Other Random 'I think this is cool' thread...

Because I can't think of what else to title this thread or where to put it... Its not demote-y so it doesn't belong there, felt wrong putting it in project logs because it's not my project...

So, for the moment here is the 'i found something random and think it's cool' thread...

The thing -

The fsociety keyboard on hackaday

 

I came across this the other day and thought 'how cute':

 

Electronic arc lighter, it uses a high voltage high frequency arc to set things on fire:



Ignore the bad YouTube link, it's the best I can manage at work.

First saw one on bigclive's channel and I had to have one, they're pretty poor for lighting things but that noise!

 

365 days of movie quotes

 

This is cool! Thanks.

 

The Sharp X68000. An 80's 68000-based PC with a cast-metal twin-tower case (and an integral carry-handle between the 'towers'). I'd love to get one and use it as the base for a portable VR rig, but outside of Japan they're not easily available and generally not cheap when you do find them.

 

Got an iPhone?...... ask Siri to "show me pictures of dogs" or "show me pictures of cats".

Not sure if this only works on iOS 10, not tried it on anything earlier.

Edit: it works on other things too, eg Turtles, insects, lions and tigers!

 

All this supercharger talk brought me to this:


Flames out of the exhaust on overrun, and a glowing red hot exhaust manifold - such excitingness

 

Dave Jones did a teardown on one of these - damned interesting.

 

What do people think about "Capsule Hotels", I absolteuly love them! They are perfect.

I like the acceptance of a small helpful space in a modern city to provide the just enough function a person requires.

If the price for night rental is low enough people would commute to work and when required to stay late, why bother to commute all the way home. Just jump into a £25 a night Capsule hotel.

Kind of like Big Yelllow but for people

Bad idea for London?

 

https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/22/facebook-and-intel-reign-supreme-in-doom-ai-deathmatch/

 

That's pretty cool, reminded me of this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkai...top-fighting-after-4-year-match/#1d3f06fe1bef

 

I've heard that that story is fake, but it could easily be true.

DQN (the one that learns to play atari games) has shown many instances where the trained agent will deliberately kill itself (i.e. lose a life) in order to get to the next rewards quicker (since there's no explicit penalty to losing a life).

Also, here's something else cool:


Listening to him speak, it almost sounds like technobabble. But essentially, if you train a neural network to replicate its inputs to its outputs on a particular dataset (in this case images of celebrity faces), you can force the to learns a lower dimensional representation of the input images. In many cases the features in this representation (ie the individual variables) are likely to be things that encode the most difference about the the images in the training set, eg if the person is wearing glasses or not, or if they have blonde hair (as opposed to low-level features such as how dark is pixel at (34,56)). This guys ediitor basically works at the level of this learned condensed representation (for which we conveniently have an encoder and decoder) which is why it can make more meaningful changes.

 

I'm going to guess that a lot of members on here are also Techmoan subscribers (if not, check him out on YouTube for exceptionally detailed reviews of retro audio gear, dash/security cams and random tech oddities.). This laser lighting rig is wonderfully 80's and futuristic at the same time. Matt (the presenter) says in his review how he'd like to see someone make a 70's game emulator so that Vector graphics games such as Battlezone or Tempest could be played. Now imagine taking that, and as its laser projector, so no focusing or Throw distances to faff around with, projecting it on to say a side of a house while being crystal clear.



I think its cool anyway.

 

Nvidia boards to power autonomous racing championship:




But can it run Crysis?

 

OpenAI releases platform to allow AI to play arbitrary games.

It remains to be seen if it can run crysis...

For those of you who use linux, might be fun to have a go at training an agent yourself.

 

There's one of these on the Bay right now at £100.

Never see one before, other than in this thread. I don't have £100 to blow, but it does look really cool and has a lot of potential.

 

That looks like it's just the case, not the complete PC. Ideal for a mod, but not so much if you're into vintage tech .

 

The case is EXACTLY what I need, nice find Arboreal!

 

You're welcome, glad to have helped - go for it!
Searching daily on the Bay for ITX does bring up all sorts of interesting things.
Mostly I can resist them