Archive for March 2018

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/02/first-sustainable-lego-pieces-to-go-on-sale The first Lego pieces made from plant-based plastic sourced go on sale this year, the company has announced. Production has begun on a range of Lego botanical elements or pieces such as leaves, bushes and trees, made entirely from polyethylene (made with ethanol extracted from sugar cane material). They will start appearing in Lego →

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/ski-robot-challenge The Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, ended late last month with the robotic ski competition. An admittedly hilarious video of the event went around last week. →

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/27/rating-the-big-smartphone-makers-at-mwc-2018/ This article gives good overview of smart phone maker announcements made by biggest manufacturers. Based of this it seems that the years of big mobile innovations are over. Many years of business growth has slowed as people keep using their phones for longer time. And the announcements don’t seem to be able to change →

https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/benchtalk/4460355/In-praise-of-the-common-base–Bench-quickie The common-base configuration is so little used, it doesn’t even register on many engineers’ radar. It is hard tp really learn and internalize a circuit until I have a need for it, and have done at least some small hands-on activity with it. This article describes how to test this type of circuit. →

This posting is here to collect security alert news in March 2018. I post links to security vulnerability news to comments of this article.   →

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/teaching-an-artificial-intelligence-to-operate-a-telecommunications-network-isnt-possibleyet AI, which telecos have already leveraged in some situations, might be able to help solve some of communications service providers’ (CSPs) problems. But CSPs have been slow to adopt artificial intelligence, because the initial problems AI was developed to address didn’t really affect them. “There’s a lot of opportunity to use AI in the →

https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/5g-is-in-danger-of-being-oversold It seems that 5G has become a technology savior. Proponents tout the poorly defined wireless technology as the path to virtual reality, telemedicine, and self-⁠driving cars. But 5G is a buzzword unleashed by marketing departments. In reality, 5G is a term that telecommunications investors and executives sling around. Millimeter-wave spectrum is freely available for →