Well now, this is a clever bit of hardware hacking.
Surfaces viewed from an angle tend to look shiny, and you can tell if a finger is touching the surface by checking if it’s touching its own reflection.
A great write-up of Science Hack Day Dublin—the 6th iteration is coming up next month.
What struck me about this hackathon is that the only end goal is for people to have a bit of fun and make stuff. There’s no flashy big-ticket prize and no commercial agenda. They’re not looking for start-up pitches or scalable business plans, and there’s no Dragons’ Den interrogation. Just good old-fashioned, high-tech making and mingling.
A clever little hack to preserve an aspect ratio for any HTML element.
We use two important attributes:
- SVG knows how to maintain aspect ratio
- CSS grid knows how to make overlapping items affect each other’s size
A report on Science Hack Day Berlin (published on the excellent eLife website).
When I put together the first Science Hack Day back in 2010, I had no idea how amazingly far it would spread—all thanks to Ariel.
Bram hopes for a way to define aspect ratios natively in CSS. We can sort of manage it now, but all the solutions are pretty hacky.
Of all the sites to pick to demo progressive web apps, we get the cesspit that is Hacker News …I guess it is possible to polish a turd.
Anyway, here are some examples of using frameworks to create alternative Hacker News readers. So the challenge here is to display some text to read..
Four of them render absolutely no content without JavaScript.
In the Hall of Shame we have React, Preact, Angular, and Polymer.
In the Hall of Fame, we have the ones doing it right: React, Vue, and Viper.
That’s right: React appears in both. See, it’s not about the tools; it’s about how you use ‘em.
Science Hack Day’s mission is simply to get excited and make things with science, and that’s just what everyone did. One of the remarks I made at the start of this year’s event was about how building community is one of the best things to be involved in right now after the election, and especially connecting different communities together as Science Hack Day does. Exploration is not a solo endeavor and thus it’s less about what you explore and more about the act of exploring. In community exploration, we build strength, support, and safe spaces.
You just know that this will end up being made into a film one day. It’s like a downmarket Mr. Robot.
This is an unintuitive—but very handy—use of of the flex-grow property. The use-case outlined here is fairly common.
Seb is going to be closing out the Brighton Digital Festival with a bang.
Seb unravels all the geeky details about how your favourite retro gadgets work, including Nintendo light guns, Casio keyboards and the cathode ray tube televisions that once dominated our living rooms.
It’s going to be like Seb: The Musical …with lasers.
When I designed the Science Hack Day logo, I never expected to one day see it recreated with florescent E. coli.
The story of Science Hack Day …as told in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America!
(a PDF version is also available)
Ariel and Lisa have redesigned the excellent Spacehack site and it’s looking stellar!
A step-by-step walkthrough of how GitHub has tweaked its Content Security Policy over time. There are some valuable insights here, and I’m really, really happy to see companies share this kind of information.
A one-day event where participants conceptualize and create projects that have no value whatsoever.
I always loved Matt’s light cone project—it was a big influence on the Radio Free Earth hack that I made with Chloe. Now it has been reborn as a Twitter bot. Here’s Matt’s documentation for his future self:
I haven’t made a habit of project write-ups before, but I’m taking an increasingly “long now” approach to the tech I make and use. How will I remember what I made in a decade? By reading this post.
It looks like this year’s Science Hack Day in San Francisco was particularly excellent.
Tantek told me about building a portable home planetarium—sounded like a blast.
Any sufficiently advanced hacking is indistinguishable from a haunting. In the same way that many Internet of Things objects are referred to as ‘enchanting’ or ‘magical,’ with an intervention, they can very quickly become haunted.
A handy way of quickly finding out how the weather in your area compares to the weather on Mars.