You’ve no doubt heard the saying, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” But there’s actually a counter-perspective to this particular philosophy that says it’s also worth doing things badly, with the general idea being that even a semi-successful attempt at something is better than no attempt at all.
We’re not sure if that’s the principle [José Luis Monteiro] and his father had in mind while working on a way to play the classic Snake on a seven-segment LED display salvaged from an old DVD player, but surely the end result is the same. It’s not so much that the display isn’t a good fit for the eponymous snake, in fact, it actually makes a strange amount of sense. Each of the segments can stand in for a piece of the ever-growing serpent, and they’re already arranged in a roughly rectangular grid that makes moving around straightforward enough.
The issue is that the resolution — such as it is — of the display it pretty unforgiving for anything else. Namely, the “food” that your sake is after is naturally identical to one of its own segments, so it doesn’t take long before it’s all rather confusing visually. But in those brief opening moments, it actually works pretty well.
Even if you’re not interested in Snake, between the documentation, source code, and the video below, this project is a great primer on reverse engineering these types of displays. With a microcontroller, a datasheet, and a bit of patience, you could put together an unattractive and frustrating gameplay experience of your very own! If that’s not the dream, what is?
To end the month, HBO Max is raising the bar in terms of the quality of its content. One of my favorite new movies of the year, The Invite, is now streaming on HBO Max. It's a comedy for adults, a genre that feels like a rarity in today's Hollywood landscape. Speaking of adults, documentaries are a staple for older audiences, and HBO Max has intriguing options.
Unsurprisingly, audiences are loving Nobody Wants This season 3, one of Netflix's new releases in October. The rom-com starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody has been a hit across three seasons, and I expect the show to return for a fourth season. If you haven't watched Nobody Wants This, then consider throwing it into your rotation.
President Donald Trump has declared the imports of foreign-made factory robots to be a national security threat—ordering new US negotiations with trading partners while holding out the possibility of imposing new tariffs on such robot imports in the future.
Issued on October 28, Trump’s presidential proclamation represents heightened government scrutiny of foreign-made industrial robots that could complicate the manufacturing operations of major US corporations that rely on such robots. Those companies include Detroit automakers General Motors and Ford, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, and aerospace and defense giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Trump’s proclamation describes industrial robots and machinery as being crucial for producing US military weapon systems along with representing a “driving force” behind all critical infrastructure sectors within the US economy. The proclamation cites an investigation under US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick as having found that US imports of such robots “pose[] risks to the United States industrial base and threatens the long-term competitiveness of the United States in a sector that is increasingly vital to national security.”
Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, including Copilot and Windows staff. Here's what the workforce changes could mean for enterprise IT teams.
ETH Zurich's experimental implant uses continuous glucose monitor readings to lower blood sugar without insulin. See how it works and what mouse tests found.
Before trick-or-treaters arrive, check your Ring Doorbell motion zones to reduce unwanted alerts and make sure visitors are detected along your walkway.
Your Raspberry Pi is actually capable of helping you save money if you put it to use in the right way. If you’re currently paying for cable with a DVR service, your Raspberry Pi can take over that task. Still paying for a password manager? The Raspberry Pi can handle that, too. Need to track prices for Black Friday? Yep, your Pi is fully capable of doing that, as well. So, here are three projects you can do this weekend on your Raspberry Pi—and none of them will take long to set up.
Senseonics has begun testing Freedom, an implanted glucose monitor that could track blood sugar for a year without wearable hardware. Here's how it would work.
Bridges! We kind of expect them to just be there and do their job, ad infinitum. They are built into the landscape, and we often take them and the routes they open up for granted.
The reality, as any civil engineer will tell you, is that bridges are living, breathing things that require endless maintenance and monitoring to keep them safe, standing, and functional. A great example of this is found in the US Department of Transportation, and its publicly accessible register of bridge health reports.
Stay Standing
The thing about bridges is that we rely on them. They serve as vital transport links in our communities, ferrying people to and from work and school, and acting as the very arteries of commerce as trucks and trains haul goods to and fro. When a bridge crossing has to close, either for maintenance or at end of life, this link is severed, often with serious economic and logistical impacts. For that reason, we tend to like to keep our bridges in service as long as possible. The result, of course, is that if pursuing this goal means that proper maintenance and repairs aren’t seen to, there is a risk of collapse—which often comes with worse consequences. Loss of life is common when bridges fail, and replacing a collapsed bridge is often much harder and more time consuming than handling things properly ahead of time.
In the United States, it’s a well known fact that the bridges are getting old. The average bridge is 44 years old, which is bumping up against the 50-year service limit many were originally built for. Being an average number, it’s indicative that many bridges are exceeding that figure significantly. Obviously, a bridge’s age isn’t a perfect proxy for its condition, but closer examinations indicate there’s definitely a problem. A 2024 report from the American Road & Transportation Builders Association noted that 36 percent of US bridges are in need of repair or replacement, a total of 221,800 spans. 42,067 spans were considered to be in “poor” condition, which in their total see 168.5 million motorists crossing them every day. It’s a particularly sobering figure as it highlights the size of the disaster possible if these structures are to fail.
InfoBridge quickly lets you sort through data by all kinds of different factors. If you’re looking for the worst bridges in town, it’s easy to flick through CAT10 – BRIDGE CONDITION to see which bridges as listed as Good, Fair, or Poor. Bridges are rated on the condition of their deck, superstructure, and substructure, and the lowest scoring section influences which bin the bridge lands in, as per federal code—specifically, 23 CFR 490 Subpart D. Credit: InfoBridge screenshot
You can drill down into the data yourself if you desire. Within the Department of Transport, the Federal Highway Administration maintains LTBP InfoBridge, a database of information on bridges all across the country. It was developed by the Long Term Bridge Performance program, because the goal of the project is to understand how these structures hold up and perform over the decades. The database is publicly accessible, and serves as a portal for all the available data and statistics on how US bridges are doing. It hopes to enable everyone from state and federal authorities, to university students, faculty, and other researchers, to dive into bridge data and visualize and understand it better.
Data available is from a wide number of sources, including the National Bridge Inventory and National Bridge Element datasets, as well as climatic data collected from NASA’s MERRA-2 database. There’s also construction and design data sourced by the LTBP program, along with non-destructive evaluations that have been carried out. Data from various other special projects is available too, such as from Federal Highway Administration projects investigating timber bridges, steel weathering, and the use of ultra-high performance concrete structures.
Just glancing at the Vincent Thomas bridge won’t tell you how the structure is doing. Credit: The Port of Authority, CC BY-SA 3.0
If you have a particular bridge of interest, it’s easy to get a quick break down of how it’s doing. For example, you might like to know about the Vincent Thomas Bridge, in Los Angeles, California: National Bridge Inventory number 53 1471. It links San Pedro with Terminal Island, and is a suspension bridge with a total length of 6,060 feet and a longest span of 1,500 feet. Built in 1963, we can see from the data alone that it’s now showing its age.
The bridge condition is listed as “Poor,” and if we dive deeper into the National Bridge Elements data, we can see why. The health indexes of the deck, substructure, and superstructure have all been trending down in recent years as the bridge’s age has increased, with a particular drop off from 2019 or so. In particular, the steel cables and girders on the bridge have been showing their age, and the concrete columns supporting the bridge have been similarly degrading. The deck, too, is in need of repair, with the California Department of Transport recently dedicating some $706 million to replace it ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games.
However, InfoBridge will let you drill down into detailed reports on the bridge conditions, down to a level which indicates which parts of the bridge are most in need of maintenance, repair, or replacement. Credit: Screenshot, InfoBridge
InfoBridge also offers condition forecasts for many bridges across the country. For example, the 24th Street Bridge over Rio Linda Creek is currently listed as being in “Good” condition. Current forecasts show that the deck and superstructure is expected to be in much poorer shape somewhere between 2035 and 2055, while the substructure is expected to hang on in good shape for a bit longer.
The Long Term Bridge Performance Program has developed a variety of models—base, survival, and machine-learning—to predict bridge condition over time. The aim is to guide maintenance efforts over time and allow for better planning. Credit: InfoBridge, screenshot
You might think that you’d have to query a government department and delve deep into some dusty records room to learn about the condition of your local bridges. Instead, thanks to the efforts of diligent civil servants, you can instead access all the rich inspection data you like from the comfort of your own web browser. It’s not just good for citizen oversight, either. It aids local authorities and bridge owners in making the right decisions, by putting the necessary data right at their fingertips.
It also creates a certain level of accountability—having the data available means there’s little room for anyone to make excuses that they were unaware of a bridge’s condition prior to something going wrong. Ultimately, it’s just one arm of a project that hopes to take US bridges safely long into the future.
Paramount has been one of the biggest names in the movie industry for a long time, and they have utilized that legacy to give us a strong streaming service with a pretty vast library. What I find so appealing about their platform is their catalog of movies, with hits from just about every era and genre ready to satisfy whatever craving I happen to have each week.
It's the final week of October, which means spooky season is coming to an end. There are plenty of horror movies to watch on Netflix, including Friday the 13th and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This week's list of movies heading to streaming is not made up entirely of horror movies, but there are some tense thrillers, including a wild documentary on Paramount+.
WHOOP plans to test whether wearable coaching can help improve blood sugar and blood pressure. See how its Abu Dhabi study could affect future health wearables.
October is slowly coming to an end, but Halloween is still a top priority for Netflix. The streamer has plenty of horror hits for spooky season, including The Black Phone and Fear Street. I don't mind watching something that can scare me, but I prefer to stream thrillers.
We're getting closer to Halloween by the day, and it is the perfect time for some content that will bring the thrills. While horror movies are great, some people prefer something a little more psychological, which is where the picks on this list come in. They might not feature the supernatural, but they will still haunt you long after you've switched off your TV.
What should you watch this weekend? If you're staying home to watch something on streaming, NBC has a sitcom about a newly married couple that might suit your interests. On Hulu, an intriguing mystery comedy premiered earlier this week and has already attracted attention.
Who's up for some brilliant documentaries? At the moment, there are a few fresh Netflix documentaries trending in the Top 10. One of those is Tyson, a limited series about one of the "baddest men on the planet," Mike Tyson. On the comedy side, Norm Macdonald's documentary is winning over viewers thanks to the late comedian's indelible humor.
While many undertake ESP32-based electronics projects for fun, because they find building rewarding, or to learn, saving money is another valid reason to DIY a solution. It could be argued your own time has a price too, but if you find the build enjoyable, then you’re probably not going to mind the time commitment.
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The issue is that the resolution — such as it is — of the display it pretty unforgiving for anything else. Namely, the “food” that your sake is after is naturally identical to one of its own segments, so it doesn’t take long before it’s all rather confusing visually. But in those brief opening moments, it actually works pretty well.
