02/14/2013 Weekly Tech Article

Olympic Ring Fails Spectacularly During Sochi Opening Ceremony

• Sochi has been fraught with problems in the days leading up to the Olympics, but no one issue has been quite so telling of Russia's hosting struggles as a malfunction at its opening ceremony that lead to an incomplete set of Olympics rings going up on display. While the ceremony was supposed to feature all five rings growing from small snowflakes into the Olympic logo's five intersecting circles, the top-right ring failed to expand alongside the others, leaving four circles beside what looked almost like an asterisk. Although that may have been a glaring mistake in the ceremony, the overall show was very well executed and quite impressive.
• http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/7/5390152/olympic-ring-malfunction-sochi-opening-ceremony

02/07/2013 Weekly Tech Article

Finally, A Super-Simple Modular Robotics Kit

• The robot of the popular imagination, whether it's R2D2 or Rosie, just works. But in reality, making a robot just work takes a lot of hard work. Many would-be roboticists give up when faced with a soldering iron, an Arduino board, and lines of code. The EZ-Robot kits make constructing and coding modular, so anyone can build a custom bot in 30 mins or less.
• Builders assemble their EZ-Robots physically and digitally. They attach motors and appendages to a controller board that contains a processor and a Wi-Fi radio. Alongside their creation, users configure their robot with the Wi-Fi. Advanced users can code their own robotic quirks and even download plans to 3-D print custom appendages for specific tasks. After all, who wouldn't like a personal snow shoveler in February?
• http://www.popsci.com/article/gadgets/finally-super-simple-modular-robotics-kit?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=9&con=finally-a-supersimple-modular-robotics-kit

My Blog Tour

Erick Peralta's Blog

1/02/2013 Weekly Tech Article

New Year's Eve 2013 marked with Google Doodle

• New Year's Eve 2013 featured in the new Google Doodle. 
• Google has marked the countdown to 2014 with a disco-themed Google Doodle on New Year's Eve. 
• The animation shows the digits marking up 2013 doing a halting jig on a stage under a glitter ball while the number 4 waits to take its place in the line-up.
• Clicking on the Doodle takes the user through to a page of results listing New Year's Eve festivities, news articles, and other results from around the world.
• A further link in the search homepage goes to Google's Zeitgeist 2013 interactive, giving highlights of the year in video, the top 100 searches, search trends, a 2013 gallery and a page of year-in-review lists ranging from celebrities to song lists, recipes, sports teams, and TV show.
• http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/31/new-years-eve-2013-celebrated-with-google-doodle

Do Now: 2013 Reflection/2014 Goals

                                                              2013 Reflection/2014 Goals

2013 was a good year for me because I had a lot of positive things happen to me. I practiced hard for the SAT and ended up getting a good score, 1600. My hard work for preparing for the SAT paid off. Also, I found out that I'm in the 15% of my graduating class, which is great. Also, I got accepted to four colleges so far: Bergen Community College, Montclair, Seton Hall, and Rutgers. My goals for 2014 is to get accepted to my top college TCNJ and continue doing well in school. Also, I hope I get a job because I really need one. 2013 was great, but 2014 will be better!

Social Bookmarking Project

Project Question

1. What's another way we can organize your computers? What about email? Your favorite websites? Your blog posts? RSS feeds?

• Another way we can organize our computers is by having several folders on the desktop, such as for pictures, documents, and videos. It will save us a lot of time to locate what we what when everything is put into a labeled folder.
• We can organize our email by also having individual labeled folders for different email types like school, college, and friends.
• Another way to organize our favorite websites is by adding them to our toolbar on our computers for instant access.
• We can organize our blog posts by categorizing them by assignment type, such as: do now, classwork, homework, and project.
• Another way to organize our RSS feeds is by adding them to our blog as side gadgets for easy access and the latest updates.

12/13/2013 Weekly Tech Article

A Toy Box That's Opened by a Kid's Fingerprint

• Four-year old Ewan Gibson loves toy cars. His dad, Grant, a Scottish Web developer, prefers electronics. Hoping to find common ground---and inspired by Apple's new finger-scanning iPhone---Grant built a biometric lockbox for his son's cars.
• He installed a sensor that scans fingers in the lid of the toy box. The data is sent to an Arduino microcontroller, which, when it recognizes one of Ewan's prints, unlocks the lid. Although Ewan is more interested in the cars than the box, it does fascinate him: As he says, his "fingers are magic."
• http://www.popsci.com/article/diy/toy-box-thats-opened-kids-fingerprint