Tag Archives: Ice

10,000-Year-Old Camera Lens Takes Striking Pictures

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The first photograph was taken sometime in the early 1800s, and through almost two centuries of development we’ve advanced through black-and-white, the video camera, and even high-speed cameras that can take thousands of frames per second. [Mathieu Stern] took a step back from all of the technological progress of the past two hundred years, though, and found a lens for his camera hidden in the glacial ice of Iceland.

Ice in this part of the world has been purified over the course of 10,000 years, and [Mathieu] realized that with this purity the ice could be formed into a workable …read more

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Icestorm Tools Roundup: Open Source FPGA Dev Guide

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We like the ICE40 FPGA from Lattice for two reasons: there are cheap development boards like the Icestick available for it and there are open source tools. We’ve based several tutorials on the Icestorm toolchain and it works quite well. However, the open source tools don’t always expose everything that you see from commercial tools. You sometimes have to dig a little to find the right tool or option.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. I don’t need to learn yet another fancy IDE and we have plenty of good simulation tools, so why reinvent the wheel? However, if you are …read more

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Dark Markets’ Weakness? Cashing out the Bitcoin to USD!

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Over the years there has been an on-going battle between law enforcement and those who use technology-based anonymity to perform their illegal deeds.  Some of the FBI’s tricks to break through the anonymity have created interesting challenges, suc… Continue reading Dark Markets’ Weakness? Cashing out the Bitcoin to USD!→

FOIA: DHS Did Not Investigate Hundreds of Civil Rights Abuse Complaints

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DHS’s Office of the Inspector General says it has ‘limited resources’ to investigate hundreds of civil liberties and detainee abuse complaints, but one expert said the figures “demand a closer look.” Continue reading FOIA: DHS Did Not Investigate Hundreds of Civil Rights Abuse Complaints→

As Sadism Surges on the American Border, Our Collective Understanding of Cruelty Collapses

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The Stanford prison experiment, which helped us understand the worst atrocities in history for decades, is called out as a ‘sham’ at a moment when America is separating asylum seekers from their children at the border. Continue reading As Sadism Surges on the American Border, Our Collective Understanding of Cruelty Collapses→

Keeping Streets Ice-Free with the Raspberry Pi

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[Revanth Kailashnath] writes in to tell us about an interesting project he and his team have been working on for their “Real Time Embedded Programming” class at the University of Glasgow. Intended to combat the harsh and dangerous winters in Glasgow, their system uses a Raspberry Pi and a suite of sensors to automatically deploy a brine solution to streets and sidewalks. While the project is still only a proof of concept and hasn’t been deployed, the work the team has done so far runs the gamut from developing their own PCBs to creating a web-based user interface.

The core …read more

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