TechnologyIQ

ChatGPT by OpenAI is a powerful AI chatbot that can give you an answer to just about any question you have. It's almost as if Google was a person you could have a conversation with.

It's open to the public for free during a trial period, so you can try it out today. The only question is, what should you ask it? Besides getting ChatGPT to do your homework for you, there are plenty of interesting ways to use it. Here are some of our favorites.

Read 15 Creative Ways to Use ChatGPT by OpenAI via MUO

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A nice collection of quick, online tools, to convert to and from a variety of file types. Just the site to keep in mind when you need to shuffle one type data into a new system. — Douglas

TinyWow & Your Privacy

Don't you love finding a great online tool-set that claims to be free, let's you build and interact the way you want, only to be denied access if you don't pay for an account(or sign up for an account). Our site is free. We don't limit. We don't even take sign-ups. Might we take sign-ups one day? Sure, we probably will(but not any time soon). When we do go down that route, what we will NOT do is trick you into spending your time using our tools, only to be denied access before you can download what you have just spent your precious time creating.

TinyWow is free. We don't have ads, we don't sell data. We currently have no plans to monetize. Why offer these tools for free? We operate two tech websites: Alphr & TechJunkie. We thought our users might find these tools helpful. For now, utilizing our existing infrastructure we are able to operate these tools at minimal additional cost. Building this and watching the growth has been fun, so we’re going to keep building free stuff.

We take your privacy seriously. Whenever you upload a file to our servers for processing, we delete the file 15 minutes after the processing of that file is complete. If you were to use that same file again in a different tool, that 15-minute window would re-start. New files created from the originally uploaded file also are subject to the same 15 minute deletion time. If those files are used again in another tool, the 15-minute deletion window is reset.

The files sent to TinyWow are uploaded via HTTPS. We do not sell information on our users or the documents, videos, images, or other file types that may be uploaded when using one of our tools.

The Print Shop Club – Create Apple II Print Shop Printouts On-Line!

The Print Shop, released in 1984, is a software package for the Apple II computer (and others) that allows for the quick and easy creation of posters, greeting cards, banners, and other things.

Other 8-bit computers also got versions of The Print Shop about a year later, in 1985. The Print Shop was extremely popular amongst both families and schools.

Play around with The Print Shop

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Growing Spectacular Gem-Like Crystals From Rust And Simple Ingredients | Hackaday

When we talk about crystals around here, we’re generally talking about the quartz variety used to make oscillators more stable, or perhaps ruby crystals used to make a laser. We hardly ever talk about homegrown crystals, though, and that’s a shame once you see how easy it is to make beautiful crystals from scratch.

We’ve got to say that we’re impressed by the size and aesthetics of the potassium ferrioxalate crystals [Chase Lean] makes with this recipe, and Zelda fans will no doubt appreciate their resemblance to green rupees. The process starts with rust, or ferric oxide, which can either be purchased or made. [Chase] chose to make his rust by soaking steel wool in a solution of saltwater and peroxide and heating the resulting sludge. A small amount of ferric oxide is added to a solution of oxalic acid, a commonly used cleaning and bleaching agent. Once the rust is dissolved, potassium carbonate is slowly added to the solution, turning it a bright green.

Read Growing Spectacular Gem-Like Crystals From Rust And Simple Ingredients | Hackaday

While brainstorming ideas for Maker starter projects with a seasonal slant, we played with the idea of 3D printing holiday ornaments. We wanted to make a project starter that was easy to do at an event like a Makerspace Open House, faculty meeting, or as a quick Maker skill builder that can be done in those flexible periods before winter break.

This generator works by creating a shape that is then copied and rotated around the Z axis. You can adjust the shape, thickness, and number of copies to create ornaments with fins, ridges, smooth surfaces and more. The generator finishes the ornament with a cap and loop for hanging.

Read Ornament Generator With Tinkercad Codeblocks : 6 Steps (with Pictures) via Instructables

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The CO2 Traffic Light will help to vent rooms at school, home, work to keep the aerosol concentrations low. We recommend to set the red light alert "must ventilate, open windows and doors" at 800ppm CO2. max 1000ppm. Follow your local government regulations. CO2 monitors are just a indicator for air quality, it will no protect you against virus or anything else. If you are not sure check resources on the principal of CO2 in breathing air and CO2 traffic lights in general. This is not meant to be a healthcare device or like. See this a foundation for STEM projects to work with sensor, IoT and learn about aerosols and CO2 impacting air quality indoors.

Read CO2 Traffic Light for Indoor Air Quality, COVID and beyond via Hackster.io

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The Covid pandemic has meant that I’m in the house a lot more, and travel has been restricted/difficult to say the least. Since I’ve been more involved in video streaming technology professionally recently, I decided to build a project based off these techologies to relieve some of the cabin fever.

The World Window shows a live webcam of various locations around the world, behind a real window frame. To change location, you can move the plane around a world map to pre-determined locations (lit by small LEDs) – the plane is magnetic to sticks to the map.

In addition to this, there is another sensor that tracks your position in front of the frame, to give a false sense of perspective when moving around in front of the frame.

Read World window

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I have an upcoming trip to Vienna next month and might try out this app for keeping a journal of the trip. I have kept a handwritten journal of past trips, but sometimes it becomes too time-consuming to write down everything while it is happening. I like the inclusion of the location feature, too, to aid in remembering the places we visited. – Douglas

The fastest way to capture and structure your thoughts: through voice.

Hold record, say what you want, and release. Just like you'd expect from an outliner, create hierarchies and rearrange. Notes are auto-transcribed and searchable, but you can always play back the audio.

Automatically attach location to notes. Remember walks you took, and which places sparked what ideas.

Read Voiceliner via Home | Max Krieger

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TLDR; I built a generative art creation flow that is fully autonomous: generating art daily from creative code, and publishing to Instagram and WordPress without any human input.

Cool, eh?

Creative coding — programming towards a visual pursuit, instead of functional, is a medium that I’ve wanted to personally explore for some time now. I love that it’s a mass of creativity, somewhere between design and programming, which is right up my alley.

Read Building a Generative Art Gallery with P5.js — Rich Tabor via Rich Tabor

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Watabou's Perilous Shores draws maps of fantastic lands in a handsome hand-made style that understates the growing sophistication of the generator. Each map has a selection of interesting locales—towns, dungeons, geographic features—to ignite the imagination. And various options allow you to tweak all of it, including the stylization.

Read Beautiful random maps in a hand-drawn style | Boing Boing

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The Q science channel engineer skillfully built a remote-controlled dachshund with legs inspired by the same mechanical design pioneered by Theo Jansen for his Strandbeest kinetic sculptures. The pup was built out of plywood and responded to a controller that was also made in the shape of a little wiener dog.

If you want a dog but for some reasons can’t – here is an answer. Build robotic dog out of plywood. It won’t replace the real dog, but better than nothing

The unique design coincidentally gave the wooden canine the very distinctive waddle of the dachshund breed.

Read A Remote Controlled Robotic Dog Inspired by the Design of Theo Jansen's Walking Strandbeest Sculptures via Laughing Squid

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Bring children's drawings to life, by animating characters to move around!

Upload a drawing of ONE character, where the arms and legs don’t overlap the body (see examples below).

CHECKLIST

Make sure the character is drawn on a white piece of paper without lines, wrinkles, or tears.
Make sure the drawing is well lit. To minimize shadows, hold the camera further away and zoom in on the drawing.
Don’t include any identifiable information, offensive content (see our community standards), or drawings that infringe on the copyrights of others.

Read Animated Drawings via

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Python is known for its short and clear syntax. Due to the simplicity of Python, it's sometimes referred to as “executable pseudocode”. You can make Python programs more concise using one-liner codes. This will help you save time and write code in a more Pythonic way.

In this article, you'll learn 11 Python one-liners that will help you code like a pro.

Read 12 Useful Python One-Liners You Must Know via MUO

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Recently, we’ve stumbled upon the extensive effort that is the BirdNET research platform. BirdNET uses a neural network to identify birds by the sounds they make, and is a joint project between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Chemnitz University of Technology. What strikes us is – this project is impressively featureful and accessible for a variety of applications. No doubt, BirdNET is aiming to become a one-stop shop for identifying birds as they sing.

There’s plenty of ways BirdNET can help you. Starting with likely the most popular option among us, there are iOS and Android apps – giving the microphone-enabled “smart” devices in our pockets a feature even the most app-averse hackers can respect. However, the BirdNET team also talks about bringing sound recognition to our browsers, Raspberry Pi and other SBCs, and even microcontrollers. We can’t wait for someone to bring BirdNET to a RP2040! The code’s open-source, the models are freely available – there’s hardly a use case one couldn’t cover with these.

Read Neural Network Identifies Bird Calls, Even On Your Pi via Hackaday

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