In December of 2010 the science journal Nature published an article about a newly discovered, but long extinct subspecies of humans. The name temporarily being used to identify these people is the Denisovans based on the cave in Siberia where a hermit named “Denis” had lived in the 1800’s. A young females pinky finger bone fragment was found in this location. The cool climate of the cave preserved the DNA and a successful DNA analysis was performed. Since the initial discovery only a tooth (a very big molar) has also been identified as being of Denisovan origin (same location, but a different person and time). Homo sapiens (modern humans) being who we are had to of course mate with both Neanderthals and Denisovans so there have been multiple interbreeding events in the last half million years. Even though the last Denisovan was estimated to have died ~40,000 years ago some of their genome has been preserved in modern day humans. We can use modern DNA tools to see how much Denisovan inheritance we personally carry.
People of East Asian and Ocieana descent have the highest likelihood to carry Denisovan genetics today. In particular Melanesians, Aboriginal Australians and Papuans have been found to have as much as 6% of their genetic material being Denisovan derived. This is kind of a big deal because even neanderthal DNA which has survived in modern humans has been reassessed and capped at 2.6% as the highest amount currently in the gene pool
23andMe currently offers a convenient Neanderthal Ancestry Report as a part of their Ancestry package. It states how many Neanderthal variants you are carrying and how that compares to the rest of their customer base. I carry 225 neanderthal variants which apparently is quite low as it is fewer than 92% of the 23andMe customers carry. My girlfriend is on the opposite end and carries 98% more Neanderthal variants than all of the 23andMe users. What 23andMe does not offer yet is a Denisovan summary. However, there are ways to start looking into your Denisovan heritage (or lack there of in my case).
How much Denisovan DNA do I have?
GEDmatch has a free Genesis utility that can make use of the Ancient DNA samples provided here. Use their One-To-One Autosomal DNA Comparison to compare your raw DNA results from 23andMe, FamilyTree, Ancestry.com and most of other services. This requires creating a free account with GEDMatch and using their One-to-One Autosomal DNA Comparison web application. The Denisovan “kit numbers” to compare against are F999902 and F999903.
Helix’s Neanderthal Test -Mentions about Denisovan genes and is only $20 for the report if you are already a Helix customer. The report is fun to read, but light on the Denisovan heritage information.
Studies
The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia
April 29, 2019 is the sixth ‘birthday’ of MicroPython. At the April Melbourne Meetup, Damien George, creator of MicroPython, delves into his archives and shows the earliest code and notes about the goals of the language. The material pre-dates the first git commit! Listen in as Damien reveals how and why the language began and evolved. It’s a nice way to celebrate MicroPython’s sixth birthday!
Here is an excerpt from the initial notes. The title is “Python board” and the date is 29 April 2013:
Python board 29/4/2013
The smallest, cheapest python.
A piece of hardware that is small and cheap, runs python scripts, and has good low-level access to hardware. If we can do it with a single chip, that would keep it small and cheap. Need then something with a large amount of flash and a decent amount of RAM, that also is cheap enough. Atmel SAM’s have order 1MiB flash and 128KiB SRAM, for around $10 one-off.
Main features:
Implements Python 3 core language.
Flash presents as a flash drive with vfat filesystem.
Put python scripts on flash and it runs them (maybe have a (multicolour?) led that flashes on error and writes a “core” dump to the flash). This led can also double as a user output led.
Can run multiple scripts on once.
Our strength would be small, cheap, simple, easy to replicate.
Can have a range of boards with different features. But all must be basically compatible and capable of running the same scripts.
Happy Birthday MicroPython! Thank you Damien for creating something special and open!
from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! http://bit.ly/2L8UXxV
via IFTTT
Back in the late 80s and through the 90s, Unix workstations were super powerful, super cool, and super expensive. If you were making 3D graphics or developing applications, you wanted a high-performance workstation and Sun made some of the best ones. But unless you worked for a huge company, university, or government, they were probably too expensive.
More than twenty years later, we have much more powerful and affordable computers, so let’s emulate the old systems and see what it was like to run some of the coolest computers you could buy in the 90s.
Sun workstations started out running SunOS, based on BSD Unix (like NeXTStep), but in 1991 they replaced it with Solaris, based on Unix System V Release 4 (like AIX and HP-UX).
We’ll run Solaris 2.6 from 1997. For comparison, at that time a PC would be running Windows 95 and Apple released Mac OS 8 the same year.
Motown Musician Accelerator’s 12-week program provides coaching, mentoring, industry networking, and grants to cohorts of four musicians and/or bands. It ends with a showcase, where the artists perform for music industry professionals, supporters and community members.
gBETA Musictech works exclusively with startups building music-related products, services or content. This includes technologies related to sourcing, recording, production, distribution, marketing, touring, licensing and streaming as well as any technology or process innovations that could serve any component of the music industry.
Here is some ominous news from Amazon’s autonomous employee tracking systems. As Amazon incorporates more and more robotic solutions, some of the human employees fear they are being treated like robots themselves.
A spokesperson for the company said that, over that time, roughly 300 full-time associates were terminated for inefficiency.
The number represents a substantial portion of the facility’s workers: a spokesperson said the named fulfillment center in Baltimore includes about 2,500 full-time employees today. Assuming a steady rate, that would mean Amazon was firing more than 10 percent of its staff annually, solely for productivity reasons.
The system goes so far as to track “time off task,” which the company abbreviates as TOT. If workers break from scanning packages for too long, the system automatically generates warnings and, eventually, the employee can be fired. Some facility workers have said they avoid bathroom breaks to keep their time in line with expectations.
Wired recently ran a brief history of open source software and there are a few pieces worth diving into. You might wonder why companies like Google would bother making open source software when it’s a potentially lucrative product to sell or lease to its massive user base. The answer is that their goals and business models are different than a traditional software company, and open source aligns with a longer term strategy.
[Google] hoped outside developers would make the software better as they adapted it to their own needs. And they have: Google says more than 1,300 outsiders have worked on TensorFlow. By making it open source, Google helped TensorFlow become one of the standard frameworks for developing AI applications, which could bolster its cloud-hosted AI services. In addition to garnering outside help for a project, open source can provide valuable marketing, helping companies attract and retain technical talent.
So there is symbiotic relationship at play, but there is something a little more self serving here.
Let’s say a company makes its own version of TensorFlow with unique elements, but keeps those elements private. Over time, as Google made its own changes to TensorFlow, it might become harder for that other company to integrate its changes with the official version; also, the second company would miss out on improvements contributed by others.
Google opens up its doors and invites people in to use its software, and because it’s free its really attractive. This in turn locks companies into its services and keeps them developing for the platform. A low barrier to entry and an increasingly improving framework keeps 3rd party developers along for the ride and making there platform better.
…money isn’t the only problem. The open source workforce is even less diverse than the tech industry as a whole, according to a survey conducted in 2017 by GitHub. Half of the respondents had witnessed bad behavior—such as rudeness, name calling, or harassment—and said it was enough to keep them away from a particular project or community. Around 18 percent of survey respondents had experienced such bad behavior firsthand. That’s a problem because working on open source projects is now an important part of landing a job in technology. If women and minorities are shut out of open source, then the technology industry as a whole becomes that much less diverse.
These problems are in part due to a lack of general oversight and uniform leadership structure, but these kinds of things still manage to happen in companies with strict hierarchies, expensive lawyers, and robust HR teams.
One way many open source projects are trying to address the issue is through a code of conduct called the Contributor Covenant, which warns participants against personal attacks, harassment, or “other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting.” As common sense as these guidelines might sound, they’ve proved controversial among open source coders used to being judged solely on their code, not their professionalism—or lack thereof. The author of the Contributor Covenant is still periodically harassed.
Open source technology is the backbone of today’s computing, but there are still some issues that need ironing out before it’ll be the foundation for the future.
from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! http://bit.ly/2ZJiDw5
via IFTTT
Editor’s Note: Launch time has been updated to 3:59 a.m. EDT, Wednesday, May 1. The What’s on Board Science Briefing time of 10:30 a.m., Monday, April 29 is unchanged. The prelaunch news conference will be held on Tuesday, April 30 at 1 p.m. (Updated April 27, 2019)
NASA commercial cargo provider SpaceX is targeting no earlier than 4:22 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 30, for the launch of its next resupply mission to the International Space Station. Live coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website Monday, April 29, with prelaunch events.
This is the 17th SpaceX mission under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services contract. The Dragon spacecraft will deliver supplies and critical materials to support dozens of the more than 250 science and research investigations that will occur during Expeditions 59 and 60. The spacecraft’sunpressurized trunk will transport NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3) and Space Test Program-Houston 6 (STP-H6).
Great piece on the history of The Frisbie Pie Company and its recent resurrection from Gastro Obscura.
The Frisbie Pie Company got its name from William Russell Frisbie, a Civil War veteran who moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1871 to manage a new branch of the Olds Baking Company. Soon, Frisbie purchased the bakery and renamed it after himself. After his death in 1903, his son, Joseph Peter Frisbie, took over. Along with opening bakeries in Hartford, Poughkeepsie, and Providence, Joseph created a pie rimmer modeled after a potter’s wheel, and a cruster that could process 80 pies in a minute.
In his latest video, Alex Ball talks with Alan Howarth about the soundtrack to the John Carpenter film Escape From New York.
Howarth discusses how he got his foot int the door in Hollywood, doing sound design for films like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and how that led to doing soundtracks with Carpenter. He also talks about the gear he used in creating the score to Escape From New York and the process used in creating the soundtrack.
Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences transmitted a recording of Martin’s classic “Volare” wirelessly via a semiconductor laser—the first time a laser has been used as a radio frequency transmitter.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers demonstrated a laser that can emit microwaves wirelessly, modulate them, and receive external radio frequency signals.
Via Stacey on IoT – how does one deal with their smart devices when they move? Stacey Higginbotham recounts her experiences moving from a smart home to an apartment.
The chaos of moving is no time to decommission 40 smart devices.
Decommissioning your gadgets will take three times the time you expect, and you will forget one. And that one you forget will be the one that doesn’t allow you to reset or delete it from your phone.
I also realized that I should have packed more connected devices to make it feel like home.
Strategies for a good move:
If you’re planning to move, I suggest you break it down in three ways (maybe more if you are like me and are moving to an interim home for a few months). First, figure out which devices you use, in particular which devices you need. Every connected device represents a cost in terms of the time it takes to maintain and troubleshoot it, the energy it uses, and the risks it poses for a data or security breach.
So, if you’re not using that Amazon Dash button or the spare Echo dot in your guestroom, decommission it and get rid of it. As part of the decommissioning process, you should also make sure you delete its permissions with other apps and services. For example, if you decide you no longer need a connected outlet in your living room, make sure you delete the device from your Amazon Echo routines and app or your SmartThings hub and IFTTT recipes. Then reset the device itself to factory settings, delete your account from the app (or just from that device if you have others by the same manufacturer still running), and sell, recycle, or give it away.
And what of the devices that stay with a house?
My thermostats, my video doorbell, my Lutron light switches, and my Amazon Echo-enabled Delta faucet all conveyed with my home and so were subsequently part of the sale listing. But because I didn’t want to confuse potential buyers, I took out my connected light bulbs, motion sensors, and a few other elements that I wanted to keep (mostly because they were portable and I knew I’d be renting for a year and didn’t want to give up the smart life).
The Python on Microcontrollers newsletter – your source for the week’s Python information
Catch all the weekly news on Python for Microcontrollers with adafruitdaily.com. This ad-free, spam-free weekly email is filled with the Python information that you may have missed, all in one place! This includes Python news worldwide – you get a summary of all the gear, events, projects, and the latest software! 5,675+ readers and growing! Save time hunting for the breaking news, we’ve got it all.
Come for the Python news, stay for the Python community.
CircuitPython is a worldwide community who love to code hardware in the fastest growing language in the world. We have helpful, active community on the Adafruit Discord channel and in the CircuitPython GitHub repo. If you’d like to join a vibrant group of coders looking to apply their skills in a helpful and appreciative environment, you’ve found it here.
SPECIAL PYCON 2019 INFO
The CircuitPython team will be running several Open Spaces sessions (as they did last year), showing how to use CircuitPython on the Digi-Key / Adafruit PyCon special edition Circuit Playground Express. We’ll have extra addons to play with also: potentiometers, NeoPixel strips, and servos. The team will be running a CircuitPython Sprint for several days to work on CircuitPython libraries and CircuitPython core code. BYOMUSB “Bring your own Micro USB” cables, we’ll have some to borrow during the sprints/sessions, as well as some USB C adapters, good idea to bring one too!
Digi-Key and Adafruit have teamed up for PyCon 2019 so every attendee (about 4,000!) will receive a SPECIAL EDITION Circuit Playground Express, running … CircuitPython.
This is just one of many efforts we’re teaming up with Digi-Key to continue to fuel all the developers from beginners to pro, using Python on microcontrollers.
from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! http://bit.ly/2IKD0Us
via IFTTT
On the Fritzing GitHub, Kjell Morgenstern announces they are taking over maintenance of Fritzing:
Hello,
As announced in #3435 , I am taking over maintenance of Fritzing for André. My C++ / Embedded development / Robotics background is a good start, but I am not alone. Together with the help of the people at Aisler and @ovidiub13, a developer with KDE background, we plan to release a fresh build of Fritzing in the near future.
So, this is a short term roadmap, limited to the minimal things to get things rolling.
April/May 2019
Add CI for Linux, Windows and Mac targets
We will create a test release 0.9.4alpha , since toolchains and many other things have changed, and we need to verify that processes still work on a all platforms.
Reduce the number of open issues, by closing issues which are too old, no longer valid, or just to low in priority as “No fix, please re-open if you disagree”.
After alpha, we will roll out 0.9.4b to the download section.
Update developer wiki: Align better with git-flow, rebase all pull requests before merge, only accept PR if CI is green, check basic coding style…
June/July 2019
8. (ongoing) Reduce the number of open issues…
9. Prepare 0.9.5 release, work on new features/feature requests
10. Add black box and unit test infrastructure
Watching rockstars destroy guitars on stage usually gives me anxiety (yes, I realize I’m uncool), which is why the idea of a ‘smash-proof’ guitar sounds so appealing.
henrik loikkanen, machining process developer at sandvik coromant, has played guitar since his youth, when he idolized malmsteen. to understand what happens when malmsteen destroys an instrument, loikkanen turned to youtube. ‘we had to design a guitar that is unsmashable in all the different ways you can smash a guitar,’ loikkanen said. ‘the engineering challenge was that critical joint between the neck and the body that usually cracks on a guitar.’
The video takes inspiration from Brian Eno‘s concept of Generative Music. Eno has been creating systems for generating music since the 70’s.
While he initially applied this approach to ambient music, on albums like Music For Airports, his later work has explored creating systems for generating other types of music, too.
I hate to say that we already missed it this year *BUT* it is such an amazing event that I have to mention it. And since this is so far ahead, it also gives you time to plan for the next one.
The Museum celebrates natural history collections by inviting visitors to bring in their own specimens for our annual Identification Day. Get an up-close look at specimens from the Museum’s rarely seen collections, while scientists attempt to identify your discoveries.
Participating scientists include researchers from Anthropology, Botany, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Entomology, Herpetology, Ichthyology, Invertebrate Paleontology, Mammalogy, Microscopy, Ornithology, Paleontology.
We absolutely love Names Dress – a new project from designer and artist Sylvia Heisel. A big thanks to Sylvia for including our very own Limor Fried!
Sylvia Heisel, head of design lab Heisel and fashion tech pioneer, is the creator of The Names Dress, a wearable, compostable conceptual art piece engineered with over 300 handwritten, 3D printed names of women in STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Math). The making of the dress was a collaboration among friends and colleagues: designed from 2D to 3D in Morphi 3D design software on iPad and 3D printed in parts on Ultimaker 3D printers using BioInspiration’s WillowFlex flexible, compostable bio-plastic.
Here is the always fascinating Ethan Hein on the deep influence of Herbie Hancock’s track “Rockit” and the iconoclastic live performance from the 1984 Grammys that broke turntable scratching and breakdancing into the mainstream.
The more I think about it, the more I feel like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” is the most interesting musical recording of all time. It touches every form of twentieth century American music, from blues to jazz to rock to techno, and it’s one of the founding documents of global hip-hop. Not bad for a last-ditch effort to keep Herbie’s label from dropping him.
Herbie’s performance of the song at the 1984 Grammys had a colossal impact. Few people watching the broadcast had ever heard (or heard of) turntable scratching. If you watch Scratch, one interviewee after another cites this broadcast as their inspiration for getting into turntablism. Breakdancing was probably new to most viewers as well. Even twenty-five years later, the whole thing remains fresh.
Harry Potter world at Universal studios uses coordinated drones to create a massive Patronus. The whole sequence is pretty neat but if you just want to see the drones jump to the end (3:03) Shared by Attracions Magazine on YouTube
See highlights from the all-new Dark Arts at Hogwarts Castle projection show at Universal Studios Hollywood, featuring Universal’s first use of drones in a nighttime show.
Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.
from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! http://bit.ly/2L89ni1
via IFTTT
Wow, incredible sights to behold in this video from NTBGSavePlants on YouTube– and, what is that at around the 1 minute mark? a presumed extinct hibiscus that was rediscovered this year?!
Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.
from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! http://bit.ly/2LcPTcb
via IFTTT
These robots are made by Japanese technical college “KOSEN” (高専) students (15~20 years old) as the theme of the Robot Contest “KOSEN ROBOCON” (高専ロボコン) this year.
http://bit.ly/VtaTwI
A rift between Mr. LaPierre, the chief executive, and Oliver North, the president, threatened to turn the N.R.A.’s annual convention into outright civil war.
from NYT > Business https://nyti.ms/2IZgjeD
via IFTTT
Mother’s Day is 2 weeks away, which means we all have plenty of time to find that elusive thing that’s ‘just right’ for the mothering person in our lives. Whether your mom is a maker who needs just ooooone more item to complete the most recent WIP or is itching to take on something brand new, you’re in luck, dear friend – Adafruit’s here for you.
And what if your mom prefers showing/receiving admiration? Good news for you, it’s time to start makin’!
If your mom wants to learn CircuitPython we highly recommend this virtual gift! We’ve partnered with our friends at Codecademy to create a brand new course that will teach you CircuitPython to help you learn how to use your Circuit Playground Express — Learn Hardware Programming with CircuitPython — which is currently available on Codecademy.com for all Codecademy Pro subscribers.
By purchasing this code, you will receive 1 month of Codecademy Pro, which is 50% off the monthly price of $39.99. This offer is only eligible for new Codecademy users.
Hydro dipping is a fun, hands-on way of adding printed designs to any surface! This process can be done on any material that can hold the base coat and can be submerged into water. Works really well with any 3D printed project, but molded and cast parts also benefit. You’ve probably seen cool videos of motorcycle helmets and ceramic statues being dipped – when done right you can cover an entire shape with colorful ink. Read more
We’re maybe a little biased, but we think this is the best HackerBox ever – and not just because we partnered with HackerBoxes on this one to provide the ItsyBitsy M4.
Please note: HackerBoxes require soldering and other common hand tools to put together!
You’ll learn how to program embedded systems, cobble together a retro gaming platform with MakeCode Arcade, and more! Read more
Here at Adafruit we love discovering new and exotic glowing things. Like moths to the flame, we were intrigued by these fresh Flexible Silicone Neon-Like LED Strips! They look a lot like neon, but without the need for expensive transformers, glass tubing or inert gasses.
Super flexible and bendy, they feature a single-color non-addressable LED strip with a solid chunk of translucent silicone rubber as a diffuser. They look incredible, and super easy to use and are a great way to make your projects light up! Read more
Are you ready? Really ready? Cause here comes the Adafruit Grand Central featuring the Microchip ATSAMD51. This dev board is so big, it’s not named after a Metro train, it’s a whole freakin’ station! Read more
This board is like a freight train, with its 120MHz Cortex M4 with floating point support. Your code will zig and zag and zoom, and with a bunch of extra peripherals for support, this will for sure be your favorite new chipset.
The Grand Central is the first SAMD board that has enough pins to make it in the form of the Arduino Mega – with a massive number of pins, tons of analog inputs, dual DAC output, 8 MBytes of QSPI flash, SD card socket, and a NeoPixel. Read more
We’ve got our Circuit Playground friends on lunchboxes, posters, puzzle, enamel pins, PCB coasters, we can’t stop accessorizing with this maker-friendly motley crew friendly electronic pals.
Peep this super-special character lanyard designed by artist Bruce Yan. We dig the vibrant colors and handy double-hooks (perfect for toting around your HalloWing M0 Express!) It feels great, and very durable, so you can show it off at your next event and take your #BadgeLife to the next level. Read more
PyPortal, our easy-to-use IoT device that allows you to create all the things for the “Internet of Things” in minutes. Make custom touch screen interface GUIs, all open-source, and Python-powered using tinyJSON / APIs to get news, stock, weather, cat photos, and more – all over Wi-Fi with the latest technologies. Create little pocket universes of joy that connect to something good. Rotate it 90 degrees, it’s a web-connected conference badge #badgelife. Read more
Carry up to 29 tools anywhere you go with this travel friendly wearable multi-tool; the Leatherman Tread. This is the Black Steel version, we also have it in stainless steel. Read more
The NeoTrellis M4 is an all-in-one USB + NeoPixel + Elastomer + Audio board. It’s powered by our new favoritest-chip-in-the-world, the SAMD51, a Cortex M4 core running at 120 MHz. This chip has a speedy core with CircuitPython and Arduino support, hardware DSP/floating point, dual DACs (more on that later!) and all the goodies you expect from normal chips like I2C, ADC, DMA, etc. It has a roomy 512KB of flash and 192KB of SRAM so it’s great for CircuitPython, we added a full 8MB flash chip so tons of space for files and audio clips. Or you can load Arduino in for bonkers-fast audio processing/generation with our fork of the PJRC Audio library. Read more
Circuit Breaker Labs is a woman-owned, US-based company that recycles circuit boards from computers, calculators, phones, etc, to make stunning, one-of-a-kind pieces of jewelry. We think this is a fantastic solution to the crippling e-waste problem, and we’re proud to carry smart jewelry that inspires dialogue in responsible recycling through art. Read more
A long time ago we made a Pi into a WiFi gateway that also blocked ads but the Pi Hole project does a way better job!
This kit will make your Pi Zero W act as a DNS (Domain Name Server) The kind of device that tells you that adafruit.com is known as IP address 104.20.38.240. Read more
Pickup a copy of Getting Started with Adafruit FLORA and then hit the ground running with everything that you need to become an Adafruit FLORA supreme being!
This pack is perfect for somebody interested in the wide world of wearable electronics and Adafruit’s tiny FLORA board. Read more
Know someone who loves electronics but doesn’t know the difference between an XBee, a soldering iron, and a SMA to uFL/u.FL/IPX/IPEX RF Adapter Cable? Want to buy the perfect gift but don’t know whether your Maker friend is a BeagleBone fan or a Rasp Pi devotee? Just a fan of Bruce Yan’s incredible design? If you’re any of these, or more, buy an Adafruit Gift Certificate – the perfect cyber-present for the electronics geek in your life. Check ’em all out here!
Buy a specific number of AdaBoxes up front. Starting with the next AdaBox installment we will ship one AdaBox directly to the gift recipient until the gift subscription is fulfilled.
$60/AdaBox
Free Shipping*
Send an email to the recipient today, on a specific date that you choose, or print a custom gift certificate.
We like this guide for the mom who likes to party and doesn’t like making repeat purchases. Piñatas are tragic, beautiful creatures, used once in a carnival of destruction, then tossed out and forgotten. This guide demonstrates how to modify a piñata so that it can be filled and refilled with candy over and over again. This piñata also has an attitude, and can be programmed to respond, when hit, with sound effects or pre-recorded taunts. Read more
This guide feels like a great choice for a boss mom OR cosplaying mom! Construct a custom-fit harness bra with a unique array of NeoPixels and a Circuit Playground Express.
Caged clothing accessories can be worn over anything from a tank top to long sleeves. Harnesses come in all shapes and sizes and although they may accentuate certain body parts, they can be worn by anyone. Read more
For the coffee/tea loving Adventure Time fan justing starting out with electronics or looking for a project to work on with a beginner! In this project we’ll show you how to build a coffee cup lamp using an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express and Microsoft Makecode.
We’ll design our lamp out of a paper cup and use capacitive touch to change the colors of the LEDs! You can build your own capacitive touch pads using conductive tape. So get ready to go on an adventure and learn how to craft your own paper cup lamp! Read more
Oooh, for the mom who likes to be precise! How many grams of coffee did I add to my pour-over? Is the bag of cat food empty? Did I remember to water the plant? What’s the weight of these screws in my workshop?
To answer these questions (and more), you’re going to build an internet-enabled scale to track weight data over a period of time. To do this, you’ll be performing a bit of hardware hacking – tearing down a DYMO Postage scale and soldering wires to connect it to a PyPortal. Then, you’ll add some CircuitPython code to the PyPortal which allows you to read the the scale remotely using Adafruit IO – our easy-to-use internet of things service. Read more
This project’s for the mom always gazing toward the stars. A Particle Photon microcontroller and an Adafruit Neopixel ring combine to make a pin that’s fit for NASA fans. It displays an orbiting white blip when idle and then turns blue, white, red and multicolor when the ISS flies by. The code takes advantage of the Photon’s Wi-Fi capability and uses IFTTT (If This Then That), a free site that makes connecting IoT devices as easy as a few clicks. This project was inspired by my first NASA Space Apps Challenge project created with friend Brooks Zurn Rampersad–the ISS Orbit Skirt. That’s enough history…on to the parts! Read more
For the mom who likes to know the door was actually shut (and maybe also the mom who likes to make sure folks are respecting curfew/coming home straight from school ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) Way cheaper than a guard dog who can use an iPhone, this project will show you how you can use an Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller board with a door sensor to email/tweet/text you when your door has opened!Read more
For the musical mom! You can build your own synthesizer using the NeoTrellis M4 with the PJRC Audio System Design Tool and Audio library for Arduino! In this guide you’ll learn how to patch together waveform oscillators, filters, envelopes, effects, and mixers. Then, you’ll learn how to control notes and parameters with the Trellis M4’s buttons and accelerometer. Soon you’ll be playing ripping synth leads, fat bass lines, and lush pads with a synthesizer of your own design! Read more and don’t miss these 3D Printed Bluetooth Controlled NeoPixel Headphones!
from Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! http://bit.ly/2ISUmPl
via IFTTT
From DCSE Team D, Dionysios Satikidis on Hackster.io:
The device consists mainly of an IoT device to monitor the washing program and operations is realized on a breadboard with the provided Particle Photon as embedded system controller…
If the end of a washing cycle was recognised, the device starts a timer and will send a notification to the user every hour until the device senses some sort of impact that would occur e.g. when laundry is removed.
A really interesting piece from Smithsonian that breaks down speech and developing communication tech.
With advances in electronics and neuroscience, researchers have been able to achieve remarkable things with brain implant devices, such as restoring a semblance of sight to the blind. In addition to restoring physical senses, scientists are also seeking innovative ways to facilitate communication for those who have lost the ability to speak. A new “decoder” receiving data from electrodes implanted inside the skull, for example, might help paralyzed patients speak using only their minds.
Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) developed a two-stage method to turn brain signals into computer-synthesized speech. Their results, published this week in scientific journal Nature, provide a possible path toward more fluid communication for people who have lost the ability to speak.
I recently had the pleasure of being invited by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to speak at a breakfast gathering honoring D.C. Emancipation Day.
We would be celebrating the 157th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s formal emancipation of over 3,000 enslaved individuals in the district (on April 16, 1862). Several months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln would go on to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which legally emancipated the nation’s estimated 4 million slaves.
In this year’s commemoration, the district’s political leadership and distinguished citizens pushed for what they consider a last frontier in the quest for emancipation—the establishment of statehood for the district.
In one sense, I was somewhat surprised to be invited to the event because I am not a supporter of statehood for the district. I believe the Founders of our nation had wise and practical reasons for leaving the district out of the American federation of states.
They rightly reasoned that including the district within any state’s boundaries—as had been originally done—would reduce the district’s role as neutral ground where state representatives could come together to hash out the nation’s business. They did not want the district’s laws and taxes to impact representatives of the other states, thereby creating political pressure on one state to do another state’s bidding.
I believe the soundness of this decision has stood the test of time.
However, that does not mean that many of the district’s residents have yet to experience full “emancipation.” I do not mean emancipation in the political and legal sense but rather emancipation in the form of economic independence.
As I prepared my remarks for the breakfast, I realized that I might be marching into somewhat hostile territory, as most in attendance were supporters of D.C. statehood. However, I did feel that I had something important to contribute to the discussion of emancipation and what it truly means.
I thought back to my own family. My earliest known ancestor, my great-great-grandfather Luke Howard, had been born a slave on a plantation in Marion County, South Carolina, in 1805. During his lifetime, he witnessed not only the height of the cotton aristocracy in the American South but also Lincoln’s election, the founding of the Republican Party, the Civil War, and the emancipation of the slaves.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, most of my slave ancestors stayed at the plantations where they had been formerly enslaved. Some, who fought as Union soldiers in the Civil War, believed that Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, would award them land taken from the plantations of their former owners.
This was not to transpire. Several black Civil War veterans wrote to Gen. Oliver Otis Howard (after whom D.C.’s famed historically black university is named) to complain that the federal government in Washington had betrayed them.
One of them wrote to Howard in 1865: “If the government having concluded to befriend its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between itself and us its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and their all-time enemies. If the government does so we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former [condition of slavery].”
In other words, the returning veterans knew that without the ability to build an economic foundation, the emancipated would be reduced to a condition that was in many ways worse than their former condition.
The federal government did not respond to their requests and essentially abandoned them. Then-President Andrew Jackson, who wanted to heal the deep wounds of the war, restored the lands to their original owners, the very people against whom the federal government had just waged a bitter internecine war.
This was a painstakingly slow progress that would take several generations to produce fruit. There was very little in the way of redemption.
Shortly after the war, the Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilante groups began terrorizing blacks. Laws were passed, including the Jim Crow laws, that denied blacks the basic rights of citizenship: They were restricted from voting, participating on juries, and even bringing lawsuits in state courts.
When you have stolen from someone, it is not enough to merely stop the theft. Justice requires that you redeem the value of what was taken. In many cases, this was not done, and the lasting effects of slavery and de jure segregation continue to this day in the form of entrenched poverty and social stigma.
The former slaves found themselves nominally “free” but abandoned by the government and practically still enslaved. They did own, at least nominally, the fruits of their own labor, though. And so they started from nothing, working harder than they had ever worked to establish some form of economic foundation.
Not only did they continue to toil in the fields of their former enslavers—albeit now for wages—but many even developed sharecropper and other forms of land-lease arrangements, where they did extra work to secure their own land and capital.
This legacy lasted up until my own generation. My father was eventually able to save up enough money from laboring and sharecropping to purchase his own farm, which eventually became self-sufficient and produced wealth for our family. It took almost five generations from when Lincoln formally emancipated the slaves for my family to finally discover true freedom.
The painstaking work it took over successive generations to bring forth a viable black middle class should not be taken for granted. It is not enough to merely be proclaimed “emancipated” without also providing some method of redress.
That is why, in the absence of some sort of redemption, it is very difficult—if not impossible—to achieve true freedom.
When policymakers in California enacted a charter school law 25 years ago, many children had educational choice for the first time. But now, teachers unions want to needlessly limit children’s choices.
Francisco Nunez’s story is a prime example of how charter schools use their independence to inspire and empower children through learning.
Growing up in foster care, Francisco rarely attended school, and he started participating in gang activity at the tender age of 10. Still quite young, he spent three years in the California Youth Authority, which is reserved for the state’s most serious juvenile offenders—often in solitary confinement.
However, upon his release, Francisco attended Learn4Life, a network of public charter schools that specializes in “opportunity youth”—students like Francisco, who have a chance to turn their lives around through education.
There, he received the guidance and care absent in his earlier years, and an education tailored to his experiences.
Upon graduating high school at Learn4Life in 2017, Francisco said, “I didn’t think I was going to make it in high school … [and] in life general[ly]. But because of the support system we have [at Learn4Life], I became successful with their help.”
Although a current proposal to cap charter school growth leaves room for those schools that specialize in helping children in difficult circumstances, too many children—like Francisco—are trapped by their ZIP codes and cannot escape bullying and dangerous environments.
Charter schools offer greater educational choice and safety to children from all walks of life and can be a particular lifeline for children from low-income families.
Indeed, charter school success isn’t limited to helping children in desperate situations. Charter schools’ autonomy empowers them to innovate with everything from their school environment to their curricula.
Dissatisfied Californian families eagerly welcomed charter creativity. In fact, The Sacramento Bee newspaper found that charter school enrollment increased 150% in the past decade alone.
However, local teachers unions don’t share families’ rising enthusiasm for charter schools. Instead, the California Teachers Association recently supported proposals that arbitrarily cap charter school growth and increase school district control of charter school authorization.
In other words, it wants the school district fox guarding the charter school henhouse.
Teachers unions recognize that the innovative approach of many charter schools threatens the district school monopoly. In fact, the nearly weeklong teachers strike in January in Los Angeles only ended after the union gained promises from the Board of Education to “call for the state to cap the number of charters.”
The union’s ostensible purpose behind the charter cap is to limit “unregulated” charter school growth, since school districts face budgetary constraints. But the union’s selective crippling of its charter school competitors is blatant.
Notably, California’s teacher strikes occurred in districts where charter schools offered impressive competition. For example, the California Charter Schools Association stated that charter schools in the Oakland Unified School District “significantly outperform their district school peers” and that “the top performing school in [the district] is a charter school. Of the top 10 schools in the district, four are charter schools.”
Oakland’s charter schools’ proficiency is even more striking in light of their financial constraints. They operate on 63% of the budget regularly provided to their district school counterparts while serving almost as many low-income families.
Charter schools offer genuine competition to district schools, and parents, empowered with choice for the first time, are voting with their feet.
Instead of hamstringing charter schools, Jonathan Butcher, senior policy analyst in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, recommends school districts engage in a little self-examination.
Butcher found pervasive bloat, waste, and theft in school districts across the nation. He wrote, “There are districts with excess administrative spending, vacant buildings supported by taxpayer resources, fraud, and theft … State lawmakers should require school districts to clean up the books … .”
Public school districts, Butcher explains, should “eliminate wasteful budgeting and poor spending practices to make better use of taxpayer resources.”
School districts also waste vast amounts of funds through bad policy, such as pay bumps for teachers with M.A. degrees. Even the Center for American Progress, a decidedly left-leaning organization, found that teachers with M.A. degrees are no more efficient in the classroom than their less-educated peers.
Policymakers should not limit greater schooling options for children because district schools fear healthy competitive pressure and suffer from poor financial management.
School districts—not children—should pay the price for corruption and bloat.
A rally this weekend will give New Jersey parents an opportunity to oppose a new state law requiring public schools to teach children about the “political, economic, and social contributions” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals.
The new law also requires schools to stress such contributions made by disabled persons, but it’s the LGBT education component that prompted organizers to plan the rally.
“When you teach about George Washington, you don’t teach that George Washington had sex with his wife and what he did; we teach what George Washington did as a president,” Victoria Jakelsky, a political consultant and parental rights activist in New Jersey, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.
“But they are twisting it around to say that anyone who is LGBT, they’re going to explain what they did, who their relationships were [with], and incorporate it as gay and lesbian and bisexual people are the history-makers,” Jakelsky, a paralegal by training, said.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, signed the legislation into law Jan. 31, and it is set to go into effect for the 2020-2021 school year.
Jakelsky is among those organizing the rally Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in front of the New Jersey State House in Trenton to help educate and mobilize parents to oppose the state law.
“We have no hope of fighting this through the legislative [process] so the only option is to rise up or to have a lawsuit,” she said.
The Facebook page with information about the rally says the event will include over 15 speakers, including R.J. Snell, director of the Center on the University and Intellectual Life at the Witherspoon Institute and a lecturer at Princeton University.
“This rally has been organized to notify parents about the new law that Murphy signed in January to mandate that LGBTQ ‘history’ is placed into ALL public middle school and high school curriculum starting in the 2020-2021 school year,” another Facebook post reads.
It says the rally is for those who want to speak the truth, defend parental rights, preserve religious liberty, and assist parents of children in public schools to collaborate with school boards to “protect their children and perhaps fight for Christian world views to also be taught.”
In 2013, state legislators in Colorado passed legislation on sex education that required students to undergo “culturally sensitive” sessions. This meant “sex ed lessons would incorporate minority perspectives on sex that had not previously been represented in sex ed—including LGBT individuals, but also other groups,” Stephanie Curry, policy manager for Family Policy Alliance, wrote in a recent commentary in The Daily Signal.
A new bill in Colorado’s Legislature would “prohibit religious, moral, and ethical perspectives on sex from being discussed in the classroom” and ban speech that promotes abstinence, Curry wrote.
Family Policy Alliance’s vice president for strategy, Autumn Leva, wrote in another commentary for The Daily Signal that the Equality Act, a priority bill for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is being used to “manipulate schoolchildren to carry water for the LGBT political agenda—whether their parents like it or not.”
The Equality Act would add sexual orientation and gender identity to characteristics—race, color, religion, sex, and national origin—already protected from discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Emilie Kao, director of the the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email that the Equality Act would harm any victories that parents have gained at keeping LGBT policy and curriculum at bay.
“The Equality Act could override the efforts of parents across the country, like those in New Jersey, to preserve their freedom to teach their own children about sexuality, marriage, and biology at a time and manner of their choosing,” Kao said, adding:
The act would codify in federal law certain viewpoints about sexual orientation and gender fluidity while censoring and punishing nonconforming viewpoints. All people should be treated with dignity and respect, but federal legislation should not determine that all students learn about homosexuality and transgender theory in their school curriculums.
Jakelsky said her goal is to bring attention to the issue so that parents will be able to opt out of New Jersey’s LGBT education programing.
“What we think is going to happen is that we’re going to find a way to work with the school board to be able to give the parents an opportunity to opt out, or at least be notified when this [LGBT material] is being part of the lesson plan,” Jakelsky said.
She said organizers of the rally want to protect children and give parents a say in their children’s education.
“All of us feel very passionate that this is a mission we are called to do, and we are just determined to stop this from being implemented, or provide parents a way to protect their children,” Jakelsky said.
