Baby Don't Hertz Me

Despite all the woes around internet accessibility and net neutrality occurring in the USA in recent times, the internet remains a modern marvel. Sure, there is always the risk of your data being sold (if it isn't already) but in exchange you gain access to the majority of humankind's knowledge. All of our joy, sorrow, science and math. The internet is an endless supply of data and learning. It isn't all about making pretty graphs like you might find on /r/dataisbeautiful but amazing stuff can be done regardless. The massive amounts of data accessible on the internet will allow for the identification of the driving forces of certain actions. As can be seen below, Bitcoin prices correlate very nicely with Google searches relating to it. From /r/dataisbeautiful and /u/DeanLa As my second last semester in university wraps up I realize the true power of data. In a course I took about pattern recognition and machine learning we got to see first hand what can happen wit...

Several weeks ago, the professor who is supervising me for the summer and I were talking about technology. This is to be expected since he is an ECE professor and I am an ECE student. It started as a run of the mill conversation until we somehow managed to get on the topic of why my supervisor always needed to have an RSS feed on his mobile devices. He insisted on the RSS feed to have easy access to Slashdot. When my supervisor first mentioned Slashdot I wondered what it was. A quick google search and some reading showed that it is the eloquent sibling of Reddit. Not to bash Reddit too hard but it can sometimes be hard to wade through the heaping pile of garbage that can be collect in a Reddit thread. There isn't an up/down-voting system but the content is definitely of a higher quality than Reddit. You can usually tell a post is of a higher quality by the number of comments. The comment counter takes the visual place of the up-vote counter on Reddit. Slashdot may have a g...

How many social media or productivity tools do you use? One? Two? Three? Five? Nine? I always get frustrated with so much to do and so little time. There is little I hate more than having to do easy, repetitive tasks. With the Internet of Things (IoT) getting more and more popular it will only be harder to stay up to date on all the information and systems that you have. Thankfully there is a magical things called "IFTTT".  No this isn't the inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT). What IFTTT standards for is "IF This Then That". The system does just precisely what its name states. If a certain criteria is met, a certain action is then completed.  I hate backing up my photos from my phone. I would like them available on all of my devices. They have a "recipe" for that. Every picture I take will get backed up to a folder in my Google Drive. The recipes that I use are to synchronize my social media posts. Nothing really fancy but it does sa...