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The Database Powering America’s Hospitals May Not be What You Expect

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Ever heard of MUMPS? Both programming language and database, it was developed in the 1960s for the Massachusetts General Hospital. The goal was to streamline the increasingly enormous timesink that information and records management had become, a problem that was certain to grow unless something was done. Far from being some historical footnote, MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) grew to be used by a wide variety of healthcare facilities and still runs today. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re in luck because [Asianometry] has a documentary video that’ll tell you everything. MUMPS had rough beginnings but ultimately found widespread support and use that continues to this day. As a programming language, MUMPS (also known simply as “M”) has the unusual feature of very tight integration with the database end of things. That makes sense in light of the fact that it was created to streamline the gathering, processing, and updating of medical data in ...
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Ride On with FOSS and GoldenCheetah

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If you exclude certain companies like Peloton, the world of cycling technology is surprisingly open. It’s not perfect by any means, but there are enough open or open-ish standards for many different pieces of technology from different brands to interoperate with each other, from sensors and bike computers and even indoor trainers to some extent. This has also made it possible for open source software to exist in this realm as well, and the GoldenCheetah project has jumped in for all of us who value FOSS and also like to ride various bicycles from time to time . GoldenCheetah focuses on gathering data from power meters, allowing cyclists to record their rides and save them in order to keep track of their training performance over time. It works well with sensors that use the ANT+ protocol, and once it has that data it can provide advanced analytics such as power curves, critical power modeling, and detailed charts for power, heart rate, and cadence. It can display and record live indo...
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Franken-engine Plays Its Own Swan Song at 15k RPM

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Back during WWII, Chrysler bodged five inline-6 engines together to create the powerful A57 multibank tank engine. [Maisteer] has some high-revving inline-4 motorcycle engines he’s trying to put together too, but unlike 1940s Chrysler, he also has a trombone… and a lot more RPMs to deal with. The Chrysler flatheads were revving at a few thousand RPM– their redline was almost certainly in the three-thousand range. [Maisteer] is working at 15,000 RPM, which is where the real challenge of this build lies: the trombone in the image is just for fun. He wanted to use a heavy chain to link the crankshafts, but at that rotational speed, a heavy chain becomes really heavy — or at least, it feels a force many times its weight due to centrifugal force. The lietmotief of this video is a quote by an automotive engineer to the effect that chains don’t work over 10,000 RPM. That leads to a few problems for the intrepid “not an engineer” that take most of the video to deal with and ultimately doom ...
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FLOSS Weekly Episode 857: SOCification

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This week Jonathan chats with Konstantinos Margaritis about SIMD programming. Why do these wide data instructions matter? What’s the state of Hyperscan, the project from Intel to power regex with SIMD? And what is Konstantinos’ connection to ARM’s SIMD approach? Watch to find out! VectorCamp: https://vectorcamp.gr SIMD Info: https://simd.info SIMD AI: https://simd.ai VSCode plugin: https://code.simd.info Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel ? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here . Direct Download in DRM-free MP3. If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode . Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast: Spotify RSS Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/1ugOY5A
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Retro Style VFO Has Single-Digit Parts Count

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Not every project has to be complicated– reinventing the wheel has its place, but sometimes you find a module or two that does exactly what you want, and the project is more than halfway done. That the kind of project [mircemk]’s Simple Retro Style VFO is — it’s a variable frequency oscillator for HAM and other use, built with just a couple of modules. Strictly speaking, this is all you need for the project. The modules in question are the SI5351 Clock Generator module, which is a handy bit of kit with its own crystal reference and PLL to generate frequencies up to 150 MHz, and the Elecrow CrowPanel 1.28inch-HMI ESP32 Rotary Display. The ESP32 in the CrowPanel controls the SI5351 module via I2C; control is via the rest of the CrowPanel module. This Rotary Display is a circular touchscreen surrounded by a rotary display, so [mircmk] has all the inputs he needs to control the VFO. To round out the parts count, he adds an appropriate connector, plus a power switch, red LED and a li...
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LoRa Repeater Lasts 5 Years on PVC Pipe and D Cells

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Sometimes it makes sense to go with plain old batteries and off-the-shelf PVC pipe. That’s the thinking behind [Bertrand Selva]’s clever LoRaTube project. PVC pipe houses a self-contained LoRa repeater, complete with a big stack of D-size alkaline cells. LoRa is a fantastic solution for long-range and low-power wireless communication (and popular, judging by the number of projects built around it ) and LoRaTube provides an autonomous repeater, contained entirely in a length of PVC pipe. Out the top comes the antenna and inside is all the necessary hardware, along with a stack of good old D-sized alkaline cells feeding a supercap-buffered power supply of his own design. It’s weatherproof, inexpensive, self-contained, and thanks to extremely low standby current should last a good five years by [Bertrand]’s reckoning. One can make a quick LoRa repeater in about an hour but while the core hardware can be inexpensive, supporting electronics and components (not to mention enclosure) ...
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Retrotechtacular: Learning the Slide Rule the New Old Fashioned Way

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Learning something on YouTube seems kind of modern. But if you are watching a 1957 instructional film about slide rules, it also seems old-fashioned. But Encyclopædia Britannica has a complete 30-minute training film , which, what it lacks in glitz, it makes up for in mathematical rigor. We appreciated that it started out talking about numbers and significant figures instead of jumping right into the slide rule. One thing about the slide rule is that you have to sort of understand roughly what the answer is. So, on a rule, 2×3, 20×30, 20×3, and 0.2×300 are all the same operation. You don’t actually get to the slide rule part for about seven minutes, but it is a good idea to watch the introductory part. The lecturer, [Dr. Havery E. White] shows a fifty-cent plastic rule and some larger ones, including a classroom demonstration model. We were a bit surprised that the prestigious Britannica wouldn’t have a bit better production values, but it is clear. Perhaps we are just spoiled by mo...
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