Awesome Technology

The product of over 6,000 hours of research, writing, and drawing, Hungry Minds’ The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization covers many “incredible inventions and discoveries throughout human history.” The coffee table book contains 400 pages of text and hand-drawn Medieval-style illustrations to entertain and educate kids and adults alike.

As of 2023, 97% of new cars released have at least one touchscreen on their dashboard. In one of the most depressingly successful implementations of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” these counterintuitive interfaces were never made with customers in mind. Automakers knew that from day one. Morning Brew dives into this distracting trend.

The first running shoes made using On’s revolutionary LightSpray technology. LightSpray involves a robot arm that sprays a recyclable filament around a mold to create a seamless one-piece upper that is directly attached to the midsole, eliminating the need for stitching or glue. The entire shoe is fully assembled in just 3 minutes. Drops Fall/Winter 2024.

YouTuber bijru reminds us of the passage of time and just how influential the iPhone has been. Watch him take an entertaining look back at the crazy form factors of cellphones in the early to mid-2000s. There were lots of hinges, odd shapes, and janky attempts at features that we now take for granted, like gaming or simply web browsing.

Drones can be used to capture aerial images or deliver packages, but they can also be weaponized. Mark Rober explores some of the technology being developed to take down dangerous drones. Then, he teamed up with fellow makers to build backyard drone defense tech, including a mega-turret, an electrified stream of liquid, and a powerful vortex cannon.

The use of artificial intelligence to generate and manipulate images has had its share of controversy, but recent technological advancements are still amazing. Two Minute Papers explores four very different ways to use AI: making still images dance, compressing video conferencing, upscaling video resolution, and making software that can identify smells.

With ongoing improvements in artificial intelligence technology, it’s getting harder and harder to discern whether what you see was made by a human rather than a computer. ColdFusion explores a cynical but plausible theory that bots now control the majority of the internet and social media, and humans are now in the minority.

Designer, writer, and engineer Marcin Wichary created this extensive visual history of keyboards and the people who use them. The two-volume set is packed with 1300 photos and numerous stories about the amazing mechanical device that changed the world in so many ways.

Ready to advance your computer networking and security skills? This series of 14 eBooks from ExamsDigest includes exam objectives and practice questions for CompTIA, AWS, Cisco, Microsoft, and Google certifications. Save more than 80% on this deal in The Awesomer Shop.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the most expensive display you can buy, gradients of color in dark scenes often look like a blocky mess. Tom Scott offers a great explanation of the technological limitations that cause these issues, and the visual mechanisms that make them less noticeable in brighter scenes.

This control system helps improve the quality and consistency of indoor and greenhouse gardens. Its sensors track critical environmental data like temperature, humidity, PH, and more. It can use that data to trigger grow lights, pumps, valves, and other components, for a fully-automated grow operation.

One of the limitations of cheap desktop 3D printers is their small print bed size. But this nifty hack by Swaleh Owais incorporates a conveyor belt print surface that can eject parts and then move on to the next one without human intervention. By angling its print head, it can also print very long objects.

If you ever thought that blurring out text would protect sensitive information, you might be in trouble. This video from censiCLICK shows how readily-available technology can recover text that has been blurred using a mosaic filter. The moral of the story? Completely remove or block out anything you don’t want to be recovered.

Artificial intelligence tech is everywhere these days, informing everything from credit decisions to diagnosing diseases and keeping cars from crashing. TED-Ed’s Briana Brownell explains the three main kinds of machine learning technology, how they differ, and how little we really know about how AI works.

After multiple lockdowns in the UK, vlogger Tom Scott is starting to run out of ideas of things he can make videos about. So he turned to an artificial intelligence to see if it could come up with any. OpenAI’s GPT-3 tech came up with a mix of mundane, ridiculous, and surprisingly legitimate-sounding ideas, depending on its tuning.

Smart home gadgets can make controlling your home easier, from turning on lights when you walk in the door, to seeing who’s at the door from your phone, to keeping your place secure. Our friends at batteriesplus.com and Batteries Plus Bulbs stores offer an array of smart home tech, including these great products from Geeni.