We’ve all been stymied by a smart thermostat, coffee maker, or other device which would work fine on its own but ultimately seems to be worse off for having an Internet connection — so when something actually pulls off this feat it’s quite noteworthy. [James] has a powerful set of connected speakers and while they […]
The ps command is extremely useful when you want to get some quick information on active system processes (hence the name), especially followed by piping it into grep and kin for some filtering. One gotcha is of course that ps doesn’t run in the current shell process, but is forked off into its own process, […]
Anyone who’s ever had the pleasure of programming FPGAs knows that it’s a land of proprietary tools that almost require marriage level commitment to a specific platform to be effective. Symbiflow hopes to solve this by becoming the GCC of FPGAs. Rather than a tool built around a specific chip or architecture, Symbiflow will provide […]
When you think of the Unix and C revolution that grew out of Bell Labs, there are a few famous names. Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan come to mind. After all, the K in both K&R C and in AWK stand for Kernighan. While Kernighan is no stranger to book authorship — he’s […]
A fundamental truth about AI systems is that training the system with biased data creates biased results. This can be especially dangerous when the systems are being used to predict crime or select sentences for criminals, since they can hinge on unrelated traits such as race or gender to make determinations. A group of researchers […]
In a world with finite storage and an infinite need for more storage space, data compression becomes a very necessary problem. Several algorithms for data compression may be more familiar – Huffman coding, LZW compression – and some a bit more arcane. [Labunsky] decided to put to use his knowledge of steganography to create a […]
If you’ve purchased a piece of consumer electronics in the last few years, there’s an excellent chance that you were forced to use some proprietary application (likely on a mobile device) to unlock its full functionality. It’s a depressing reality of modern technology, and unless you’re willing to roll your own hardware, it can be […]
Not every programmer likes creating GUI code. Most hacker types don’t mind a command line interface, but very few ordinary users appreciate them. However, if you write command line programs in Python, Gooey can help. By leveraging some Python features and a common Python idiom, you can convert a command line program into a GUI […]
Some sentences have more than meets the eye, and we’re not talking about interpretive nonsense. Rather, some sentences may contain up to four paragraphs’ worth of hidden text, invisible to readers. Thanks to Zero Width Obfuscation, it is possible to use Zero Width Characters – Unicode characters that are invisible even when you try to […]
Many languages feature a random number generator library for help with tasks like rolling a die or flipping a coin. Why, you may ask, is this necessary when humans are perfectly capable of randomly coming up with values? [ex-punctis] was curious about the same quandary and decided to code up an experiment to test the […]