No more slipping, sliding or shimmying with these chest straps. The best chest strap heart rate monitors, as rated by Amazon reviews – CNET
Source: CNet

Isn’t this the cutest little synth you ever saw? The matching sparkly half-stack amp really makes it, visually speaking. But the most interesting part? There’s not a wire in sight, ’cause [Blitz City DIY]’s futuristic rig sends the bleep boops over Bluetooth LE.

Hardware-wise, both the synth and the amp are fairly simple. Underneath each of those cute little printed keys is one of those clicky momentaries that usually come with bright button caps in primary colors — the keys themselves just press-fit over the tops. All twelve ebonies and ivories are connected up to an Adafruit Feather, which communicates over Bluetooth LE to a CircuitPlayground Bluefruit (CPB) in the amp. Each time a note is played on the synth, its corresponding color circles comet-like around the CPB’s NeoPixels, which shine through the amp’s speaker grille.

The super interesting part is that all the hard work is happening in the code. Both boards have the same array of colors in rainbow order, and the CPB has an array of tone frequencies that match up one for one with the colors. For every note played, the CPB looks up the color, swirls it, and plays the note. If you want to build one, this project is wide open — [Blitz City DIY] even made a learn guide with all the dirty details. Be sure to check out the demo and extended walk-through after the break.

More in the market for making a computer keyboard? Just grab the nearest ESP32.

Via Adafruit

Adora-BLE Synth Wails Without Wires
Source: HackADay

Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:

Union of Concerned Scientists study: ride-hailing trips today result in an estimated 69% more climate pollution on average than the trips they displace  —  Union of Concerned Scientists recommends more electric cars and pooled trips  —  Uber and Lyft have weathered criticism about pollution …

In Australia, researchers discover a hitherto unknown type of lion that lived over 24 million years ago. New lion, size of house cat, with bone-crushing teeth, is found in fossil form – CNET
Source: CNet

Vivo’s new phone has a curved waterfall display, 60-watt super-fast charging and a notch-killing in-screen selfie camera. Vivo Apex 2020 concept phone hides a 16-megapixel selfie camera under its screen – CNET
Source: CNet

eMarketer:

eMarketer: in the US, TikTok is expected to grow 21.9% YoY to 45.4M MAU in 2020, down from 97.5% growth in its breakout year of 2019  —  More than 20% of social users will use TikTok this year … After nearly doubling its US user base last year, growth for TikTok will slow in the coming years …

[Tony] posted an interesting video where he looks at the Atari 2600 and the way many companies tried to convert it into a real home computer. This reminded us of the ColecoVision, which started out as a video game but could expand to a pretty reasonable computer.

It might seem silly to convert a relatively anemic Atari video game into a computer, but keep in mind that computers were pretty expensive in those days. Not to mention, the Atari itself was a fair investment back then, too.

There were four options [Tony] found, although none of them seemed to be very popular. One looked like a cassette player that plugged into your cartridge port and a keyboard port for a cheap-looking keyboard. [Tony] thinks it, along with the “piggy back,” never actually made it to market.

Atari also got into the act with the Graduate. For $79 you got 8K of RAM and a membrane keyboard. There was a big public relations push including a very period TV commercial you can see in the video.

Apparently a dispute between Atari and the actual designers of the Graduate, caused Atari to kill the project with no sales. So far, of the three [Tony] covered, none of them were sold to the public.

The fourth one, CompuMate, was sold for $79. You would get some extra memory and an odd-looking membrane keyboard along with a cassette port. If you want to see the guts, fast forward to 13:30. Like many period computers, it will start up at a BASIC prompt. Unlike many other computers, it would also play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

The screen resolution was very poor. Apparently, the flavor of BASIC used by the CompuMate isn’t very well documented. A 100 line program fills up the memory which is funny when you think of how much memory your PC or even your phone has today.

It is hard to realize that the days when this kind of add on might make sense was not that long ago. You can wonder what the computers of 2080 will look like.

If you want to write native, there are ways to do that with a bit of work. There are plenty of ways to get the equivalent of a 2600 — and more — in a much smaller package now.

Converting an Atari 2600 into a Home Computer; Did That Ever Work?
Source: HackADay

Drivers for Uber and Lyft and delivery people for Instacart and DoorDash are independent contractors and don’t get sick leave or healthcare benefits. Gig workers face the spread of the new coronavirus with no safety net
Source: Washington Post Tech

All the latest, hottest rumors about a potential successor to the iPhone SE, aka the iPhone 9 or iPhone SE 2. iPhone 9 rumors: Launch date, ,price, specs and Touch ID might be back – CNET
Source: CNet

Joanna Glasner / Crunchbase News:

ZoomInfo, which operates a cloud market intelligence platform for sales and marketing teams, files to raise around $500M in an IPO  —  ZoomInfo Technologies is the latest heavily funded SaaS player to publicly file for an IPO.  —  Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

Email is something that consistently absorbs a lot of my day. I start everyday checking and responding to email, but as the day progresses, find myself checking my inbox pretty much constantly from my phone and computer.

Read more…

Use Out of Office Messages Even When You're Not on Vacation
Source: Life Hacker

The Logitech SqueezeBox was a device you hooked up to your stereo so you could stream music from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box or your desktop computer over the network. That might not sound very exciting now, but when [Aaron Ciuffo] bought it back in 2006, it was a pretty big deal. The little gadget has been chugging all these years, but the cracks are starting to form. Before it finally heads to that great electronics recycling center in the sky, he’s decided to start work on its replacement.

Thanks to the Raspberry Pi, building a little device to stream digital audio from a NAS is easy these days. But a Pi hooked up to a USB speaker isn’t necessarily a great fit for the living room. [Aaron] didn’t necessarily want his replacement player to actually look like the SqueezeBox, but he wanted it to be presentable. While most of us probably would have tried to make something that looked like a traditional piece of audio gear, he took his design is a somewhat more homey direction.

The Raspberry Pi 4 and HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro live inside of a wooden laser cut case that [Aaron] designed with OpenSCAD. We generally associate this tool with 3D printing, but here he’s exporting each individual panel as an SVG file so they can be cut out. We especially like that he took the time to add all of the internal components to the render so he could be sure everything fit before bringing the design into the corporeal world.

While the case was definitely a step in the right direction, [Aaron] wasn’t done yet. He added a WaveShare e-Paper 5.83″ display and mounted it in a picture frame. Software he’s written for the Raspberry Pi shows the album information and cover art on the display while the music is playing, and the current time and weather forecast when it’s idle. He’s written the software to plug into Logitech’s media player back-end to retain compatibility with the not-quite-dead-yet SqueezeBox, but we imagine the code could be adapted to whatever digital media scheme you’re using.

Over the years, we’ve seen a number of SqueezeBox replacements. Many of which have been powered by the Raspberry Pi, but even the ESP8266 and ESP32 have gotten in on the action recently.

Media Streamer With E-Ink Display Keeps it Classy
Source: HackADay

Roughly 2 million tweets peddled conspiracy theories and other falsehoods about coronavirus in other countries over the roughly two-week period when the outbreak began to spread outside China, according to a report from an arm of State Department obtained by The Washington Post. Millions of tweets peddled conspiracy theories about coronavirus in other countries, an unpublished U.S. report says
Source: Washington Post Tech

Wireless speakers make nice gifts — and some are quite affordable. Here are our top picks for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi speakers. The best wireless speakers to give in 2020 – CNET
Source: CNet

Aditi Shrivastava / The Economic Times:

Sources: Amazon to launch a food delivery service in India in March, charging restaurants commissions of 10-15%, about half of what Swiggy and Zomato charge  —  The food delivery platform is open to own employees for now, pilots underway across five high-density pin codes in Bengaluru

The death happened in Washington state, says the department of health there. First coronavirus death in US confirmed – CNET
Source: CNet

A do not enter sign has been taped to the door at Bothell High School in Bothell, Washington. It is closed for disinfection after a family member of a staffer was put in quarantine for possible coronavirus | Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images

A person in Washington state died after contracting the novel coronavirus, health authorities announced on Saturday. It is the first death attributed to the virus in the U.S. Officials also announced two new cases in Washington state linked to a long-term care facility, including the first confirmed case in a healthcare worker in the United States.

“We are dealing with an emergency evolving situation,” Amy Reynolds, of the Washington state health department, told the Associated Press. A spokesperson for EvergreenHealth Medical Center in King County, Washington confirmed to the AP that the patient died there. The patient who died was a man in his 50s with chronic underlying health conditions, Jeff Duchin, a health officer for Public…

Continue reading…

First U.S. coronavirus death confirmed in Washington state
Source: New feed

Monday is “National Egg McMuffin Day” a most definitely made up holiday by McDonald’s that comes with the opportunity to score a free Egg McMuffin.

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Get a Free McMuffin on Monday for 'National Egg McMuffin Day'
Source: Life Hacker

[Carl] wanted to prototype his circuits quickly using printed circuit boards. He picked up a Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Mill and made a video about the results. His first attempt wasn’t perfect, as you could notice under the microscope. A few adjustments, though, and the result was pretty good.

Be warned, this mill is pretty expensive — anywhere from $2,500 to $3,000. The company claims it is a better choice than a conventional cheap mill because it uses a 26,000 RPM spindle and has high-resolution steppers. Because of its low backlash and high accuracy and repeatability, the company claims it can easily mill boards with 6 mil traces.

Of course, the mill can do things other than PCBs. [Carl] was impressed with the speed of the system, too. The boards he tries in the video are pretty small, but they took a few minutes each.

Of course, like most homemade PCBs, there are no plated-through holes or solder mask or plating. Of course, you could add all of those things using additional steps. We’ve seen people use wires for vias or even rivets. However, that sort of takes away from the main idea of push a button and PCB pops out.

We’ve looked at using a cheap mill to do the same thing, and Hackaday’s own [Adil] found that 0.3 mm traces (not quite 12 mils) were easily doable. If that’s sufficient for your needs, you might save quite a bit of money over the mill presented here. We’ve seen others do 10 mil traces, so that’s probably doable, too.

Desktop PCB Mill Review
Source: HackADay

Biz Carson / Protocol:

Anonymous Twitter account @VCBrags hits a nerve mocking VC’s propensity for self-promotion by quote-retweeting boastful tweets  —  Investors either are loving or blocking @VCBrags, which retweets investors’ best brags.  —  A parody Twitter account is getting under the skin …

These peel-and-stick montages make a great addition to nearly any wall. Plus: Add Rachio’s smart sprinkler controller to your yard for $120. Get 35% off a WeMontage custom photo wallpaper – CNET
Source: CNet

Save 44% on a robot vacuum equipped with sensors to avoid collision and return to spots it has missed. Get an Ecovacs Deebot 711 robot vacuum for 0 – CNET
Source: CNet

Did you know TNW Conference has a track fully dedicated to bringing the biggest names in tech to showcase inspiring talks from those driving the future of technology this year? Tim Leberecht, who authored this piece, is one of the speakers. Check out the full ‘Impact‘ program here. At first glance, it is an unlikely match: on the one side, Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), or neuro-computing — so-called “exponential technologies,” defined as technologies that develop exponentially fast, with power and speed doubling and cost dropping by half every year. On the other side, the pre-kindergarten kids enrolled in Head…

This story continues at The Next Web

Emerging tech will enhance your kid’s education — but not their creativity
Source: The Next Web

Notifications, fitness tracking, heart-rate monitoring and more, all for an impossibly low price. This Apple Watch copycat is surprisingly good for just – CNET
Source: CNet

Or celebrate Leap Day the way ancient Romans did, with up to five 7-11 pizzas for $2.29 each. Today only: Celebrate Leap Day with a delivery order from 7-11 for just – CNET
Source: CNet