I confess, I don’t receive the MagPi magazine – which is a shame for a print enthusiast like myself, because it looks like a handsome and skillfully made publication. It’s also a shame because I could have received a new AIY projects kit from Google, which would have let me add voice recognition and AI capabilities to the Raspberry Pi projects that I am definitely going to get started on one of these days.Issue 57 of MagPi comes with the aforementioned add-on board, which is a joint project of Google and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It’s probably the simplest way yet to add voice recognition to Pi projects, though it’s far from the only one, of course. You can use Google’s voice recognition API with your own hardware, you can wire it up to Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant – suffice it to say, there are options.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of Star Wars, the second of the two “star” franchises that form such a foundational part of nerd culture. Consequently, this is a special Star Wars edition of your faithful Raspberry Pi roundup.It’s easy to see what Star Trek “means” as a part of nerdery – it’s a mostly hopeful vision of the future, where the adults mostly act like adults and the better angels of our natures win out much more often than our demons. Star Wars is harder to pin down. As lots of people have said, it’s really more fantasy than sci-fi, but it’s one where many have chosen to let their imaginations roam freely.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars Day + Raspberry Pi roundup: Searching for Pi, steampunk laptops, Code Angels, and a visit to Competitor CornerTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of Star Wars, the second of the two “star” franchises that form such a foundational part of nerd culture. Consequently, this is a special Star Wars edition of your faithful Raspberry Pi roundup.It’s easy to see what Star Trek “means” as a part of nerdery – it’s a mostly hopeful vision of the future, where the adults mostly act like adults and the better angels of our natures win out much more often than our demons. Star Wars is harder to pin down. As lots of people have said, it’s really more fantasy than sci-fi, but it’s one where many have chosen to let their imaginations roam freely.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars Day + Raspberry Pi roundup: Searching for Pi, steampunk laptops, Code Angels, and a visit to Competitor CornerTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Red Hat’s annual summit opened today with the announcement of three new products aimed with uncharacteristic directness at developers, rather than the company’s usual target of IT operations staff.Openshift.io is the company’s free SaaS development environment, specifically designed for cloud-native apps, that lets geographically far-flung teams work together and automatically containerizes code for easy deployment. The environment builds on open source projects like Kubernetes-focused development platform fabric8, IDE Eclipse Che, and automation server Jenkins.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Red Hat CEO: Open-source innovation is always user-led + Which Linux distros should newbies use?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Red Hat’s annual summit opened today with the announcement of three new products aimed with uncharacteristic directness at developers, rather than the company’s usual target of IT operations staff.Openshift.io is the company’s free SaaS development environment, specifically designed for cloud-native apps, that lets geographically far-flung teams work together and automatically containerizes code for easy deployment. The environment builds on open source projects like Kubernetes-focused development platform fabric8, IDE Eclipse Che, and automation server Jenkins.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Red Hat CEO: Open-source innovation is always user-led + Which Linux distros should newbies use?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s a cloud option out there for almost every IT workload, but a survey from the Uptime Institute indicates that about two-thirds of enterprise computing is still done in company-owned data centers.The study, which polled more than 1,000 IT professionals and data center workers via email earlier this year, found that 65% of enterprise workloads were running in data centers owned or operated by those enterprises, and that that number is just about the same as it was in 2014.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft to slash cloud-connection rights for stand-alone Office + Old Windows Server machines can still fend off hacks. Here's howTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s a cloud option out there for almost every IT workload, but a survey from the Uptime Institute indicates that about two-thirds of enterprise computing is still done in company-owned data centers.The study, which polled more than 1,000 IT professionals and data center workers via email earlier this year, found that 65% of enterprise workloads were running in data centers owned or operated by those enterprises, and that that number is just about the same as it was in 2014.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft to slash cloud-connection rights for stand-alone Office + Old Windows Server machines can still fend off hacks. Here's howTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Homemade musical instruments don’t usually work out very well. I remember the experiment we all had to do with the rubber bands and the empty tissue boxes and finding the resulting sound, well, pretty disappointing. How’s a fifth grader supposed to rock out and impress girls for reasons he only vaguely understands with this thing?!Perhaps unsurprisingly, the age of ubiquitous computers has made the possibilities of the homemade instrument a lot more exciting than the twanging rubber band or the musical comb. (Leaving aside professional stuff like That 1 Guy, who has been weird and excellent for a while.) What we have here is a wild digital “piano,” as inventor Andy Grove calls it, that combines a Raspberry Pi with motion sensors to create a unique musical toy:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Current-generation Wi-Fi technology lives in the 5GHz band. Almost all of the major innovation in wireless standards takes place in the relatively untroubled frequencies around 5GHz (and well above), where there’s little radio competition and the living is easy.But wireless LAN users can’t just stay comfortable in the 5GHz realm – the older 2.4GHz frequency bands are a necessary part of most wireless implementations, and they’re rarely a favorite of the people who have to build and operate Wi-Fi networks.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Toward a bigger, faster, denser Wi-Fi WorldTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Current-generation Wi-Fi technology lives in the 5GHz band. Almost all of the major innovation in wireless standards takes place in the relatively untroubled frequencies around 5GHz (and well above), where there’s little radio competition and the living is easy.But wireless LAN users can’t just stay comfortable in the 5GHz realm – the older 2.4GHz frequency bands are a necessary part of most wireless implementations, and they’re rarely a favorite of the people who have to build and operate Wi-Fi networks.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Toward a bigger, faster, denser Wi-Fi WorldTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Raspberry Pi is a computer of relatively modest raw capability, but it’s limited much more by our own creativity than it is by its hardware. We’ve seen Pis be everything from video game emulators to fantastic wedding proposal aides to fruit sniffers. Sure, it’s not a powerhouse, but that’s missing the point.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Network management company Riverbed Technology today announced its intent to acquire enterprise Wi-Fi equipment vendor Xirrus for an undisclosed fee.Riverbed touted that the acquisition, which it expects to close by the end of the month, will expand its software-defined WAN solution, and integrate Xirrus’ robust Wi-Fi products into the broader Riverbed ecosystem.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: New FCC web portal opens for 5G experimenters + Trump's cybersecurity mystery: 90 days in, where's the plan?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Got a fantastic, futuristic 5G wireless application you need to try out, but you need an FCC license to start testing? It’s about to get easier to get a program experimental license, thanks to a new web portal announced days ago by the FCC, in partnership with NYU and the University of Colorado Boulder.The idea is to make it simpler for research labs, universities, manufacturers and others to obtain the necessary permission to test new devices, while also ensuring that existing services aren’t impacted by testing.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Secrets of bimodal IT success: Tiger teams, skunkworks and the camel’s nose + Galaxy S8+ review: The future of Android is nowTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
5G technology, despite some fairly breathless hype, is still in the embryonic stages of development, but the pace is quickening. The major U.S. carriers are racing to buy up critical spectrum that will be necessary for the realization of 5G’s potential, which could include support for speeds up to 1Gbps and support for the ever-expanding Internet of Things.AT&T has made two major purchases with that end in mind – January saw the company announce the acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, of bankrupt wireless backhaul provider FiberTower, and just this week AT&T said that it would spend about $1.6 billion in an all-stock deal to acquire Straight Path Communications (Note: A Reuters report overnight cited sources as saying Verizon might try to top AT&T’s bid).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
5G technology, despite some fairly breathless hype, is still in the embryonic stages of development, but the pace is quickening. The major U.S. carriers are racing to buy up critical spectrum that will be necessary for the realization of 5G’s potential, which could include support for speeds up to 1Gbps and support for the ever-expanding Internet of Things.AT&T has made two major purchases with that end in mind – January saw the company announce the acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, of bankrupt wireless backhaul provider FiberTower, and just this week AT&T said that it would spend about $1.6 billion in an all-stock deal to acquire Straight Path Communications (Note: A Reuters report overnight cited sources as saying Verizon might try to top AT&T’s bid).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the first big stories about the Raspberry Pi when it hit retail shelves more than five years ago was that it didn’t actually hit most retail shelves. Availability was a serious issue at launch, as the Raspberry Pi Foundation didn’t yet realize what a hit it had on its hands, and initial supplies didn’t last long. Pis began popping up on eBay for substantially inflated prices.The situation has gotten a lot more reasonable these days, but, for those of you having Pi sourcing problems, never fear – Verona University computer science student Marco Della Valle has created an attractive, functional site that automatically checks major retailers for their supplies of the Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W models.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The University of Utah announced last week that it had become the first school in a Power Five athletic conference to field its own varsity esports team.+More on Network World: Most notable tech leaders delivering 2017 college commencement addresses+Adding League of Legends and several other as yet unconfirmed games to the varsity list, alongside football, baseball, basketball, track and so on, Utah said that it hopes to prod other schools into following suit, creating a flourishing college esports scene.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Canonical, the company behind the best-known Linux distribution in the world and one of the biggest players in commercial open source software, has announced several large-scale changes of direction that have created big ripples in the open source world.The biggest news is that the company will no longer focus development resources on its Unity desktop front-end for Linux – a long-standing project designed to make Ubuntu a viable operating system for a wide array of endpoints, including phones and tablets. Instead, Ubuntu will move back to the venerable GNOME desktop environment, which it split from in 2010.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Samsung's profit soars after recovery from Note7 debacle + Microsoft Surface beats Apple iPad in JD Power testsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you haven’t read the story of the original mechanical Turk, you really should. This was a 1770s machine that appeared to use complicated mechanisms to play competent chess against even very good human players, and it has fired the imaginations of everyone from computing pioneer Charles Babbage to today’s steampunk nerds. Here’s a great summary from Atlas Obscura.The Turk has lent its name to many things over the years, including Amazon’s Mechanical Turk micro-job service, but the latest is the Pi-powered Raspberry Turk, which works like this:
The heart of the machine is a Raspberry Pi 3 running an open-source chess engine called Stockfish. A Pi camera module and a lot of custom Python code let the system translate the physical pieces into a chess position that the Stockfish engine can digest, and little tiny magnets embedded in the tops of the pieces let the robotic arm actually move things around.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The internet sure seems mad about something.You’re not kidding.More than usual, that is.You’re right. President Trump just signed a bill into law that rolls back internet privacy protections enacted by the previous administration, and that has made things just a little angry around the ol’ internet.What kind of privacy rules are we talking about here?The previous iteration of the Federal Communications Commission created new rules last October for ISPs which stipulated that those ISPs would be required to seek customer permission before selling things like browser history data to advertisers for targeting purposes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Jon Gold