A real, working, Star Trek-style Tricorder (open source)

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/03/this-is-a-real.php

Making Objects Invisible to Magnetic Fields

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/imaging/making-objects-invisible-to-magnetic-fields/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=032912

Soft Robots for Hard Problems

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-hardware/soft-robots-for-hard-problems/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=032912

Linux in a 8 bit dip microcontroller on a protoboard!

http://dmitry.co/index.php?p=./04.Thoughts/07.%20Linux%20on%208bit

This is simply marvelous, althoug it takes ours to boot…and minutes to run a ls…

Arduino with Linux

Got it working in 5 minutes with the help of this:

http://www.pluggy.me.uk/arduino-ubuntu/

Really strong encrypted files with vim

http://mybrainhurts.com/blog/2011/02/encrypted-password-vault-with-vim-openssl.html http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2012

Robotics trends for 2012

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/robotics-trends-for-2012

#5 SMARTPHONE-BASED ROBOTS: THE NEW ROBOT BRAINS

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson

http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-jobs/ar/pr

Scope @ linux

apt-get install xscope

Very nice, powerful and easy to use

Command line video editting

Recently I used gtk-recordmydesktop to record a “video class” with both the slides, videos and the teacher appearing at the same time.

After that I had to edit the video. So here’s what I’ve done:

Convert from OGV created by gtk-recordmydestktop to MPEG
mencoder input.ogv -o output.mpg -ovc x264 -oac pcm;

Cut video segments from the beggining to a position at the end (00:15:02) mencoder tmp.mpg -o Parte12.mpg -ovc copy -oac copy -endpos 00:15:02

Cut video from a starting position to the end:
mencoder tmp.mpg -o Parte12.mpg -ovc copy -oac copy -ss 00:05:14

Rescale the video to a certain resolutions:
mencoder nn1.mpg -o tmp.mpg -oac copy -vf scale=1056:800 -ovc x264

Merge several video files into a single video:
mencoder -o ../final.mpg -ovc copy -oac copy

Enhance audio volume and convert to XviD:
ffmpeg -i f.mpg -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -vol 1000 -qscale 5.1 outro.avi

(-qscale adjusts quality. 0 is best but biggest)

If needed, play with higher volume in mplayer:
mplayer -af volume=12:0 Parte1.mpg

More useful information can be found here:
http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/19-ffmpeg-commands-for-all-needs