While version control used to be reserved for big corporate projects, it is very mainstream these days. You can attribute much of that to Git, the software that has nearly displaced other version control. Git works well, it is versatile, and it scales well. It is easy to use as an individual developer or as part of a worldwide team. But Git is also one of those things that people don’t always study, they just sort of “pick it up” as they go. That motivated [Glasskube] to create “The Guide to Git I Never Had.”

If you are ready to click away because you are not a software person, hang on. Git is actually useful for many different kinds of data, and there are a number of hardware projects that use Git in some form. That’s especially true if the project has some code associated with it, but there are projects that consist of PCBs, reverse engineering documentation, or schematics.

Simplistically, Git tracks a bunch of files and lets you rewind in time to answer the question: what did this look like a month ago? Or a year ago? However, the real power lies in producing and merging branches.

For example, you might be working on a product and decided to add feature “A.” Meanwhile, your partner decides to work on feature “B.” No problem. You can each work in your own separate branch and get everything working. You don’t even have to be connected to a server until the very end.

When either of you are ready, you can merge your branch with the main branch. Often, this can be done automatically, but Git knows when it is in over its head and will ask for help. When you are both done merging, both of your changes are “live.” If you do it right, Git can also help answer the question: why did we make that change two years ago? It is surprising how often that’s important.

If you think Git is just for code, we can show you some strange examples. If you don’t fancy reading a blog post to learn Git, would you like to play a game?

hackaday.com/2024/09/07/get-th…

Whenever you buy a servo, it usually comes with a little baggie full of various plastic horns. Most of us pick our favorite and use it in our projects. Some of us hack them up, glue them back together, and do all kinds of weird things with them. And others skip them entirely, going for direct drive instead. In a new video, [Dynamix Systems] explores when going direct drive is the right solution.

The video primarily concerns servos as they’re used in the context of aero modeling. In this regard, the video points out that while stock servo horns are easy to use, they can be cumbersome and clumsy. For example, you often end up with horns and control linkages protruding out into the airstream, adding drag and generally making things a bit inelegant. They can also snag on things and easily damage your servos or controls.

Using direct shaft couplers can be a much tidier solution in some respects. The servo can be coupled directly to the axis of motion, allowing it to be hidden inside a wing or tail surface. It can require a little more finesse in installation and design, but they’re much less likely to snag on things or be damaged. There’s also a drag benefit if you do it right. [Dynamix Systems] notes that you’ll want to source some shaft couplers to do this properly, which you can make yourself or buy online fairly easily.

It’s great to see how tidy direct drive really is. We’ve seen some other nifty servo tricks of late, too. Video after the break.

youtube.com/embed/zr02G2yCvGU?…

hackaday.com/2024/09/07/should…

My sister is a beekeeper, or maybe a meta-beekeper. She ends up making more money by breeding and selling new queen bees to other beekeepers than she does by selling honey, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t also process the sweet stuff from time to time. She got a free steam-heated oscillating hot knife, used for cutting the waxy caps off of the tops of the cells before spinning the combs down to extract honey, and she thought it might be easier to use than her trusty hand-held electric hot knife.

The oscillating knife, which was built something like a century ago, hadn’t been used in decades. All of the grease had turned to glue, and the large v-belt wheel that made it go was hard to turn by hand, and the motor was missing anyway. So she gave it to my father and me as a project. How could we resist?

We found the original manual on the Internet, which said that it would run from any 1/2 hp motor, or could be optionally driven by a takeoff wheel from a tractor – unfortunately not an option in my sister’s honey house. But we did find a 3/4 hp bench grinder at Harbor Freight that conveniently fit inside the case, and bought the smallest v-belt pulley wheel that would fit the grinder’s arbor. We thought we were geniuses, but when we hooked it all up, it just stalled.

We spent more than a few hours taking the mechanism apart. It was basically an eccentric shaft with a bearing on the end, and the bearing ran back and forth in the groove of a sliding mechanism that the knife blade attached to. As mentioned above, everything was gunked, so we took it all apart. The bearing was seized, so we freed that up by getting the sand out of the balls. The bearing couldn’t move freely in the slide either, but we filed that down until it just moved freely without noticeable play. We added grease from this century, and reassembled it. It turned fine by hand.

But with the belt and motor attached, the mechanism still had just enough friction to stall out the motor. Of course we wrapped some rope around the shaft and pull-started it, and it made a hell of a racket, nearly vibrated itself off the table, and we could see that the marvelous zinc-coated frame that held it all together was racking under the tension. It would require a wholly new housing to be viable, and we hadn’t even figured out a source of steam to heat the knife.

In short, it was more trouble than it was worth. So we packed up the bench grinder in the original container, and returned it no-worse-for-wear to the Freight. But frankly, we had a fantastic time playing around with a noble machine from a long-gone past. We got it “working” even if that state was unworkable, and we were only out the cost of the small v-belt pulley. Who says all of your projects have to be a success to be fun?

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hackaday.com/2024/09/07/fun-an…

Nella vivace città di Dubai, uno chef ha preso una decisione insolita che avrebbe cambiato per sempre il menù di una famosa catena di pizzerie. Spartak Arutyunyan, responsabile dello sviluppo del menù per Dodo Pizza, si è rivolto al chatbot di OpenAI, ChatGPT, per elaborare una nuova ricetta per la pizza. Il risultato? Un mix selvaggio di sapori che è diventato un successo immediato.

La nascita della “Pizza Tuttofare”

ChatGPT, noto per la sua capacità di generare idee creative, è stato incaricato di riflettere le tradizioni culinarie di Dubai.

Il chatbot ha suggerito una ricetta che includeva pollo shawarma arabo, formaggio paneer grigliato indiano, erbe mediorientali Za’atar e salsa tahini. Questo miscuglio di sapori interculturali potrebbe sembrare insolito, ma ha toccato un nervo scoperto nei clienti.

Arutyunyan ha ammesso: “Come chef, non mescolerei mai questi ingredienti su una pizza, ma il mix di sapori era comunque sorprendentemente buono”. La pizza, soprannominata “Everything Pizza”, ha iniziato a vendere come il pane e rimane una scelta popolare nel menu.

L’intelligenza artificiale in cucina: successi e fallimenti

L’uso dell’intelligenza artificiale in cucina non è una novità. L’anno scorso, un “negozio di frullati su misura” chiamato BetterBlends a San Francisco ha chiuso i battenti dopo che la sua attività di ricette di frullati iper-personalizzate non ha avuto successo. Allo stesso modo, un negozio di tacos a Dallas ha sperimentato l’intelligenza artificiale generativa, con risultati sorprendenti.

Venecia Willis, direttrice culinaria di Velvet Taco, ha condiviso la sua esperienza con ChatGPT. “Penso che l’intelligenza artificiale sia un ottimo strumento da usare quando si è in un momento di crisi creativa, per far ripartire il cervello: ‘quella combinazione potrebbe funzionare, proviamola’”, ha detto. “L’intelligenza artificiale può suggerire qualcosa a cui forse non avrei pensato”.

Scetticismo e potenziale

Nonostante il successo di “Everything Pizza”, alcuni esperti rimangono scettici sull’uso dei chatbot AI in cucina. Emily Bender, critica AI e professoressa di linguistica presso l’Università di Washington, ha sottolineato che la capacità di ChatGPT di generare ricette si basa su ricette esistenti disponibili online.

“Se riesci a far sì che ChatGPT tiri fuori qualcosa che sembra una ricetta, allora è perché ci sono ricette su Internet”, ha detto Bender alla BBC. Ciò solleva interrogativi sull’originalità e la creatività delle ricette generate dall’intelligenza artificiale.

Il futuro dell’intelligenza artificiale in cucina

Il successo di “Everything Pizza” dimostra che l’intelligenza artificiale può essere uno strumento prezioso per gli chef che vogliono innovare. Sebbene non tutte le ricette generate dall’intelligenza artificiale saranno dei successi, il potenziale di creatività e ispirazione è innegabile.

Man mano che l’intelligenza artificiale continua a evolversi, possiamo aspettarci di vedere creazioni culinarie più uniche ed entusiasmanti.

L'articolo ChatGPT Chief Stellato: La Pizza Creata dall’AI che Sta Conquistando Dubai proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Look, if something happened to you every three weeks or so to basically turn you into a different person and factored heavily into whether any new humans were created, you’d probably want to keep abreast of the schedule, yeah? Yeah. So, while there are, of course, a ton of ways to do this with your phone, most of those apps do gross things with your data. Are you angry yet?

[Jakoba the Online Witch] certainly was, or if not angry, at least annoyed. So she built a glowing egg timer, which shines a different color based on current point in her cycle, to let her know when she is fertile and expecting Aunt Flo.

The coolest part is that this is an actual egg from one of [Jakoba]’s backyard chickens. No. The coolest part is how she was able to make so many holes without breaking it. (It took four tries.)

After bleaching the insides, the egg was ready to glow. As [Jakoba] says, the guts are simple — just a Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266, a WS2812 LED, and a heatsink. The enclosure consists of an inverted peanut bowl with a glass ornament hot-glued in place.

Once it was put together, all she had to do was add it in Home Assistant and use the current calendar state to trigger services from the YAML configuration.

Would you prefer an on-body solution? Here’s an earring that tracks temperature.

hackaday.com/2024/09/07/glowin…