Mark Gibbs, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Mark Gibbs

Author Archives: Mark Gibbs

Nanoleaf Aurora: Smart lighting for the nerd set

“You’re going to put that in your office, aren’t you?” So quoth my beloved when I assembled and fired up the Nanoleaf Aurora lighting system in our living room. I understood her point. As lighting solutions go, the Nanoleaf Aurora isn’t exactly subtle in design and in operation as colors flow and change across the various panels it can be a little, well, dominating. That said, speaking as a card-carrying nerd, I love it! Check it out: As you can see, the Nanoleaf Aurora could be part of the set of “Lost in Space”, so unless your house looks like something from the Jetsons, you may find you have a stylistic conflict (and possibly significant other conflict) to deal with. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The LeEco Le Pro 3 Ecophone; an Android smartphone definitely worth considering

It takes a brave company to attempt to gain a serious foothold in the U.S. smartphone market given that the dominant players are so massive and entrenched but that apparently wasn't a concern of LeEco when the company launched its products at the end of 2016. And rather than just selling smartphones, LeEco’s market approach is to become a lifestyle brand and claims that: LeEco seamlessly blends devices, content, applications and distribution in a first-of-its kind ecosystem. This innovative approach puts extraordinary experiences in the hands of millions of people all over the world. Pretty ambitious stuff but perhaps not surprising as LeEco is notable for being aggressively innovative and their product lines include televisions (the company acquired U.S. television manufacturer Vizio last year), headphones, speakers, chargers, phone covers, and there’s the LeEco Super Bike (with built-in fingerprint sensor ID and a waterproof touchscreen Android display). But wait! There’s more! They’ve even showcased a high-tech, self-driving concept car. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Internet of Things Messaging, Part 3: Testing Mosquitto

So, in the last installment of this series on the messaging protocol MQTT, we installed the Mosquitto MQTT broker. Now we'll test it which we’re going to do on the same machine that Mosquitto is running on. First, you’re going to need to install the Mosquitto client tools:sudo apt-get install mosquitto-clients Now, let’s run Mosquitto from the command line:root@deb-01:/home/mgibbs# mosquitto 1485602498: mosquitto version 1.3.4 (build date 2014-08-17 03:38:31+0000) starting 1485602498: Using default config. 1485602498: Opening ipv4 listen socket on port 1883. 1485602498: Opening ipv6 listen socket on port 1883. The Mosquitto broker is now listening on the standard MQTT port, 1883, for both IPv4 and IPv6 MQTT requests. Next, open a new terminal window and enter:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Internet of Things Messaging, Part 2: The Mosquitto MQTT broker

MQTT is a messaging technology for machine-to-machine communication that’s lightweight and relatively simple to implement on pretty much any device. In my first post on MQTT I covered the basics and background of the protocol and threatened to follow up with a discussion of Mosquitto, a free, open source MQTT server (the MQTT developers no longer call them “brokers”) that’s one of the most widely used messaging platforms in the Internet of Things world. Being a man of my word, here goes …The Mosquitto broker (apparently the Mosquito developers and MQTT developers do not see eye-to-eye on terminology) is part of the Eclipse IoT Working Group, “an industry collaboration of companies who invest and promote an open source community for IoT.” Mosquito currently supports MQTT versions 3.1 and 3.1.1 and support for the proposed MQTT v5, which introduces scalability and protocol improvements is under way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cluster HAT, the easiest way to build a Raspberry Pi Zero cluster

I recently compiled a list of Raspberry Pi clusters and reader Alex Hortin wrote in to suggest I looked at a cluster framework for up to four Raspberry Pi Zeros called the Cluster HAT produced by 8086 Consultancy. In case you haven’t come across the term, the “HAT” part of Cluster HAT, means that the device implements the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Hardware Attached on Top system for add-on hardware. The Foundation’s 2014 blog post announcing the standard explains:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 amazing Raspberry Pi clusters

Single boardsImage by Mark GibbsThe Raspberry Pi family of single board computers transformed education and has become one of the drivers of the Internet of Things revolution. These boards are low-cost, well-featured, and easily available. So what do you get when you take a bunch of Raspberry Pi boards and wire them together? An incredibly cheap and surprisingly high performance parallel computing system that’s not only valuable in education but can also solve some useful, real world problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Rosie Pattern Language, a better way to mine your data

We’ve all been there: You’ve got tons of unstructured or semi-structured data to sift through and like any savvy nerd, you know that doing so handraulically is against all that is good and holy [queue “Mission Impossible” music]. Your problem, which you have to accept, is how to efficiently and effectively automate the extraction process. As an old hand on the digital ship you’ll probably turn to a tool you know well such as grep, that good ol’ workhorse that implements regular expressions. Say you want to find all of the IPv4 addresses in a text file. You might resort to using:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PIXEL, the latest Raspberry Pi OS … for x86!

Apparently Santa thought that Raspberry Pi users deserved something special this Christmas because there, underneath the digital Christmas tree, was the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s x86 port of its Debian + PIXEL Linux desktop environment designed to run on pretty much any hardware even old, pensioned-off gear. Lovers of horrible backronyms might have rejoiced at the name PIXEL which is derived from “Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight” but as clumsy as the name’s derivation might be, the PIXEL distro is way cool and a seriously good idea. Mark Gibbs PIXEL is a highly modified version of the LXDE X11 desktop environment on Debian “Jessie” and was originally released in September 2016 but only for Raspberry Pi boards. This Christmas release now allows you to run PIXEL on most X86 devices including many machines that are veritable antiques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 hot Cascading Style Sheet Libraries (Collection 1)

CSS3Image by Mark Gibbs / NikotafAlong with HTML5 and JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (particularly version 3) have evolved into a cornerstone of modern Web content design. CSS is used to not only set the visual style of a Web page and its contents, it also allows for sophisticated control of user interaction and animation, printing, and device detection. In this roundup, I’m highlighting some of the most powerful and novel pure CSS libraries (pure, as in they work their magic without the aid of JavaScript or anything else). If you have a favorite CSS3 library, pure or not, you think I should include in the next collection, let me know.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New OS X Tools for Photographers

If you’re into photography you’ll probably have tried all sorts of software tools in the quest for the perfect image. Over the years my favorite apps for managing, tweaking, and massaging images have been Adobe Lightroom and, when I want very specific results, Adobe Photoshop. The problem that I have had with Photoshop, in common with many other people, is that getting really good at correcting problems takes a lot of time and experience; Photoshop is not only complex but its features are so remarkably broad that photo editing becomes death by choices.Recently I’ve come across some software titles for OS X (macOS … whatever) that makes much of the power of Photoshop available in what you might consider pre-packaged forms for very reasonable prices. And, as we will see, some of the apps also operate as Photoshop plug-ins making serious photo editing easier. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Ring Stick Up Cam. Don’t bother.

Just over a year ago I reviewed the Ring ($199), a security camera that replaces your conventional doorbell and lets you not only see who’s ringing your doorbell but also talk with them. The Ring doorbell provides movement detection with optional cloud video recording for a monthly fee ($3 per month).While I liked the product conceptually, the startup lag (the time between detecting movement and when recording begins, usually a delay of a few seconds) is long enough that fast moving people like the Fedex guy can come and go before the device starts recording and the so-so video quality led me to give it a Gearhead rating of 3.5 out of 5.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Ring Stick Up Cam. Don’t bother.

Nerd Alert! You need a Christmas tree for your car!

What makes this product truly nerdy is that you have to be kind of a nerd to drive around with a lit up Christmas tree on your car roof. A PR company recently sent me a sample of the aptly named Christmas Car Tree and, natch, I had to, er, test drive it. The Christmas Car Tree It’s easy to assemble, solidly made (it’s got a metal, bolt-together frame), and unless you're driving a Ferrari, this 30-inch tree isn’t going to come loose. The Christmas Car Tree has 70 LEDs in multiple colors and can be folded flat so you can get into low garages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Artificial intelligence, instrumental convergence, and photos of cats

In the awards winning short story, Cat Pictures Please, by Naomi Kitzer, an artificial intelligence with a predilection for cats photos inhabiting some unspecified system has taken to manipulating people to see if it can change their lives for the better. It’s a clever story that raises several interesting issues about what the nature of an A.I. might be and one of the biggest concerns the A.I.’s fondness for pictures of cats. This fondness is understandable as cats can be very entertaining. Consider this video … Wasn’t that cute? Anyway, in Kitzer’s story, cat pictures are the A.I.’s source of pleasure in a manner that isn’t fully articulated, something that’s fine for the purposes of fiction. On the other hand, in the real world, such an interest by an A.I. could have very different consequences due to something called instrumental convergence, which is defined on Wikipedia as:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Internet of Things Messaging, Part 1: Introducing MQTT

In the world of the Internet of Things one thing you’ve got lots of, apart from things, is messages. When IoT devices generate messages, they send stuff like status reports and environmental measurements; when they receive, they’re being told what to do (“open that valve” or “send your status”) or they’re storing data from other devices or, or ,or … there are endless use cases. Moreover, the number of IoT devices is growing incredibly fast and only their combined message traffic is growing faster. And as well as the explosion of the IoT, there are applications running on smartphones, tablets, and computers that all need the same type of messaging service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Welcome to the 11th Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards

Back for 11th helpings?Image by Mark Gibbs / psdblast.comWelcome, once again, to the Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards. It’s been a few years since our last effort to point the digit of disdain at those individuals, companies or entities that don't, won't or can't come to grips with reality, maturity, ethical behavior and/or social responsibility because of their blindness, self-imposed ignorance, thinly veiled political agenda, rapaciousness and greed, or their blatant desire to return us to the Dark Ages. Or all of those sins combined. But that lapse aside, with loins girded anew with cheap girders, we undertake again the traditional annual roasting of those who deserve a damn good basting. Without further ado, here in reverse order, are the top 10 Golden Turkeys for 2016 …To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Welcome to the 11th Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards

Tools you need: W3 Schools color libraries and Bootstrap Studio for Web building

I often find myself hacking away at web sites and today I have a couple of tools to share that have made my life easier. Well, slightly easier.The first is a neat set of CSS libraries I discovered on W3 Schools. These libraries define commonly used color values for things like safety standards, highway signs, army camouflage colors, and so on. The libraries can be linked to your Web pages by referencing them directly:<link rel="stylesheet" href=“http://www.w3schools.com/lib/w3-colors-highway.css">To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Alexa Voice Service, a singing fish, and the FABRIQ speaker

In my last post I discussed implementing Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service on a Raspberry Pi but you can also do the same on other platforms; witness AVS driving a hacked Big Mouth Billy Bass: Created by Brian Kane, a a teacher at Rhode Island School of Design, this is a wonderful rethink of a 20-year old, hideous … what could you call it? Toy? Thing? Conversation piece? Built on an Arduino, Kane’s Big Mouth Alexa Bass (my name, not Brian’s) is a work of genius.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Putting Alexa on a Raspberry Pi

Every geek worth his nerdiness has wanted to be able to converse with their computer since we saw Star Trek's Data talk to the Enterprise's computer back in the 1960s. For most of the time since then, having a real conversation with a computer has seemed something that was really, really far away. Recently, it's got a lot closer ...Just over a year ago I reviewed Amazon’s Echo which I judged to be amazing and I still think it's amazing although even though the technology is still in its early days. The problem is that the Echo isn't really conversational as it's limited to a basic request-response model (though its occasional weird weird non-sequiturs are hysterical and TV ads from Amazon of course get hilarious responses). That said, the Echo, which uses the Alexa Voice Service, remains a compelling, useful product and since I wrote about it, Alexa’s abilities have grown rapidly. Alexa now understands a much greater range of ways to make a request, can deliver information on a wider range of topics, and has an API that has matured and expanded impressively. Here's how the Echo works: On the backend, there’s the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) which is: Continue reading

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