Tag Archives: Language

8-bit Computer for On-The-Go Programming

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If there was one downside to 8-bit computers like the Commodore 64, it’s that they weren’t exactly portable. Even ignoring their physical size, the power requirements would likely have required a prohibitively large power bank of some sort to lug around as well. The problem of portability has been solved since the late ’70s, but if you still want that 8-bit goodness in a more modern package you’ll have to look at something like retrocomputing madman [Jack Eisenmann]’s DUO Travel computer.

The computer is based around the ubiquitous ATmega328 which should make the ease at which it is programmable apparent. …read more

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Facebook’s fastText library is now optimized for mobile

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 This morning Facebook’s AI Research (FAIR) lab released an update to fastText, its super-speedy open-source text classification library. When it was initially released, fastText shipped with pre-trained word vectors for 90 languages, but today it’s getting a boost to 294 languages. The release also brings enhancements to reduce model size and ultimately memory demand. Read More Continue reading Facebook’s fastText library is now optimized for mobile→

Learn a Language, One Moment at a Time

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There’s a lot of times in an average day when you’ll find yourself waiting. Waiting for your morning brew at the cafe, or for an email to show up — it’s often just a few minutes, many times a day. It’s far too short a time to get any real work done, but it adds up at the end of the week.

Enter WaitSuite, a language learning tool developed by MIT’s CSAIL. It’s a language learning tool, which aims to teach users words in a foreign language in these “micromoments” — the short periods of time spent waiting each day. …read more

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New Fonts for gEDA PCB Tool

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In the open-source world, there are two main choices for PCB design: KiCad and gEDA. But if you’re tired of the boring Hershey fonts telling you which resistor is which, or if you need to comply with ISO 3098, there’s one clear choice: PCB-RND, the improved fork of gEDA’s PCB tool. Why?

Because PCB-RND now supports osifont, which supports a ridiculous number of languages. In addition to the usual suspects, like Azerbaijani through Vietnamese, support has also been added for legacy users, including those of Middle Earth, who build PCBs that can only be read when the thrush knocks by …read more

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The Comic Book World Of Capacitor Marketing

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The Economist is an interesting publication, a British weekly newspaper that looks for all the world like a magazine, and contains pithy insights into world politics and economic movements. It’s one of those rare print news publications that manages to deliver fresh insights even to hardened web news junkies despite its weekly publication date.

It was typical then of their wide-ranging coverage of world industries to publish a piece recently on the world of supercapacitors, with particular focus on Estonia’s Skeleton Technologies. This is an exciting field in which the products are inching their way towards energy density parity with …read more

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Estimate Your English Vocabulary Using Python

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We take our mother tongue for granted, a language we learn as young children without realizing the effort involved. It is only when as adults we try to pick up another language that we fully understand how much hard work surrounds each acquired word.

Depending on who you listen to, estimates vary as to the size of a typical native English speaker’s vocabulary. The ballpark figures seem to put most adults under 20 thousand words, while graduates achieve somewhere around 23 thousand words. It’s a subject [Alex Eames] became interested in after reading a BBC article on it, and he …read more

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Microsoft TypeScript 2.0 Language — Ready for Prime Time in IT?

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Microsoft TypeScript 2.0

Microsoft updates TypeScript language to 2.0. It’s an open-source superset of JavaScript, but said to be easier to use, more productive, create more reliable code, and compile down to standard JavaScript. Version 2.0 adds features such as non-nullable types and expanded control flow analysis. Plus tagged unions, the never type, this types for functions, and of course glob support…

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