watson Teaching Watson to See My Garage After a long day of work, I like to head out to my garage and tinker, binge the latest series, listen to a podcast, or settle in with a book. If the weather
events Index Conference It has been a number of years since I have been involved in running a conference. When a chance to chair a track around future technology at Index, I jumped at the opportunity.
ocr OCR with Tesseract.JS I recently ran across a DataTurks blog post that did a high-level comparison of the OCR (optical character recognition) APIs offered by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. At various points throughout the article, you
watson LightBlue Bean to IBM Cloud The LightBlue Bean, by Punch Through, is one of my favorite IoT development platforms. The Bean has many parts, including an iOS application called the LightBlue Explorer, that lets you view and control
blockchain Event Notifications from Blockchain As a ledger, among the core functionality of blockchain is to store data. Having that data encrypted, with an audit trail, distributed across all peers in the network, with consensus among nodes, is
developer Developer Advocates and Content Congratulations! Your first presentation as a Developer Advocate lay just ahead. You have put in the hours to build a really cool demonstration. It is a masterpiece of elegant code. Now comes the
watson Slap Robin with the ZX Gesture Sensor Every now and again, I run across a sensor that just sounds like fun. Such is the case when I read about the ZX Gesture Sensor from Sparkfun and XYZ Interactive. Put it
swift HTTP Requests from Server-Side Swift As with any server environment, there are numerous (countless?) ways to make an HTTP request from a server-side Swift project. Most frameworks have their preferred approach. When it comes to Kitura, an approach
openwhisk Async OpenWhisk Web Action with CORS Apache OpenWhisk is a serverless (functions as a service) cloud platform, originated at IBM. It has broad language support, robust tooling, and fine-grained consumption (saves money). As a champion of the Web, here
developer Developer Advocates and Ideas Over the past decade, I have submitted abstracts to countless conferences, and been accepted at hundreds of events around a good portion of the planet. I do not say that out of ego,
watson Watson Conversation System Entities If you are building a chatbot, then Watson offers a product called Conversation. If you are wanting to get keywords from a body of text, Watson offers Natural Language Understanding. Sometimes however you
web Preflight Image Hashing Sometime earlier this year, I became enamored with image hashing. The idea is to read an image, perform various maths on the RGB color model, and output a unique string. Effectively, an image
particle Particle and Google Maps Integration At Google IO 2017 just a few weeks ago, Particle announced an integration with Google Maps. This integration allowed you to get the location of a Photon without the need for a GPS.
machine Face Detection with Tracking.JS Tracking.JS is a JavaScript library that brings a few machine vision algorithms, and a splash of related utilities, to the browser. The web site has live examples with links to the source
web Animated File Upload Button Among the countless ways to perform a file upload from an web page, this will likely be nothing new. Progress bars are also nothing new. However, when I ran across a post from
watson Content Keywords with Watson and Python I am always impressed by Python when I have to use it. The community always has great content, and the surface coverage of the language is immense. This allows you to do a
blockchain Blockchain Vocabulary Blockchain has gained a lot of attention this year. That is great! It is a fine solution for many problems. If you are a developer however, being asked to make since of what
web Web Bluetooth Bean Bluetooth has been around for a while now, but it has always been a feature for native applications. The Web Bluetooth specification has been brewing for a while, lived under a flag for
tessel Tessel Barcode Scanner: Software In my previous post, I show how you can connect a barcode scanner to a USB port on the Tessel, and read the scanned values. While that is interesting, what is more interesting
tessel Tessel Barcode Scanner: Hardware In addition to the two module ports on the Tessel, there are also two USB ports. USB, while big and bulky in many IoT projects, can provide a useful access point to hardware.
tessel Tessel I2C Climate The Tessel is expandable in several ways. One of those ways is pre-built modules. And one of those modules is called the "climate" module. This is effectively the Silicon Labs Si7020
tessel Custom Tessel Module Not too long ago now, I presented at Windy City Things 2016 in Chicago. Among the IoT boards I showed there was the Tessel. I have written about the Tessel before, and how
tessel Tessel on Watson IoT Do you know JavaScript? Do you like IoT? Lean towards open standards? Then the Tessel should be right up your alley! Tessel is a hardware development platform. It has both Ethernet and 802.
developer Measuring Developer Relations If you are in a developer relations organization, this question will eventually come up. It has likely already come up when the team was first created. And it is a tricky to answer.
evangelism Evangelist, Advocate, Community I have been directly involved in developer relations for almost a decade. Indirectly, for about another five years on top of that. When I first started, there was only the term "evangelist&