Why spend $300 to $500 on a mediocre, mid-range laptop or desktop when you can have a highly portable, powerful Windows machine? Whether it is looking for yourself or for a loved one, consider a used Thinkpad. They regularly come onto the used market for cheap as companies renew their stock of Thinkpads, and they offer a very good price to performance ratio. Because they are older, you can also find old and used peripherals to trick out the Thinkpad for a song. ...

While conducting the fairy light teardown, I came across the YX8018 IC which was seen in many other teardowns regarding garden lights. These are small stakes with a solar panel. You stick them in the soil and they light up at night. Fairy Light TeardownTearing apart a solar powered fairy light unit to see what makes it blink and shimmer.West Side Electronics·Benjamen Lim It costs $0.08 per IC, and it is a simplified joule thief circuit that requires only an inductor to work. This IC is also readily available, as compared to the one I found in the fairy light circuit, which I couldn’t get a hold of. ...

Introducing the Thunderboard BG22 from Silicon Labs! Featuring the all new EFR32BG22 Bluetooth 5.2 IC and a whole bevy of sensors, it is the perfect platform for learning BLE and microcontrollers. If you are interested in taking a step beyond Arduino and want a platform that loves its developers with quality documentation and a smooth development workflow regardless of your OS preferences, then I recommend getting the BG22 to test out. ...

What a Spectacle! Last week, I was reminded of this platform by way of browsing Sparkfun’s surplus section, that the Spectacle Director board was going for 60% off. At that point in early 2017 I thought it was a neat concept to connect boards together but I never really followed up because it seemed to be a little limiting. My interest piqued, I decided to check up on the other Spectacle boards, but there was a reason why the Director board was being offered at 60% off… ...

I recently took the PCA and passed! It was tough but I thought it was worth it as I am better able to understand the context for Google Cloud much better. Everyone tells you to read the docs and that they are the most useful thing when it comes to studying for the PCA. Unfortunately this is like telling someone who is studying the English language to study the dictionary. It is useful as a reference, only in context of the questions you have! If you read it from end to end, it’s just not a good use of your time! ...

Trilateration is the act of finding a location given a set of distances from known locations. It is a little different from triangulation where you know the angles from known locations. Triangulation With triangulation, you measure the angle and find the intersections. Trilateration With trilateration you find the distance from the center to each of the shaded circles to determine the location of the origin. Now to picture the problem, since audio signals radiate out from a single point, and you don’t know the direction, the only info is the time which each node detects the sound. ...

I recently passed my Google Cloud ACE examination! Yay! The exam itself was very challenging and it certainly pushed my cloud knowledge as well as my understanding of networking to the limit. It can be quite nitpicky, all the way down to four similar looking commands with minor differences in order to selecting a suite of services based on a given scenario. I used the Official ACE examination study guide as well as Qwiklabs. I thought Qwiklabs were the most useful in terms of getting me familiar with Google Cloud in a risk free environment since they create a custom lab each time you start a lesson. You can get a free month by taking part in their challenges each month here: https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/google-cloud-skills/register.html ...

Tldr; more content, worse support. If you are looking into this Nanodegree to learn data engineering I would strongly advise you to look elsewhere. Old content that has not been updated This is the biggest issue for me. Technology does not stand still, especially for cloud technologies. If you decide to create videos, I minimally expect that the content is kept up to date because videos become impossible to follow if the GUI on the instructor’s screen does not match the current state of the GUI. For this reason, I don’t like follow-along videos for GUI interactions because it is simply not easy to follow what someone is clicking around in a GUI as compared to coding. The interface for AWS has not changed much, but a few options that were laid out in the video are hidden in dropdown menus now, and it took me awhile to find it. ...

Great for busy professionals, pass otherwise. Tldr; I enjoyed the novel aspects of the program, but ultimately I thought it fell short of the price it was asking for self-funded learners. I recently had the opportunity to do a Udacity course. Arguably, amongst all the providers I’ve tried, the Udacity curriculum is most tailored towards a working professional: It designed around the assumption that learning is not your full time job. Correspondingly, the content is broken down into small bite-sized chunks that you can start and stop at any time. It provides you all the tools you need to complete the program right in your browser. No more figuring out installations and setups! With that in mind, I set out to finish the Udacity Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree. Below, I break down my experience of each part of the program, and hopefully, it can help you to decide if Udacity Nanodegree is right for you. ...

Using the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: *x equals to negative bplus or minus, the square root ofB square minus four A C**all of which is over two A.**Now I know how-to find my roots,*next time you can find them too! [ x = \frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}] My dad thought up of this ingenious way to remember the roots of the quadratic formula and taught it to all of his students including me. So while my peers were struggling with trying to remember if it was $b^2-4ac$ or $b^2+4ac$, I was quietly singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to myself. ...