nook simple touch

A brief clip of a Nook Simple Touch e-ink reader running PlayStation 1 games through an emulator with a hacked fast refresh rate.

Matthaeus Krenn presents a concept for car touchscreen UI where the screen controls only one thing at a time, designed to suit driving. A tablet prototype accompanies the short demo.

A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

A short WIRED demo from CES 2013 of Tactus Technology's haptic touchscreen, whose panel raises physical bumps to form a keyboard.

GameSpot meets the VP of Senseg, a company adding electrostatic touch feedback to tablets and touch surfaces, and demonstrates the technology.

Technology Connections explains how touch lamps work and traces them back through patents to the 1950s, far earlier than most people assume.

Technology Connections explains how the simple American drip coffee maker works, including the bimetal valve and bubble-pump heating, and compares the original Mr. Coffee with modern machines.

Tested explains how Apple's Touch ID recognizes fingerprints, then tries to defeat it using fake fingers and prints, retracing methods claimed by a German computer club.

A 2008 CES demo of the original Microsoft Surface, a smart table with multi-touch interaction. It shows touch manipulation of photos and objects on a tabletop display.

Author JL Collins discusses his book The Simple Path to Wealth at Google, covering avoiding debt, simple index fund investing, and retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs. It is an hour-long interview in plain language.

Researchers from the Artificial Life Lab Graz introduce the Primordial Particle System, where a simple motion law for self-propelled particles produces cell-like structures that self-reproduce and show life cycles.

Johnny Chung Lee shows how infrared light pens and a Wii Remote can make a very low-cost multi-point interactive whiteboard or tablet display. Software is available for download.

A short video of a Microsoft Surface multimedia coffee table, with a pointer to making a homemade multi-touch screen. It shows the original touch-table concept.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote distinguishing 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand). It argues that software complexity comes from complecting things and that we should pick simple constructs.

Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.

Jason Turner's CppCon 2016 talk builds a simple Commodore 64 game using C++17, showing how constexpr and const let a modern compiler produce tight 6502 code. He walks through assembly output to show abstractions being optimized away.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote separates 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand) and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things. It offers a vocabulary for judging designs and abstractions.

Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk. He distinguishes simple (not intertwined) from easy (familiar), and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things, with Rails-specific examples including large gem collections.

A five-minute excerpt of Rich Hickey's Clojure Made Simple talk, with new slides, ranting about HttpServletRequest and specificity. He argues for using generic maps instead of many specific classes and getters.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2022 talk on whether C++ can become ten times simpler and safer. He introduces his experimental Cpp2 syntax and the cppfront transpiler, explaining the limits on incremental improvement.

The full 80-minute Macworld 2007 keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone. It includes the multitouch demos, visual voicemail and scrolling.

Conal Elliott presents his paper on automatic differentiation, deriving a simple, generalized AD algorithm from a natural specification. Varying the representation of derivatives yields forward and reverse mode algorithms that avoid the complexity and statefulness of backpropagation.

Technology Connections explains why humidity matters and compares the main types of humidifiers, including evaporative and ultrasonic designs. It covers how and why you would add moisture to indoor air.

A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.

Mathologer shows a simple idea, the commutator, that lets anyone who can solve the first layer design their own full Rubik's cube solution. The same idea carries over to other symmetric twisty puzzles such as the Megaminx.

Technology Connections explains how automatic windshield wiper rain sensors work, using an infrared light source and total internal reflection in the glass.

Technology Connections looks at why awnings disappeared from houses and how effective they are at cutting solar heat gain and cooling costs. It argues they are a simple, forgotten cooling technology.

Stuff Made Here builds a device that lets a blind person perceive their surroundings by touch, using an iPad's lidar and a mechanical tactile display driven by motors. The video walks through the build and the limits he hit.

Jason Cammisa reviews the 2022 Volkswagen Mk8 GTI and explains why he thinks it is worse than the Mk7. He criticizes aspects such as the capacitive touch controls and the interface.

Elon Musk gives students at the Sorbonne a short, simple explanation of climate change and carbon emissions shortly before the 2015 COP21 conference in Paris. He covers why CO2 accumulation matters and argues for a carbon tax.

A 2007 parody mocking Microsoft's Surface touch table, made by SarcasticGamer.

A short Simpsons clip (S5E20) of the 'Am I so out of touch?' moment, in which Principal Skinner concludes it must be the children who are wrong.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Comedian Dominic Frisby gives a ten-minute explanation of land value tax. He argues it would fix problems of rent-seeking and the economics of land ownership.

Brian Warner, author of magic-wormhole, presents the tool at PyCon 2016. He explains how a few secret words let two computers securely transfer files, covering the cryptography (NaCl, SPAKE2) and library use.

Corning's 2011 concept video showing a future where specialty glass surfaces and touchscreens are woven into everyday life.

Big Clive gives a 38-minute beginner's guide to identifying common electronic components and what they do. He keeps the maths minimal and aims to fill gaps for people just starting out.

A five-minute animated explainer of liquid democracy, in which voters can delegate their vote to trusted people. It starts from the origins of democracy and contrasts direct and representative models.

Technology Connections explains how an ordinary tank water heater works, including twin-element designs, and why it is cleverer than it looks.