Technology

Please delete this post if it isn't appropriate.

I have a high interest in technology and related topics but find it hard to wrap my head around a lot of it. So I am looking for books that are all about the basics and are designed for the extreme novice.

I know "technology" is a very broad term, but honestly, anything will probably pique my interest as long as it's easily digestible. That being said, some specific things I would like to be a bit more educated on would be; AI, robotics, future/emerging technologies, our current internet landscape and speculations on its' future, etc.

When Threads launched on Wednesday, numerous right-wing users shared(opens in a new tab) their dissatisfaction(opens in a new tab) with Twitter's biggest competitor — on Twitter of course — over having their accounts flagged for disinformation. As of Friday, however, it seems the warning label on accounts that reported the issue has since disappeared.

Heya! I thought I'd mention that I've been doing a bunch of development on the optical Timex Datalink watches! I have been carefully sniffing data from the original Timex software with a logic analyzer, and have fully reverse engineered every Datalink protocol, the serial Notebook Adapter, and even the CRT syncing graphics! This means that every Datalink device, including every Timex and Motorola watch, all PDAs, and the funny e-BRAIN talking toy is supported!

For those that aren't familiar, the Timex Datalink is a watch that was introduced in 1994 that is essentially a small PDA on your wrist. The early models (supported by this software) have an optical sensor on the top of the face that receives data via visible light.

The original data transfer method involves drawing patterns of lines on a CRT monitor for the watch to receive with the optical sensor. CRTs use electron beams that draw scan lines one-by-one from top to bottom, then it returns to the top and repeats for the next frame. This means that the electron guns turn on when its drawing a white line, and and turn off when its drawing the black background. This produces flashing light as the graphics are drawn, which is ultimately received by the optical sensor and decoded by the Timex Datalink device.

For laptop users, Timex also offered the Datalink Notebook Adapter. Instead of using a CRT monitor, the Notebook Adapter simply flashed a single LED light. This adapter is fully supported by the Timex Datalink software, and sends the same data as a CRT.

However, Notebook Adapters are rare and expensive now, so I reverse-engineered one! Here's my timex_datalink_client Ruby library communicating with my DIY Datalink Notebook Adapter to emit data to a Timex Datalink watch!

And if you want to try the reverse-engineered CRT graphics, I got you covered! I reverse-engineered that, too!

As a fun tidbit, these watches are flight certified by NASA and is one of four watches qualified by NASA for space travel! Here's a shot of James H. Newman wearing a Datalink watch on the Space Shuttle for STS-88!

Here is my Ruby library with all options for all watches reverse-engineered into a tidy model-based syntax!

• https://github.com/synthead/timex_datalink_client

Here is a Notebook Adapter emulator that is fully compatible with all Timex software on old and new machines, and also works with my library too!

• https://github.com/synthead/timex-datalink-arduino

And if you have an anchor that happens to contain an electron beam and wanna try it, here's my library for drawing graphics to a CRT to transfer data!

• https://github.com/synthead/timex_datalink_crt

This has all been done over months of careful effort with lots of VMs, Pentium machines, Windows 98SE, logic analyzers, and solving data puzzles little by little. On July 4th, 2023, I'm proud to announce that I have reverse-engineered every Datalink device with 100% feature compatibility! This is definitely a passion project by all means, and I thought I'd pop in and share this passion with y'all!

Enjoy!

I'm putting a smallish (200x2) amp in my car Real Soon Now. The factory head unit can drive the speakers well enough to sound good enough for background music or an audiobook, but when I really want to play music it sounds not awesome. Better than a clock radio from 1992 but not by much.

The thing is I want it both ways. When I'm playing an audio book I don't need the amp and want it to play directly without the amp in the speaker circuit at all.

This isn't something beyond my ability to solve, I could knock out a nice solution with relays and blinky lights and whatnot to do the job triggered by the antenna/amp line like the amp would be, then switch that from the dash. But if there's an existing solution that isn't stupid expensive I'd rather not reinvent the wheel.

Has anyone done this or am I the only one who would even want it?

One more important point: the amp will be using line level input, I'm going to install RCA lines for the future but the factory stereo has no low level outputs. It would be dead easy to do what I want if it did, but alas.

This article explains the types of software with examples.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ninja/post/78911

AMD has unveiled two workstation GPUs, the Radeon Pro W7900 and Radeon Pro W7800, based on the advanced RDNA 3 architecture. These high-performance GPUs, designed for workflows such as visualization, real-time 3D, ray trace rendering, and more, are equipped with unified RDNA 3 compute units, dual-issue stream processors, AI accelerators, and second-generation ray tracing accelerators. According to AMD, RDNA 3 delivers up to a 50% increase in raytracing performance per compute unit compared to the previous generation.

The Radeon Pro W7900 is a triple (2.5) slot GPU, packing 48 GB of GDDR6 memory and 61 TFLOPs of peak single precision performance with a total board power of 295W, priced at $3,999. On the other hand, the Radeon Pro W7800 is a dual slot GPU, featuring 32 GB of GDDR6 memory and 45 TFLOPs of peak single precision performance with a total board power of 260W, available for $2,499.

Both GPUs are engineered to rival Nvidia's RTX 6000 Ada Generation (48 GB). While AMD's Radeon Pro W7900 outperforms Nvidia's flagship pro GPU in certain benchmarks, AMD emphasizes the competitive price-performance ratio of both GPUs. For instance, in the SPECviewperf 2020 GeoMean benchmark, AMD claims the Radeon Pro W7900 comes within 7% of the Nvidia RTX A6000 Ada Generation's performance, but at less than half the cost ($3,999 vs $8,615), delivering more than double the price-performance.

The newly launched GPUs also feature support for DisplayPort 2.1, a significant upgrade from the previous generation that allows for increased refresh rate, pixel resolution, and color bit-depth. This ensures these GPUs are future-proofed for next-gen displays. Both the Radeon Pro W7800 and W7900 offer three DisplayPort 2.1 and one Mini DisplayPort 2.1 connectors, contrasting with the previous Radeon Pro W6800's six Mini DisplayPort 1.4 connectors.

The Radeon Pro W7900, with its 48 GB memory, offers a 50% increase from its predecessor, the Radeon Pro W6800, matching the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada's memory capacity. As workflows become increasingly complex, larger memory capacity is crucial for handling high-polygon datasets and multitasking. Both GPUs are expected to be available in Q2 2023, with OEM and SI system availability expected in 2H 2023.

#AMD #GPU #red_team

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605

A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.rocks/post/3214

So I created an open-source Lemmy bot to reply to posts/comments with YouTube links with converted Piped links to preserve your privacy.

Piped is an open-source alternative privacy-friendly frontend to YouTube. You can watch the same content from YouTube without connecting to Google's servers.

You can find the source code at: https://github.com/TeamPiped/lemmy-piped-link-bot

You can find Piped's source code at: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

PS: I'm the author of Piped :P

Sheriff’s Office shared license plate reader data with law enforcement in states that passed laws banning abortion, including Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas

Here’s what is collected by Threads, as well as by Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Spill, and Hive Social.