New York engineering firm Pliant Energy Systems have developed a robot that uses undulating fins to propel itself. The fins allow the robot to move easily over different terrains like water, ice and sand.
Javascript internet extraordinaire Wes Bos posted 2 videos (part 1, part 2) last week showing him working on controlling a DJI Tello drone with React and Node.js! The videos were made to help promote a new Drone giveaway by IBM developer.
Amazon have produced a handy factsheet describing how to go about designing an Alexa skill, starting from defining the customer value of voice interface, and matching that with the available features of an Alexa voice skill.
youbionic have developed a set of 3D printed remote controlled robotic arms that can be mounted onto things. To demonstrate this, they mounted their bionic arms on Boston Dynamics Spot Mini quadruped robot. The STL files for 3D printing the set of bionic arms can be downloaded from the youbionic website for $179.
Low-tech Magazine have launched a new version of their website which is a low tech, self hosted, solar powered site. The new site drastically reduces the amount of content served and the page size delivered by dithering images, using a default font and removing the logo and cookies. Using solar power, the site boasts approx. 90% uptime, and uses an overlay to show users the current charge of the battery.
At AWS re:Invent this week Amazon launch a rake of new services, including a managed blockchain and quantum ledger database (QLDB) service. Their blockchain offers a managed scaleable service and the QLDB ledger offers an append only immutable ledger with a central trust authority. I think these services will be huge for companies that don't want to deploy and manage their own blockchain, or that don't necessarily need the distributed part of DLT.
This is an interesting article by Singularity Hub on the possibilities for the next generation of the web, what they term the spatial web and web 3.0. The article describes how 5G, AI and the IoT landscape could allow realtime generation of AR and VR scenes sources from multiple public cameras in realtime, allowing the user to embed in a street protest, sporting or news event. Other technology possibilities discussed are always-available AR virtual sales people and ads, yay!
Learning Dollars have put together a great list of 15 source code tools that can be used to help developers make sense of professional code bases, ranging from Chrome Developer Tools up to research projects to illustrate runtime events based on questions asked by the user.
The Spinnaker project at the department of Computer Science in the University of Manchester turned on their million-core neuromorphic computer this week. The system is designed to mimc the human brain and can perform 200 trillion operations per second.
