Category: reader

How to learn hiragana in one hour or less

A week or so ago I decide to relearn hiragana and katakana (Japanese syllabaries), which I’d completely forgotten. I loaded a hiragana flashcard set onto iAnki (read Gary Wolf’s excellent Wired article about the guy who invented the memory technique that iAnki employs) and went to work. Progress was brutally slow. I looked around the iTunes store and came across Dr. Moku’s Hiragana Mnemonics . It presents each character as an appealing and memorable cartoon – a rabbit eyeing a carrot, a dude with food, a farting cow. Each flashcard is a different color (to “refresh your brain” with each new character). Thirty minutes later I had memorized all 46 hiragana. Now my 9-year-old is learning them, and having a lot of fun. (of course, learning to write hiragana is going to take much more time). Now it’s time for Dr. Moku’s Katakana Mnemonics .

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How to learn hiragana in one hour or less

Autodesk University 2012: Zebra Imaging Demos Holographic Prints Via 123D Catch

Way back at AU 2009, Zebra Imaging’s holographic prints blew us (and you, judging by the hit counts) away. Here in 2012 they’re using Autodesk’s 123D Catch to capture footage for their jaw-dropping technology, like the nutty 3D family portrait you’ll see in this video: (more…)

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Autodesk University 2012: Zebra Imaging Demos Holographic Prints Via 123D Catch

Wiki Weapon Project Test-Fires a (Partly) 3D-Printed Rifle

MrSeb writes “In its continuing mission to build a ‘Wiki Weapon,’ Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 and tested it to failure. The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that’s quite impressive. And hey, it’s a plastic gun. Slashdot first covered 3D-printed guns back in July. The Defense Distributed group sprung up soon after, with the purpose of creating an open-source gun — a Wiki Weapon — that can be downloaded from the internet and printed out. The Defense Distributed manifesto mainly quotes a bunch of historical figures who supported the right to bear arms. DefDist (its nickname) is seeking a gun manufacturing license from the ATF, but so far the feds haven’t responded. Unperturbed, DefDist started down the road by renting an advanced 3D printing machine from Stratasys — but when the company found out what its machine was being used for, it was repossessed. DefDist has now obtained a 3D printer from Objet, which seemingly has a more libertarian mindset. The group then downloaded HaveBlue’s original AR-15 lower receiver from Thingiverse, printed it out on the Objet printer using ABS-like Digital Material, screwed it into an AR-57 upper receiver, loaded up some FN 5.7x28mm ammo, and headed to the range. The DefDist team will now make various modifications to HaveBlue’s design, such as making it more rugged and improving the trigger guard, and then upload the new design to Thingiverse.” Sensible ammo choice; 5.7x28mm produces less recoil than the AR-15’s conventional 5.56mm. I wonder how many of the upper’s components, too, can one day be readily replaced with home-printable parts — for AR-15 style rifles, the upper assembly is where the gun’s barrel lives, while the lower assembly (the part printed and tested here) is the legally controlled part of the firearm. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Wiki Weapon Project Test-Fires a (Partly) 3D-Printed Rifle

This Tiny Flash Drive Broadcasts Its Contents Over Wi-Fi

Besides greater capacities, faster transfer speeds, and novel designs, there hasn’t been much recent innovation with USB flash drives. Which is why the Paketta from King Jim is such a welcome break. With built-in Wi-Fi B, G, N hardware it can wirelessly broadcast its contents to PCs and mobile devices. More »

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This Tiny Flash Drive Broadcasts Its Contents Over Wi-Fi

Windows 8 takes 1 percent of Web usage as Internet Explorer gains

Enlarge Net Marketshare November saw Firefox climb back up above 20 percent, Internet Explorer grow further still, and Chrome apparently suffer a surprisingly sharp drop. Enlarge Net Marketshare Enlarge Net Marketshare Internet Explorer was up 0.63 points at 54.76 percent, its highest level since October 2011. Firefox was up 0.45 points to 20.44 percent, all but erasing the last six month’s losses. Chrome, surprisingly, was down a whopping 1.31 points to 17.24 percent, its lowest level since September 2011. We’ve asked Net Applications, the source we use for browser market share data, if it has made any change in its data collection that might account for this large Chrome drop. The company attributed this in part to the exclusion of Chrome’s pre-rendering data. It estimates that 11.1 percent of all Chrome pageviews are a result of pre-rendering (where Chrome renders pages that aren’t currently visible just in case the user wants to see them) and accordingly excluded this from its figures. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8 takes 1 percent of Web usage as Internet Explorer gains

Volvo plans self-driving cars in 2014, envisions accident-free fleet by 2020.

Long hailed as one of the safest car producers in the world, Volvo hopes to retain that reputation by introducing vehicles that can avoid passenger injuries on their own by the year 2020. Its plans hinge on eliminating the largest cause of road accidents — the drivers themselves. The head of development for the program is convinced that driver-less cars are the future and that Volvo will be the first one there. The main technology underpinning Volvo’s autonomous automobiles is wireless internet, which would enable each car to be assigned a certain point on the road and give different vehicles the ability to interact with each other. The company is preparing to release an initial batch of autonomous vehicles, capable of speeds of up to 31 miles per hour, in 2014. We know from the SARTRE project that the automaker has been able to achieve autonomous speeds of 53 miles per hour in traffic for long distances, though they aren’t disclosing when those higher-speed prototypes would be publicly available. Filed under: Transportation Comments Via: Autopia (Wired) Source: Driver’s Seat (WSJ)

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Volvo plans self-driving cars in 2014, envisions accident-free fleet by 2020.

Auto-threading Compiler Could Restore Moore’s Law Gains

New submitter Nemo the Magnificent writes “Develop in the Cloud has news about what might be a breakthrough out of Microsoft Research. A team there wrote a paper (PDF), now accepted for publication at OOPSLA, that describes how to teach a compiler to auto-thread a program that was written single-threaded in a conventional language like C#. This is the holy grail to take advantage of multiple cores — to get Moore’s Law improvements back on track, after they essentially ran aground in the last decade. (Functional programming, the other great white hope, just isn’t happening.) About 2004 was when Intel et al. ran into a wall and started packing multiple cores into chips instead of cranking the clock speed. The Microsoft team modified a C# compiler to use the new technique, and claim a ‘large project at Microsoft’ have written ‘several million lines of code’ testing out the resulting ‘safe parallelism.'” The paper is a good read if you’re into compilers and functional programming. The key to operation is adding permissions to reference types allowing you to declare normal references, read-only references to mutable objects, references to globally immutable objects, and references to isolated clusters of objects. With that information, the compiler is able to prove that chunks of code can safely be run in parallel. Unlike many other approaches, it doesn’t require that your program be purely functional either. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Auto-threading Compiler Could Restore Moore’s Law Gains

Microsoft Office 2013 now available to businesses, wide release still set for Q1 2013

Right on time , businesses with the inside track to Microsoft’s account team and partner program can now snag the latest version of Redmond’s content production software suite, Office 2013 . What’s that? You’ve got the hook up, but you were also hoping for Exchange Server 2013, Lync Server 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, Project 2013, and Vision 2013? You’ll be happy to hear that those are also available today — the already announced “first quarter 2013” release window for Office 2013 stands, when it’ll become widely available both digitally and at direct retailers. The big update to Office this time around comes in the form of Windows 8-style visuals and cloud-based saves using Microsoft’s SkyDrive service. We’ve got a full hands-on right here if you’d like to learn more ahead of next year’s big launch. Filed under: Desktops , Internet , Software , Microsoft Comments Via: WinSupersite Source: Microsoft

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Microsoft Office 2013 now available to businesses, wide release still set for Q1 2013

Why (some) manufacturing is returning to the USA

General Electric has moved some of its key appliance-manufacturing work back to the USA, re-opening “Appliance Park,” a megafactory in Louisville, KY. The company is finding it cheaper to do some manufacturing in the US relative to China, thanks to spiking oil costs, plummeting natural gas prices in the US, rising Chinese wages, falling US wages, and, most of all, the efficiencies that arise from locating workers next to managers and designers. The GeoSpring suffered from an advanced-technology version of “IKEA Syndrome.” It was so hard to assemble that no one in the big room wanted to make it. Instead they redesigned it. The team eliminated 1 out of every 5 parts. It cut the cost of the materials by 25 percent. It eliminated the tangle of tubing that couldn’t be easily welded. By considering the workers who would have to put the water heater together—in fact, by having those workers right at the table, looking at the design as it was drawn—the team cut the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville. In the end, says Nolan, not one part was the same. So a funny thing happened to the GeoSpring on the way from the cheap Chinese factory to the expensive Kentucky factory: The material cost went down. The labor required to make it went down. The quality went up. Even the energy efficiency went up. GE wasn’t just able to hold the retail sticker to the “China price.” It beat that price by nearly 20 percent. The China-made GeoSpring retailed for $1,599. The Louisville-made GeoSpring retails for $1,299. The Insourcing Boom [The Atlantic/Charles Fishman]

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Why (some) manufacturing is returning to the USA