Minecraft to 3D Printer

With all the talk about 3D printing and creating STL files, I thought this was a fun link.  Draw things in Minecraft and then print them into real objects!

http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/06/13/converting-your-minecraft-creation-into-an-stl/

High Tech Jobs Migrating?

http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/break-points/4414984/High-tech-jobs?cid=Newsletter+-+Whats+New+on+Embedded.com

 

Win $800,000 Writing Software for S4

http://www.techhive.com/article/2039221/samsung-launches-800000-app-contest-for-galaxy-s4.html

Low Cost Android TV Box

Android for your TV in an affordable package; the Mini XPlus!  Looks like you could use it for all sorts of things, too.  Wifi, an A10 processor, HDMI, USB; all for $69.99.  The Miniand site has a few other hackable platforms that also look interesting.

GCC Competitor: LLVM

I’ve used GCC for the better part of my career.  It’s worked fairly uniformly across many platforms:  x86, MIPS, PPC, ARM, AVR8, and AVR32.  Honestly, it is near and dear to my heart.

When I got wind of the Embedded.com article titled “Does GCC still have a future?“, I felt a little blind-sided.  After reading the article, however, my conclusion is that competition is often a good thing.

Check it out.  Maybe your next project can leverage LLVM for quicker build and execution times?

Secure Email Made Easy

Security Schmurity

Never send anything confidential via email without using encryption.  Exchanging tax documents with your accountant?  Working with an online Mortgage company?  DO NOT use email to transport this type of information in clear-text.

Who’s Tracking You Online?

Check out the Collusion plugin for Mozilla/Firefox.  You can get it for Chrome also.  It allows you to watch who’s tracking you and control access to that data.  You may be surprised.  Take your privacy seriously.

How Companies Treat Your Privacy

Interesting what online companies take your privacy seriously.  See https://www.eff.org/ for some really cool data.

4 Reasons PC Market Won’t Rebound

One of the better articles on PCs, tablets, and other “computers”.

http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/desktop/4-reasons-pc-market-wont-rebound/240154202

Open Files in Emacs With Power

Emacs has a lot of power to open files.  Once in the program, you can open multiple files with one operation, use environment variables, and other techniques not available in many other editors.

Here’s a list of cool things you can do:

• Use environment variables defined in the invoking shell.  E.g.  ‘$SDK_PATH/include/foo.h’
• Use a glob to open multiple files at once.  E.g.  ‘*_mux.h’  or for more fun ‘board/*/*_mux.h’
• Use Tramp to open files on remote systems.  E.g.  ‘user@host:filename’
• Use gtags to find a file to open.  Gtags searches all file names for a pattern and either opens a “hit” or presents you with a list to choose from.  E.g.  gtags-find-file ‘bar’