Hackaday Newsletter 0x0B

That Cloud Rant! [HACKADAY]( The Wright Stuff: First Powered Flight on Mars Is a Success [Read Article Now»]( Hack the Cloud! By [Elliot Williams]( The obvious rants against software or services "in the cloud" is that you don't own it, your data isn't on your own hard drive, or that, when the interwebs are down, you just can't get your work done. But the one that really grinds my gears is that, at least for many cloud services, you just can't play around with them. Why does that matter? Well, as a hacker type, of course, I like to fool around, but more deeply, I feel that this invitation to play around is what's going to grow up the next generation of hackers. Openness matters not just for now, but also for the future. Of course, it's unfair to pin all of this on the cloud. There are plenty of services with nice open APIs that let you play around with their systems as much as you want -- witness the abundance of amusing things you can do with Twitter or Twitch. Still, every day seems to bring another formerly-open API that gets bought up by some wealthy company and shut down. I built a nice "is it going to rain today" display out of a meter-long WS2812 strip and an ESP8266, but [Dark Sky API got bought up by Apple and is going dark]( soon (tee-hee!) leaving me thinking of how I'm going to get easy weather data in the next few months. Or take my e-mail annunciator. I wrote a little script that, when I have new mail that's work related or from my wife (read: important), it displays the subject line on a VFD that I have perched on my monitor. This works with Gmail, which I have to use for work, because they support IMAP so at least I can do cool things with the mail once it reaches my server. But can I do anything with Google Groups, which we use for the [Hackaday Tip Line]( Fat chance! So there's good "cloud" and there's bad "cloud". Good cloud is open cloud. Good cloud invites you to play, to innovate, and to come up with the right solutions for yourself. Good cloud gives you access to your data. Good cloud is hackable cloud. Let's see more of that. From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [Crew Dragon’s Short Hop Begins the Era of Valet Parking at the ISS]( By [Tom Nardi]( OK, everybody in the spaceship, it needs to autonomously move itself a few meters. [Read more »]( [ISO 8601: Ending the Date Wars and Confusing Everyone Equally]( By [Jenny List]( In a world where different countries write dates differently, only one way is best. [Read more »]( [BMW Pushing Hard For Solid-State Battery Tech; Plans Demo By 2025]( By [Lewin Day]( Solid-state batteries will improve on lithium-ion by charging faster and lasting longer. They'll be ideal for cars. [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast 115: AI is Bad at Linux Terminal, Puppeting Pico in Python, 3D Scanning Comes Up Short]( By [Hackaday Editors]( What happened last week on Hackaday? Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [This Pineapple Keyboard is the Bomb]( [A Useful Macro Pad For Microsoft Teams]( [DOOM on a Bootloader Is the Ultimate Cheat Code]( [Detergent DRM Defeated on Diminutive Dishwasher]( [Unmasking the Identity of an Unusual Nintendo DS]( [Hackaday]( NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA