For everything from family to computers…
Use the new Pi 3 to make a touchscreen photo booth that instantly uploads to Google Photos!
The post Create a Raspberry Pi Photo Booth for Your Next Party appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
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The cost of buying a home goes beyond the price of the house itself. Property taxes, for example, can add up, but the cost varies depending on where you live. Here are the cities where taxes are the highest.
A study from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy looked at property taxes in U.S. cities to find the highest and lowest tax rates. According to their methodology:
The report calculates property taxes for parcels with a range of property values in three sets of cities:
- The largest city in each state and the District of Columbia along with Aurora, Illinois and Buffalo, New York
- The largest fifty cities in the United States; and
- A rural municipality in each state.
Overall, they found that Bridgeport, CT had the highest tax rate at 3.88 percent. Honolulu had the lowest property tax rate at 0.30 percent.
There are, however, some important factors to consider that the study points out. For example, many of the cities with low property tax rates have higher local sales or income taxes, so they don’t rely as heavily on property taxes. They explain:
Cities with high local sales or income taxes do not need to raise as much revenue from the property tax, and thus have lower property tax rates on average. For example, this report shows that Bridgeport (CT) has the highest effective tax rate on a median valued home, while Birmingham (AL) has one of the lowest rates. However, in Bridgeport city residents pay no local sales or income taxes, whereas Birmingham residents pay both sales and income taxes to local governments.
Another important factor: property values. If houses are pricey enough, the city can get away with a lower tax rate and still raise a decent amount of revenue, since homes are expensive. Here are the cities with the highest and lowest rates, according to the study:
Highest Property Tax Rates
Lowest Property Tax Rates
Check out the full study at the link below, which includes more detail on other cities as well as explanations for why rates vary in each city.
50-State Property Tax Comparison Study (PDF) | Lincoln Institute via Forbes
Photo by liz west
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Reader Jon built this programmable outlet from an Arduino that can control your devices remotely, be programmed to do whatever you want, monitor temperatures with the included thermocouples, and much more—and he’s made it open hardware so anyone can get the parts and make one too.
The “Portlet,†as Jon calls it (a portmanteau of “programmable†and “outletâ€) can be programmed to do just about anything you like. Maybe you want it to automatically turn your devices on or off when you’re away from home so it looks like someone’s actually there, or maybe you want it to automatically shut off the power when your gadgets are charged. Maybe you want it to control a reflow oven and monitor the temperature within, then cut it off at a given temperature, or control your epic holiday light show. The sky’s the limit really, especially since the whole thing is powered by an Arduino.
Jon had initially launched the project on Kickstarter, but after a few years opted to make the project open to the world, and has a complete list of the parts you’ll need and the code you’ll need, along with documentation, at his web site (linked below.) If you want a fancy looking case like the one in the image above, you can purchase them from Jon, who’ll appreciate your contribution to the project. If you’d rather make your own, he even includes the files required to 3D print one.
In any event, hit the link below if you want to check out the project, or get everything you need to make one yourself.
Portlet | Mech Tech Lab
Thanks to Jon for sending in the tip!
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Microsoft’s pushy and occasionally misleading Windows 10 update process has had some tangible backlash. According to the Seattle Times, a small business owner from California has successfully sued Microsoft for $10,000 in "compensation for lost wages and the cost of a new computer" after an unwanted and unauthorized update allegedly left her primary work PC slow, crash-prone and unusable.
"I had never heard of Windows 10," Sausalito-based travel agent Teri Goldstein told the Seattle Times. "Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to update."
While Goldstein appears to be the first user to get an actual monetary award, Windows 7/8 users have been complaining about the update process for nearly as long as the new version has been available. Earlier this year, Microsoft changed the update from "optional" to "recommended" and, perhaps most egregiously, the company also switched the behavior of the ubiquitous red X button so that it actually accepted the upgrade rather than canceling it. For their part, Redmond denied any wrongdoing in the Goldstein case and has offered a new tutorial for disabling the update notifications, although there’s still a chance that doing nothing at all will result in an unwanted update that has already been scheduled without the user opting in.
For others who might be looking for a handout from Microsoft, or just some compensation for their upgrade headaches, it is unclear if the case could lead to more lawsuits. The Seattle Times also reports that Microsoft was planning to appeal the Goldstein ruling, but dropped the case to avoid even more court costs. So, it seems unlikely that the company would continue to put itself at risk of more litigation, even if it does have an ambitious goal of 1 billion Windows 10 users to reach. On the other hand, a lawsuit involving a similarly "optional" operating system update for PlayStation 3 consoles recently ended in a class action settlement and potentially millions of dollars in damages on Sony’s part. So, if anything, tech savvy lawyers could have a field day with this one.
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China is celebrating the successful launch of its Long March 7 rocket, a key component and backbone of its future space program. As Xinhua News explains, the craft is designed as the "main carrier" for the Chinese space program, capable of pushing 13.5 tons of gear towards the heavens. SpaceFlightNow reports that the rocket carried a miniature version of China’s forthcoming crew capsule, which is currently being tested. Other craft on the launch included an experimental satellite tasked with cleaning up space junk and a device to measure the Earth’s gravitational field.
As impressive as 13.5 tons may sound to us, China’s already looking to dwarf that record with its next rocket, the Long March 5. While Long March 7 will be used for regular trips beyond the sky, March 5 will be able to carry 25 tons of hardware. That’ll come in useful over the next few years, when the nation begins working on the 60-ton Tiangong-3 space station. Before that, Tiangong-2 will launch towards the end of this year, although that’ll be carried on the back of the older, less exciting Long March 2F. As for Tiangong-1, the station seems to have malfunctioned towards the end of March and has now, reportedly, "gone rogue."
Via: The Verge
Source: Xinhua News, SpaceFlightNow
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(Credit: NASA/Swift/Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University)
We can’t — yet — directly see black holes, making finding one of these elusive beasts hard, especially since a great majority of them are dormant. But researchers at the University of Maryland, NASA Goddard, and the University of Michigan recently caught one of these sleeping giants waking up to slurp on a big snack: a passing star.
Called Swift J1644+57, the black hole is about 3.8 billion light-years away at the center of a relatively quiet galaxy. The supermassive black hole was initially spotted in 2011 when a passing star woke the hungry giant up. The black hole, which is itself invisible, shredded the material of the star into an accretion disk as it feasted, giving researchers a window into its activity. The new study, published today in Nature, outlines a unique phenomenon just discerned from the event: so-called X-ray reverberation, in which the energy is seen bouncing around as it prepares to be eaten.
“The basic idea is that there are primary flashes of X-ray emission, and we see that directly but it also gets reflected off the walls of the accretion disk,†Erin Kara, lead author of the paper, says.
By analyzing these reverberations, astronomers are better able to discern the geometry of the black hole by analyzing the accretion disk during one of these “tidal disruption events.â€
Such events should be common, but they’re hard to spot. Most black hole regions emit energy in the X-ray spectrum, and to see X-rays, you need a space-based observatory like NASA’s Swift or the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton to catch a glimpse. Researchers in 2011 got a sort of “early warning†on the event and were able to monitor it for 200 days.
“We caught it fairly early on in its lifetime,†Kara says. “It was long enough that it could form an accretion disk around this normally dormant black hole.â€
The time delay in the emission lines gives a rough idea of not only what material is present, but what shape the accretion disk has assumed. Additional data on size is inferred through redshift and blueshift present. From there, the researchers build a more complete picture of not only the black hole, but its snack.
“In X-rays, we can’t image the innermost region around the black hole directly, so we really need to use these other techniques to infer what it must look like around the black hole,†Kara says.
The Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission has been NASA’s main workhorse in this effort. But in its 12 years in orbit, it’s only seen three tidal disruption events.
“It’s a very rare thing in the hard X-rays, and theory predicts that we should see more of them, but we are still waiting since 2011,†Kara says.
With a continuous eye in the sky viewing across the cosmos in X-ray, that could become more possible. Kara says that in the future, more and more powerful telescopes may be able to find a few optical signatures of a tidal disruption event too faint to otherwise capture. An all-sky monitor like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope may be able to catch a few such events, and a potential observatory called the Lobster Transient X-Ray Detector may find a few more if it becomes part of the International Space Station.
“We don’t know where these tidal disruption events are going to happen, so you need to look everywhere,†she says.
This post originally appeared on Astronomy.com.
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Opera has offered up a rebuttal to Microsoft’s claims that their Edge browse is your best bet for extending your laptop’s battery life. Shocker: Opera claims that their battery-saving mode is the true battery savior. Hey, sure, I’ll go with anything that lets me watch ten hours of Netflix in one sitting.
Edit Assist, Lifehacker.com
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