad measurement and attribution company. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time on May 29. Coke serves up a nearly wordless (except for the “Enjoy Coca-Cola” tagline at the end) music-video-style ad that focuses on the pleasures of summer grilling. Rakuten (formerly Ebates) explains how its cash-back shopping rewards work. And McDonald’s presents another in a series of spots that promote its partnership with Uber Eats for food delivery. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network http://bit.ly/2Icz9g6 via IFTTT

Forget what you’ve heard about gliding into the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon or seeing Chewbacca face-to-face at Disney’s latest thematic romp. When Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opens at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, Calif., today and at Walt Disney World outside Orlando later this year, it won’t just be a collection of attractions, entertainment, and a liquor-slinging cantina. It’s also a nerd mall. The highlight of Disneyland Resort’s largest-ever land expansion and first large-scale footprint since Walt Disney Co.’s acquisition of Lucasfilm more than six years ago is undoubtedly the merchandise. Come for a vivid universe of attractions, stay for a detailed treasure trove referencing every obscure toy, cackling monkey and pathetic pretzel rod that characters such as Jyn Erso, Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker have encountered in the 42-year history of the film franchise. As for the rest of the land? It’s brilliantly Star Wars with a Disney sheen. Since park offerings are centered on the

Baltimore. The city was breached, crippled and held for ransom. The ransomware attack was discovered on May 7th, shutting down a major portion of the city’s infrastructure. The latest news is that an NSA-written tool, EternalBlue, is responsible for the attack. Except maybe it isn’t? First off, digging back through the history of an attack is challenging. It’s often hard to determine the initial attack vector with certainty. The “initial attack vector” is the patient zero of the attack — how the first machine was compromised. An organization generally has a firewall separating the outside internet from the internal network. Once an attacker has sound a way to access a machine inside the network, the separation is not nearly so strict. This takes many forms, but the most common is phishing. Close contenders are RDP and SMB (Remote Desktop and Windows File Sharing). A report at Ars Technica indicates that the initial vector into the Baltimore network was a phishing email. The second

Mike Szczys is on a well-deserved vacation this week, so staff writer Dan Maloney joins managing editor Elliot Williams for a look at all the great hacks of the week. On this episode we’re talking about licensing fees for MIDI 2.0, a two-way fail while snooping on employees, and the potential for diagnosing Alzheimer’s with virtual reality. We also dive into the well-engineered innards of a robotic cheetah, a personal assistant safe enough for kids to use, and how listening to your monitor reveals more about you than you’d think. You don’t want to miss a space nerd’s quest for fire or a hacker’s guide to solder and soldering. And you’ve got to catch the story of a hapless hacker’s contact high from a vintage synthesizer. It’s quite a trip. Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! <span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-

There’s a piece of tech that many of us own, but very few of us have dissected. This is strange, given our community’s propensity for wielding the screwdriver, but how many of you have taken apart a camera lens. Even though many of us have a decent camera, almost none of us will have taken tits lens to pieces because let’s face it, camera lenses are expensive ! [Anthony Kouttron] has taken that particular plunge though , because in cleaning his Olympus lens he tore its internal ribbon cable  from the camera connector to the PCB. Modern lenses are not merely optics in a metal tube, their autofocus systems are masterpieces of miniaturised electronics that penetrate the entire assembly. In normal circumstances this would turn the lens from a valued photographic accessory into so much junk, but his solution was to take the bold path of re-creating the torn cable in KiCad and have it made as a flexible PCB, and to carefully solder  it back on to both connector and autofocus PCB. We applau

Have you looked up into the night sky recently and seen a bizarre line of luminous dots? Have you noticed an uptick in the number of UFO reports mentioned in the news and social media? If so, you may have already been touched by what many have come to affectionately call Elon Musk’s “Space Train”: a line of tightly grouped Starlink satellites that are making their way around the globe. Some have wondered what’s so unique about the Starlink satellites that allows them to be visible from the ground by the naked eye, but that’s actually nothing new. It’s all about being in the right place at the right time, for both the observer  and the spacecraft in question. The trick is having the object in space catch the light from the Sun when it has, from the observer’s point of view, already set. It’s essentially the same reason the Moon shines at night, but on a far smaller scale. The ISS as it travels through Earth’s night and day The phenomena is known as “satellite flare” , and chasing th

Someone had to do it. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network http://bit.ly/2HN68so via IFTTT

Bradley Whitford, who appears onscreen in 'Godzilla: King of Monsters,' has a knack for playing characters that understand their power and privilege. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network http://bit.ly/2EWRWvt via IFTTT

Nancy Pelosi has avoided impeachment to talk about infrastructure and healthcare, but her legacy will rest on this moment. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network http://bit.ly/2Wio3QH via IFTTT

The U.S. has the highest rates of pregnancy-related deaths in the developed world, and the numbers are only getting worse for new mothers. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network http://bit.ly/2KhbgXq via IFTTT

In Tate Taylor's new horror film 'Ma,' Octavia Spencer does excellent work with material that doesn't properly serve her talent. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network http://bit.ly/2EFhLjp via IFTTT

If you’ve ever cast your eyes towards experimenting with microwave frequencies it’s likely that one of your first ports of call was a cheaply-available Doppler radar module. These devices usually operate in the 10 GHz band, and the older ones used a pair of die-cast waveguide cavities while the newer ones use a dielectric resonator and oscillator on a PCB. If you have made your own then you are part of a very select group indeed, as is [Reed Foster] and his two friends who made a Doppler radar module their final project for MIT’s 6.013 Applications of Electromagnetics course. Their module runs at 2.4 GHz and makes extensive use of the notoriously dark art of PCB striplines, and their write-up offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of this type of design. We see their coupler and mixer prototypes before they combined all parts of the system into a single PCB, and we follow their minor disasters as their original aim of a frequency modulated CW radar is downgraded to a Doppler des

Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. You can get an audio version of this briefing on your Alexa device; sign up here . What people are talking about today Georgia is sometimes called the “Hollywood of the South” or “Y’allywood;” everything from “Black Panther” and “Avengers: Endgame” to “Stranger Things” and “The Walking Dead” has been shot there. Now at least nine big entertainment players say they might stop filming in Georgia if a restrictive new law on abortions goes into effect. TheWrap says Netflix, Disney, Viacom, CBS, Sony, AMC, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia and STX Entertainment all have spoken out about the law, which is set to go into effect in 2020 and would ban abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected. "Creative voices across our industry have expressed strong concern about the recently signed bill in Georgia,” a CBS spokesperson said, according to The Hollywood Reporter . “The ability to attrac

Recently the MAVLab (Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory) at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands proudly proclaimed having made an autonomic drone that’s a mere 72 grams in weight. The best part? It’s designed to take part in drone races . What this means is that using a single camera and onboard processing, this little drone with a diameter of 10 centimeters has to navigate the course, while avoiding obstacles. To achieve this goal, they took an Eachine trashcan drone , replacing its camera with an open source JeVois smart machine vision camera and the autopilot software with the Paparazzi open UAV software. Naturally, scaling a racing drone down to this size came at an obvious cost: with its low-quality sensors, relatively low-quality camera and limited processing power compared to its big brothers it has to rely strongly on algorithms that compensate for drift and other glitches while racing. Currently the drone is mainly being tested at a four-gate race track at TU D

The rebirth of west London’s landmark BBC Television Centre continues. Six years after the broadcaster vacated the iconic ‘doughnut’ building, the multifaceted complex, now home to residences, restaurants and a hotel, continues to wow with its extended roll out of outlets. The newest addition — Endo at the Rotunda — crowns the Graham Dawbarn-designed Helios building and presents what is the centre’s first true fine dining restaurant; a 16-seat Japanese experience where Omakase-style dining and Kengo Kuma -designed interiors come together in a fusion that is both soothing and dramatic. Defined by a meandering two-hundred-year-old Hinoki wood sushi counter, the space places all emphasis firmly on Japanese tradition, a focus which also sees light sources concealed by a series of washi-inspired folds of fabric that appear as a giant cloud from street level. The cuisine is equally authentic. Water used for the Yamagata rice here is shipped over from sushi master Endo’s hometown, and a thi

One of the most convenient things about modern digital oscilloscopes is that you can access the recorded data on a computer for later analysis, advanced protocol debugging, or simply the convenience of remote capture. The problem is that the software isn’t always ideal. Vendor-supplied utilities are typically closed-source and they try to nickel-and-dime you for every a-la-carte protocol and/or feature. The open-source options come with their own issues, from performance-limiting designs, to incomplete features, to license constraints. Faced with these issues, [Andrew Zonenberg] decided to take matters into his own hands and create glscopeclient, a permissively-licensed open-source remote oscilloscope utility . The eventual goal is to allow you to do remotely anything you would normally do using the scope’s front panel, plus capture and analyze data on the computer side. The code uses a modular architecture that allows for various backends to talk to different scopes. At the moment,

Procter & Gamble and Saatchi & Saatchi’s multi-part Super Bowl campaign “It’s a Tide Ad” took the Grand Effie Thursday night, the top honor at the 2019 Effie Awards U.S., held at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York. The series starred "Stranger Things" actor David Harbour as a fourth-wall-breaking, genre-hopping, self-referential brand ambassador who kept showing up in commercial breaks when audiences least expected him—until they caught onto the gag and started looking for him everywhere. Contributor agencies Hearts & Science, Taylor Strategy, MKTG and MMC also accepted the prize. P&G was also named the most effective marketer, while Tide took third for brand effectiveness.   “‘It’s a Tide Ad’ had insight, magic, effervescence, surprise, extraordinary execution and great numbers,” said Grand Effie Juror David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer at BBDO, in a statement. “When all of these things come together in a seemingly effortless way, it’s a winn

There’s nothing new, ever. It’s all been done. But that doesn’t mean you can’t invent something interesting. A case in point is the Motor Synth, a crowdfunding project from Gamechanger Audio . It’s what you get when you combine advanced quadcopter technology with the market for modular and semi-modular synthesizers. The core feature of the Motor Synth is an octet of brushless motors tucked behind a plexiglass window. These (either through an electromagnetic pickup or something slightly more clever) produce a tone, giving the Motor Synth four-note polyphony with two voices per key. On top of these motors are reflective optical discs sensed with infrared detectors. These are mixed as harmonics to the fundamental frequency. The result? Well, they got an endorsement from [Jean-Michel Jarre] at Superbooth earlier this month (see video below). That’s pretty impressive. While using rotating wheels and motors might seem like a novel way to generate sounds, this is actually the way the first

Under Armour’s new UA Rush fabric claims to recycle the body’s energy during performance—and the sportswear brand is putting a lot of its own marketing energy behind the product. Baltimore-based Under Armour will host an interactive pop-up performance lab for consumers in New York City this Friday and Saturday (May 31 and June 1). It’s also pushing out a 13-minute documentary featuring brand ambassadors Stephen Curry, Anthony Joshua and Kelley O’Hara—the film looks at how small details, like the fabrication of a shirt, can help improve athletic performance. Under Armour debuted Rush, which it created with tech fiber company Celliant, last month. The fabric is infused with minerals that help absorb the heat that the wearer exerts during exercise and converts it back it into energy which is resupplied to the body. While many brands are focused on footwear innovation, including Under Armour’s own HOVR shoe, the Rush product is apparel, with prices ranging from around $35 for sports bras

In the world of Doctor Who, the sonic screwdriver is a versatile tool with a wide range of capabilities. [Hartley] wanted some of that action for himself, and built a device of his own. Unable to recreate the broad swathe of features from the show, he settled on something easier. The device is fitted with an ATTiny85, and a 433MHz transmitter. It’s programmed to switch wirelessly controlled mains sockets on and off. This lets him control appliances in his house with a flick of a screwdriver. Power is supplied by the classic AA battery, with a boost converter stepping it up to 5V to run the electronics. It’s all wrapped up in a 3D printed case, that was carefully designed to fit all the parts inside. A paper mockup of the PCB layout was also used in the design phase. [Hartley] took full advantage of CAD software, to ensure everything fit correctly first time. It’s a fun project, as sonic screwdrivers often are. Video after the break. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network htt

There’s nothing wrong with building something just to build it, but there’s something especially satisfying about being able to solve a real-world problem with a piece of gear you’ve designed and fabricated. When all the traditional methods to keep birds from roosting on his mother’s property failed, [MNMakerMan] decided to come up with a more persuasive option: a solar powered spinning owl complete with expandable batons . We imagine the owl isn’t strictly necessary when you’re whacking the birds with a metal bar to begin with, but it does add a nice touch. Perhaps it will even serve to deter some of the less adventurous birds before they get within clobbering distance, which is probably in their best interest. [MNMakerMan] says the rotation speed of the bars seems low enough that he doesn’t think it will do the birds any physical harm, but it’s still got to be fairly unpleasant. At first glance you might think that this contraption simply spins when the small 10 watt photovoltaic

Digital cameras have been around for forty years or so, and the first ones were built around CCDs. These were two-dimensional CCDs, and if you’ve ever looked inside a copier, scanner, or one of those weird handheld scanners from the 90s, you’ll find something entirely unlike what you’d see in a digital camera. Linear CCDs are exactly what they sound like — a single line of pixels. It’s great if you’re into spectroscopy, but these linear CCDs also have the advantage of having some crazy resolutions. A four-inch wide linear CCD will have thousands of pixels, and if you could somehow drag a linear CCD across an image, you would have a fantastic camera. Many have tried, few have succeeded, and [heye.everts]’ linear CCD camera is the best attempt at making a linear CCD camera yet. It took a fuzzy picture of a tree, which is good enough for a proof of concept. The linear CCD used in this project works something like an analog shift register. With a differential clock, you simply push valu

The artistic elite exists in a stratum above we hoi polloi , a world of achingly trendy galleries, well-heeled collectors, and art critics who act as gatekeepers to what is considered the pinnacle du jour of culture. Artistic movements that evolve outside this bubble may be derided or ignored as naive and unsophisticated, even in complete denial of their raw creative edge. When they are discovered by the establishment a few of their artists are selected and anointed, while inevitably the crucible in which they were formed is forgotten. On the streets of Bristol the incredible work of far more graffiti artists can be seen than just that of Banksy. Our community has an art form all of its own, in the guise of PCB artwork and the #BadgeLife community. One day you will see electronic badges from darlings of the art world behind glass in those trendy galleries, but for now they live in glorious abundance in the wild. Here at Hackaday we are lucky enough to have in Brian Benchoff a colleag

Fixing up a watch that’s damaged, discolored, or nicked up sounds smart. But it wouldn’t be honest. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network http://bit.ly/2HJUM8F via IFTTT

Welcome to the latest edition of Ad Age Publisher’s Brief, our roundup of news from the world of content producers across digital and print. Got a tip? Send it our way . Joining us late? Here’s the previous edition . Today’s edition of Publisher’s Brief focuses on awesome content because, well, that’s ultimately the point, right? First up, a report from the spring edition of Pop-Up Magazine , which I witnessed last night in New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House. Pop-Up entirely filled the historic, 2,109-seat theater in the wake of sold-out shows at similarly stately venues in San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles over the past couple of weeks. (The last stop on the spring tour: Washington, D.C., this Friday night. If you’re in D.C., go! There are, as of this writing, still $29 and $39 tickets left .) Pop-Up has been going strong since 2009, when it was founded in San Francisco by Douglas McGray, Lauren Smith, Derek Fagerstrom, Eva