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Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.
Planes these days are super complicated – think about the recent flaming-lithium battery issues in the B787 that may or may not have been solved – but it wasn’t always this way. Here’s a great example. The manufacture of a Piper J-3 Cub shows simple and efficient mechanical design brought to life in a multitude of steps all performed without automation.
The build starts with the frame. Pipes are nibbled into specialized fish mouths for a tight fit before being strapped to a jig and tack welded. With the fuselage in one piece the frame is removed for each joint to be fully welded and subsequently inspected. Cables are run through the frame to connect control surfaces to the cockpit. Continuing through to wing assembly we were especially surprised to see hand hammering of nails to secure the wood ribs to metal spars. How many nails do you think that worker pounded in a career? The entire aircraft is covered in fabric, an engine is added, and it’s into the wild blue yonder.
The look back at manufacturing techniques is interesting – do you think the large model shown in the video would be built these days, or would they just use a CAD rendering?
[Thanks Ronald]
Retrotechtacular is a weekly column featuring hacks, technology, and kitsch from ages of yore. Help keep it fresh by sending in your ideas for future installments.
This week’s Judge Spotlight features [Dave Jones] who posted a video reponse to our slate of questions. If you’ve spent much time around here chances are you know of [Dave] quite well. He is the man behind the EEVblog and also hosts The Amp Hour podcast along with [Chris Gammell].
It’s great to pick [Dave's] brain a bit. He’s seen a lot during his career, with insights on professional engineering from the point of view of job seeker, employer, job interviewer, and more. His time with the EEVblog and Amp Hour have furthered his experience with looks inside of all manner of equipment, adventures in crowd funding, and interactions with a multitude of hardware start-ups. Check out his video, as well as a list of the questions with timestamps, after the jump.
We’re sure you know by now, he’s judging The Hackaday Prize which will award a trip to space and hundreds of other prizes for showing off your connected device built using Open Design.
Here are the questions:
What did you do over the weekend? I spent both days at Maker Faire Kansas City and it was awesome. This is the fourth year the Faire has been held in Union Station, a stunning Kansas City landmark that celebrates its centennial this fall.
As you might imagine, there were 3D printers galore. One of my favorites was the One Up family from Q3D. These acrylic beauties start at $199 and offer a heated bed plate option.
Maker Juice Labs, purveyors of 3D printing inks for SLA brought a LittleSLA printer which they demonstrated by making some very nice key chains.
Little SLA does it stereolithographically.
SeeMeCNC had their Rostock Max V2 printer cooking up some huge prints, and Oni Technology, a local KC company, had their H Bot cranking.
Locally-made Oni H Bot.
At the Modio booth, my companion and I constructed heroes and monsters from a rainbow-colored pile of 3D-printed body parts and weapons. With Modio's iPad app, you can create characters from the existing parts library, modify those parts, and print them on any 3D printer. All of the parts are designed to snap together. Modio recently teamed up with MakerBot and hopes to port their app from the iPad to the iPhone and Android in the near future.
I managed to resist the inexplicable Hostess booth and their free piles of Twinkies, Cup Cakes, and Coffee Cakes. They had a display that promised banana Twinkies and some Greek yogurt oddities, but only had the regular stuff on hand. On Sunday, I saw many people lugging around entire boxes of free Donettes and other goodies.
I could not resist a nearby booth that let me try out needle felting. If you're unfamiliar, this process involves a repetitive stabbing motion with a small and insanely sharp needle to marry wool fibers together into any shape you can conceive. I got the basic hang of it and definitely see myself picking up another hobby—it would be very fun to felt a creature and incorporate, say, blinky eyes or a tilt switch that makes it squawk.
Exterminate!
There was no end to the diversity of makers and their creations. I was nearly exterminated by a Dalek, but enlisted the aid of a nearby R2 unit. I saw scooters made from Adirondack chairs, complete bouquets made of fabric, hydroponic bucket gardens, jewelry, woodturnings, and networked music collaboration systems. I tasted blueberry jam that surprised me with its savory notes. I saw people walking around in freshly laser cut eyeglasses-and-moustache disguises and others wearing intricate makeup and costumes. There were steampunks, cosplayers, and superheroes galore.
The lower level was dedicated to children and I almost didn't get down there. Boy, am I glad I did, because I got to meet [Sarah Hodsdon] of Sarahndipitous Designs. Let me tell you, this woman is the friendly, caffeinated, inspirational embodiment of the maker spirit. She and her three virtually educated kids had a long table covered with a paper timeline of the Maker Faire. They instructed fairegoers to make their mark by creating a stamp from an eraser and stamping the area of the timeline representing their visit. [Sarah] and her crew had paper on hand to wrap up inky stamp souvenirs.
![[Sarah] and her daughter brought their creative A-game.](http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/20140629_141043.jpg?w=223&h=300)
[Sarah Hodsdon] brought her creative A-game.
[Sarah] is disappointed that cursive will no longer be taught in schools. As a result, part of her booth was dedicated to creating a handwritten copy of The Wizard of Oz one sentence at a time on yellow index cards. Her vision is that these cards would be laid out as a yellow brick road of penmanship and making.
Kansas City's hacker space, CCCKC had a booth in the main hall and were also running a Learn to Solder workshop on the lower level. They currently offer classes in game development, the Raspberry Pi platform, and Toki Pona [link], a minimalist language of fewer than 130 words.
Hammerspace was there as well with member [Michael]'s 3D-printed electric vehicle. This group has also printed a prosthetic hand for a 9-year-old boy and a replacement digit for an active duty soldier. They recently held a build workshop for Little Free Libraries.
They’re distracted! Run!
[Tom] of MakeICT, the maker space of Wichita, KS won a Maker of Merit ribbon for his foot-activated percussion tree of delight. They also brought a foam cutting bot and this fantastic drawing bot. I ran into [Dustin Evans] of tesseract replica fame, and I got to see it in person. He and [Nick Alexander], re-purposer of Wi-Fly helicopter receivers also brought a sweet homebrew arcade cabinet that attracted these unsavory characters. Surely it wasn't the huge Hackaday logo . . . or was it?
Also in attendance: Lawrence Creates maker space and center for innovation, an analog-leaning hive of creativity. Their members give classes in everything from sewing and silk screening to stone carving and stained glass.
The Free/Libre Open Source and Open Knowledge Association of Kansas was formed in 2012 to promote FLOSS and open knowledge in Kansas and beyond.
The KC Open Hardware Group will hold their second annual hardware conference this fall which aims to spread the gospel of the open source hardware movement. There will be a wide range of speakers, presentations, and smaller panels for demonstrations.
The Omaha Maker Group brought a hacked Qwest payphone that showed videos of their 'space, past events, and of course, their creations. I was treated to pleasant, danceable music through the receiver that went well with the montage of their community adventures.
Dial ‘A’ for Adventure.
Folks from Milwaukee Makerspace brought their souped up Power Wheels as did members of Area515 out of Des Moines, IA. Area515 also brought electric vehicles to display including an electric Miata and a modified Cushman truckster.
As I remarked to my companion, each aspect of the Faire seemed to be about three times larger than last year. I hope that it will continue to grow and keep inspiring people for years to come.
Above: Samsung's Galaxy S5 Mini.
Samsung’s Galaxy S5 is getting a smaller sibling, the Galaxy S5 Mini, the smartphone maker announced today. Here’s the skinny on the Samsung’s compact new device.
The Galaxy S5 Mini has a feature-set similar to Samsung flagship Galaxy S5 phone, including the S5′s fingerprint scanner, heart rate sensor, water- and dust-resistant casing, a Micro SD slot, and the ability to sync up with Samsung wearable devices like the Gear Fit.
But Samsung sacrificed some of the S5′s power to cut the Android phone’s cost and pack the Mini’s innards behind its 4.5-inch screen.
We’ll be exploring the future of the mobile tech ecosystem at MobileBeat in San Francisco on July 8-9.
The S5 Mini boasts an unspecified quad-core 1.4 GHz processor, 1.5 GB of RAM, and a 1,280 x 720-pixel AMOLED display. The device has 16 GB of internal storage — though you can boost that with a Micro SD card — and a 2,100 mAh battery.
The flagship S5 phone, meanwhile, has a more powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 5.1-inch, 1920 x 1080-pixel AMOLED screen. Samsung also slashed the back-facing camera quality from 16 MP (in the S5) to 8 MP (in the S5 Mini), though the Mini’s 2.1 MP front-facing shooter is actually a tad better than the S5′s.
This isn’t the first Mini phone from Samsung, which previously released the Galaxy S4 Mini for around $400.
Samsung’s Mini phone serve as “a fairly easy way for [Samsung] to extend its flagship product, but also cut down on the cost,” Ryan Reith, IDC’s research director for mobile devices, told VentureBeat.
Based on past Mini performance and limited geographic distribution, Reith doesn’t expect the S5 Mini to drive a huge amount of sales for Samsung — not that he thinks its Mini strategy is a bad one.
"There is still a portion of people that don't feel comfortable using a 5- or 5.5-inch device, although that will probably continue to decline,” he said. For now, “That chunk of the market is looking for something smaller.”
The Galaxy S5 Mini will be available in four colors — black, white, blue, and gold — when it goes on sale in Russia in early July. Samsung plans to bring the device to future regions sometime after the Russian launch. It has yet to announce a price point for the new device.
Take a look at the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini in our gallery below.
Click to view slideshow.
Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul. It comprises numerous subsidiaries and affiliated businesses, most of them united under the Samsung brand, and is the largest Sout... read more »
Amazon Web Services has you covered if you’re seeking powerful chips to handle your app’s needs. Now it’s becoming more full-featured on the other range of the spectrum, with new slices of servers that can run super-light workloads and handle slightly heftier when necessary.
The new T2 instances in Amazon’s cloud — the top public cloud around — start using a fraction of a CPU core and can gradually scale up to a full core, according to a blog post on the news from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr. It’s an interesting model, as Barr explains:
Your ability to burst is based on the concept of “CPU Credits” that you accumulate during quiet periods and spend when things get busy. You can provision an instance of modest size and cost and still have more than adequate compute power in reserve to handle peak demands for compute power.
Amazon has come out with several new instances in the past year, including the storage- and memory-packed r3, Dense Compute servers featuring solid-state drives, and I2 instances optimized for input and output.
Amazon can make product announcements like that because so many companies and individual developers use its cloud. And as new instances come out, more people get interested and sign up. Then Amazon can buy infrastructure at better economies of scale and lower prices — and that happens several times a year. Then even more people jump aboard. And the cycle continues.
This is how Amazon has remained the market leader in the public cloud. Google and Microsoft and others are looking to shake up Amazon’s lead, but they still need time. New instances have come out from Amazon’s competitors, but not at the same rate.
The new instances on AWS could be a good fit for small databases, web servers, and remote desktops.
The T2s cost less than any other AWS instances, starting at 1.3 cents an hour. The CPU credits associated with them don’t roll over forever; rather, they hang around for 24 hours, Barr wrote.
The new instances are available today in micro, small, and medium sizes, out of several data center regions Amazon operates, including U.S. East, U.S. West, EU, and South America.
Job listings search site Simply Hired has simply landed a $12 million funding round.
This brings the total raised so far to $34 million over five rounds. The new financing, announced Tuesday, will be used to back R&D in vertical search technology, data sciences and job seeker user experience, as well as to boost sales growth in the U.S. The company said on its website that, in 2013 alone, it made over 100 optimizations to its search algorithms.
“Our business is growing very quickly, but we are consciously unprofitable — and will be through the end of 2014 — as we invest in product innovation and scaling the business,” president and CEO James Beriker told VentureBeat.
“Having all of the content structured in a way that job seekers can search for is non trivial,” he added, “but is just the first step.”
Job searching is evolving from quantity to quality, Beriker told us. “Job seekers are increasingly beginning their job search on search engines because it is much more efficient than scouring job boards and company sites — and search is a very familiar paradigm for all of us.”
With an emphasis on searching, plus the site’s pay-per-click advertising model, he said that Simply Hired embodies the transformation in job searching:
“[It's] very similar to the transformation we saw in the early 2000′s in marketing from display advertising to search engine marketing. HR and recruitment teams were slashed in the 2008/09 downturn — and there is more pressure now than ever on them to source high quality candidates quickly and at lower cost.”
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company operates in two dozen countries, offering six million different job listings for nearly a quarter million employers to more than 30 million job seekers each month.
Founded in 2003 and launched in 2005, the site aggregates listings from such other sites as job boards, social networks and classified listings, and it offers a pay-per-click model for advertisers.
The new funding, from existing investors Foundation Capital and IDG Ventures plus City National Bank, is a combination of equity and debt financing.
In a new report, research house ON World says sensor-laden and voice activated smartwatches will begin to steal users’ attention from their smartphones and will sell like hotcakes in the future.
ON World projects that by the end of 2018, 330 million smartwatches will have been shipped worldwide, up from less than 4 million in 2013.
The report projects that 700 million wearable tech devices of all classes will be shipped over the next five years for a global annual market worth $47.4 billion. Consumer wearables such as smartwatches, smart glasses, and personal sensors will surpass other sports/fitness gear in 2014 and make up two-thirds of the revenues in 2018, the report says.
Hardware will make up the majority of the revenues during this period but monitoring services, ON World predicts, but mobile apps and subscriptions will grow faster.
The firm also surveyed 1,000 online consumers and found that smartwatches are the wearable technology consumers say they would most likely purchase. Fitness is the most desired use for a wearable device, ON World says, while 38 percent of likely buyers would like to user a wearable for health and biometrics functions (reading heart rate, measuring blood pressure, etc.)
The survey also found that people are most likely to buy an Apple smartwatch, even though the device won’t make an appearance until this fall.
The top five smartwatch market sellers in 2013 were Samsung, Nike, Pebble, Sony, and Garmin. Lots of new players are expected to jump into the market during 2014, including LG, Motorol,a and Nissan.
Consumers may be unrealistic about the price of smartwatches, especially ones that carry sensors for biometrics measurement onboard. ON World's survey found that 40 percent would be willing to pay $99 or more for a smartwatch that had integrated blood pressure, heart rate, and activity tracking sensors, while only 8 percent would be willing to spend $299 or more.
On World believes women will be the first movers on smartwatches. "Smartwatches and wearables have created an interesting opportunity for the integration of technology and fashion and this will drive women into the role of early adopters," says Mareca Hatler, ON World's research director, in a statement.
It’s true that women, mothers actually, are the most active and devoted users of fitness wearables today.
Vine, the popular six-second video sharing website, has announced that users will now be able to view loop counts.
This means that Vine users who have uploaded videos will now have the ability to see how many times their clips have been looped (a.k.a. viewed) by others on the social network. Vine stated on its blog that this will be a quick way for people to see how popular their videos are once they have been uploaded onto the app. The loop count will be up-to-the-second, meaning individuals can gain an accurate depiction of how many people are watching their videos in real time.
In addition to releasing this feature, Vine will be remodeling its Activity feed, organizing according to when posts were released. This will ideally help users determine which content is newest as soon as they log into the app.
Currently, Vine is rolling out the loop count feature on iOS and Android devices. There is no word yet on whether it will be unveiled for Windows Phone users. Vine revealed that it has been tracking loops since April 3 of this year.
