wideNES - Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games

http://prilik.com/blog/wideNES

At the end of each frame, the CPU updates the PPU on what has changed. This involves setting new sprite positions, new level data, and —crucially for wideNES— new viewport offsets. Since wideNES runs in an emulator, it’s really easy to track the values written to the PPUSCROLL register, which means it’s incredibly easy to calculate how much of the screen has scrolled between any two frames!

Hmm, what would happen if instead of painting each new frame directly over the old frame, new frames are instead painted overlapping the previous frame, but offset by the current screen scroll? Well, over time, more and more of the level would be left on-screen, gradually building up a complete picture of the level!

How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

https://dejanseo.com.au/competitor-hack/

I spoofed the back button in Chrome and sent people to my version of search results and competitor websites where I recorded everything with Lucky Orange.

Meteor showers from space

https://www.meteorshowers.org/

An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html

Network analysis of Bob Ross data from Walt Hickey of 538

https://github.com/brianckeegan/BobRoss

counting bees on a rasp pi with a conv net

http://matpalm.com/blog/counting_bees/

How Ikea took over the world

http://fortune.com/ikea-world-domination/

One way Ikea researchers get around this is by taking a firsthand look themselves. The company frequently does home visits and—in a practice that blends research with reality TV—will even send an anthropologist to live in a volunteer’s abode. Ikea recently put up cameras in people’s homes in Stockholm, Milan, New York, and Shenzhen, China, to better understand how people use their sofas. What did they learn? “They do all kinds of things except sitting and watching TV,” Ydholm says. The Ikea sleuths found that in Shenzhen, most of the subjects sat on the floor using the sofas as a backrest. “I can tell you seriously we for sure have not designed our sofas according to people sitting on the floor and using a sofa like that,” says Ydholm.

Gaze and foot placement when walking over rough terrain

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8bzdr8/gaze_and_foot_placement_when_walking_over_rough/

Smart homes and vegetable peelers

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/1/4/smart-homes-and-vegetable-peelers

Many of the things that get a connection or become 'smart' in some way will seem silly to us, just as many things that got 'electrified' would seem silly to our grandparents - tell them that you have a button to adjust the mirrors on your car, or a machine to chop vegetables, and they'd think you were soft in the head, but that's how the deployment of the technology happened, and how it will happen again. The technology will be there, and will become very very cheap, so it will slide unnoticed into our lives. On the other hand, many things that people did think might get electrified did not, and many of the ideas that did work were not adopted in a uniform way. Most people in the UK have an electric kettle, but that's not true in the USA, and most people in Japan have a rice cooker, but this in turn isn't true in the UK. Anyone who's baked a few times has bought an electric whisk for $20, but not many people use electric carving knives.

The “hydrogen economy” may be a thing after all.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/2/16/16926950/hydrogen-fuel-technology-economy-hytech-storage

The first product, scheduled to debut in April, is the key to everything else.

It’s called Internal Combustion Assistance (ICA), a modification to internal combustion engines that enables them to substantially increase their fuel efficiency and reduce their air pollution. It does this by adding tiny amounts of gaseous hydrogen and oxygen to the fuel just before it is combusted in the engine’s cylinders. The HHO mix lends intensity to the combustion, allowing the fuel to burn more completely, generating more oomph and less pollution.

The ICA system can technically work on any internal combustion engine, but to begin with, HyTech is targeting the dirtiest engines with the fastest return on investment, namely diesel engines — in vehicles like trucks, delivery vans, buses, and forklifts, but also big, stationary diesel generators, which still provide backup (and even primary) power by the millions across the world.