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Keep your phone firmly in hand and add some personality with these comfortable, durable, and nifty smartphone grips.

The Battery-Free Smart Card Revolution: A Hands-On Review of NFC Energy-Harvesting MCU PCBs In professional networking, first impressions are everything. But in a landscape crowded with QR codes and cheap plastic tap-to-share cards, how does a high-tier developer, cybersecurity expert, or tech founder stand out? Enter the NFC Energy-Harvesting MCU PCB Business Card . It’s not just a card; it's a fully functional, battery-free embedded system packed inside a 1.6mm-thick piece of FR-4 fiberglass. In this review, we’ll dive deep into the tech behind passive RF power harvesting, explore the hardware stack making this possible, and evaluate whether building (or selling) these high-tech novelties is worth your time. What is an NFC Energy-Harvesting MCU PCB? At its core, this device is a printed circuit board (PCB) styled to the dimensions of a standard business card. However, unlike passive NFC tags that simply store a URL, this card integrates an onboard Microcontroller Unit (MCU)—such as the ultra-cheap WCH CH552 or Microchip ATTiny85 —and an array of LEDs or an e-paper display. The real engineering marvel? It has no battery. +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | [ NFC Coil Antenna ] -> (Harvests 13.56 MHz RF Field) | | | | | v | | [ Schottky Rectifier Bridge ] | | | | | v | | [ Voltage Regulator ] | | | | | v | | [ Ultra-Low Power MCU ] | | / \ | | v v | | [ Status LEDs ] [ Dynamic NFC payload ] | +-------------------------------------------------------------+ When tapped against an NFC-enabled smartphone, the phone's transmitter emits a magnetic field at 13.56 MHz . The trace antenna etched directly into the outer edges of the PCB acts as an inductor, harvesting this RF energy and converting it into AC electricity. This current is rectified to DC, regulated to a stable 3.3V, and powers up the MCU to execute its onboard program instantly. The Tech Stack: Under the Hood To truly appreciate these cards, we have to look at the components that m

I built it because something I loved disappeared. Five years later it has a handful of users, one paying customer, and it taught me more than any tutorial. In 2017 I was preparing for IELTS, and somebody gave me the advice everyone gives: watch films with subtitles. That advice sent me looking for a specific kind of tool. Not a streaming service — a search engine for phrases. Type a sentence, and see it spoken, in context, in whatever film happened to contain it. I found one. An Estonian site, judging by the .ee domain, whose name I have completely forgotten. It did not host anything. It collected embedded players from video hosts elsewhere and made them searchable. That distinction mattered technically and it mattered legally, and at the time I did not think much about either — I just thought it was clever. Then it closed. No announcement, no explanation. I looked for an alternative for years and never found one. In 2021 I decided to build my own. The name I asked a friend, because naming things is not my strength. His logic was that the site is light. It stores nothing itself — no video files, no uploads, no gigabytes sitting on a disk. It holds pointers to things that live elsewhere, the way a floppy disk holds very little and is proud of it. VideoFloppy. It stuck. What it actually is A place to save, organise, and share videos that already exist on the internet. You bookmark a video from YouTube or another host, put it into an album, and share it or keep it. You can follow other users. The content today is mostly YouTube trailers, music videos, and whatever people have collected — my own albums are largely seventies and eighties disco, and an unreasonable amount of Modern Talking. Nothing is uploaded to my server. Every video plays from the host it already lives on, which means their CDN carries the bandwidth and my VPS stays cheap and idle. That was a deliberate architectural choice, and it is the single reason the project has survived five years without costin

Experience the oddly satisfying joy of labeling bins, drawers, and more with the best Bluetooth and traditional label makers.

Several Hollywood celebs are ditching the massive eight-figure checks and exotic movie sets for a rising format: microdramas.

Grand Theft Auto VI is nigh. Here’s what the developer revealed about its highly anticipated game.

You’re hunched over your desk and phone for hours. I rounded up gadgets, a DIY trick, and even some yoga advice to help you straighten up.

Let us help you choose the right Pixel phone. Plus, check out our Pixel accessory recommendations and smart software tricks to try.

TL;DR We're building a caption evaluation harness that scores a WebVTT file on four axes instead of one: word error rate under a fixed normalizer, missed entity rate on domain terms, median cue timing offset, and reading rate in characters per second. Python 3.12, jiwer , whisper_normalizer , webvtt-py . Run it on every model or vendor change. A caption file can score 96% accurate and still be unusable. WER counts substitutions, insertions and deletions and weighs each one the same, so "fifteen milligrams" becoming "fifty milligrams" costs exactly as much as "the" becoming "a". It also throws away every timestamp before it starts, which means synchronization and readability are invisible to it. Let's measure the other three things. 0. Setup 🛠️ python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate pip install jiwer whisper_normalizer webvtt-py $ pip list | grep -Ei 'jiwer|whisper|webvtt' jiwer <your version> webvtt-py <your version> whisper-normalizer <your version> Pin whatever you install, and pin it in CI. The APIs below move between majors, which is exactly why the next tip exists. 💡 Tip: jiwer.compute_measures() is gone in recent versions. It is jiwer.process_words() now, and it returns a WordOutput dataclass. Most blog posts you will find still use the old name. 1. Parse the VTT into text plus timings # captions.py from dataclasses import dataclass import webvtt @dataclass class Cue : start : float end : float text : str @property def duration ( self ) -> float : return self . end - self . start @property def lines ( self ) -> list [ str ]: return self . text . split ( " \n " ) @property def flat ( self ) -> str : return " " . join ( l . strip () for l in self . lines ) @property def chars_per_second ( self ) -> float : return len ( self . flat ) / self . duration if self . duration > 0 else float ( " inf " ) def _to_seconds ( ts : str ) -> float : h , m , s = ts . split ( " : " ) return int ( h ) * 3600 + int ( m ) * 60 + float ( s ) def load_vtt ( path : str ) -

TL;DR -c copy can only cut on keyframes, so your 12.4s trim starts wherever the last keyframe was. We'll build a smart-trim script that probes keyframe positions with ffprobe , re-encodes only the head and tail fragments, stream copies everything between them, and concatenates the three. Frame accurate output, encoding cost proportional to two GOPs instead of the whole file. Tested with FFmpeg 9.0 "Lei" (released 2026-08-04) and Node 22.x. The JS is ESM, so put "type": "module" in your package.json before running any of it. Everything here also works on FFmpeg 7.x and 8.x; nothing we use is new. The problem, in two commands 🎬 # fast, and wrong ffmpeg -ss 12.4 -i input.mp4 -t 20 -c copy fast.mp4 ffprobe -v error -show_entries format = start_time,duration -of default = nw = 1 fast.mp4 # start_time=0.000000 # duration=20.388000 <- we asked for 20, starting at 12.4 The clip is long by the distance from our requested start back to the previous keyframe, and every frame in it is shifted earlier than the user asked for. Stream copy moves compressed packets without decoding them. Most frames in a compressed stream only describe the difference from their neighbors, so the only place you can start is a keyframe. FFmpeg snaps back to the nearest preceding one, and your clip starts early. # accurate, and slow on a long source ffmpeg -ss 12.4 -i input.mp4 -t 20 -c :v libx264 -crf 20 -c :a aac slow.mp4 We want the accuracy of the second and roughly the cost of the first. 1. Look at your keyframes first Before writing any code, find out how bad the problem is for your content: ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 \ -show_entries packet = pts_time,flags \ -of csv = print_section = 0 input.mp4 | grep 'K' | head -20 0.000000,K__ 2.002000,K__ 4.004000,K__ 6.006000,K__ Two second GOPs here, so worst-case error is about two seconds. Screen recorders and some camera output emit keyframes on scene change only, and there the gaps can be 30 seconds or more. That distribution is the real spe

AI Dev Weekly is a Thursday series where I cover the week's most important AI developer news, with my...

The site, called Stud or Dud, helps daters dig up dirt on potential paramours. It’s fueled by the same public data as PeopleFinders.com—and comes with many of the same concerns.

MBMC IdeaX 2026 is a national technology hackathon organized by Madan Bhandari Memorial College in Kathmandu, Nepal. Registration opened on 28th Shrawan 2083 (13th Aug) and closes on 16th Bhadra (1st Sept). The Online Round runs from 21st–28th Bhadra (6th–13th Sept), followed by the Final On-Site Hackathon Event from 16th–18th Ashoj (2nd–4th Oct). Participants will develop innovative technology solutions across five problem tracks: Climate Change, Resilience & Sustainability; Tourism; E-Governance & Smart Public Services; Smart Urban Transport & Road Safety; and FinTech & Digital Financial Innovation. Visit: https://ideax.mbmc.edu.np/ for more details and registration.

Variant Multiplier already let an editor swap one section of a winning ad and keep the rest. The next request from a real production job — replacing product SL-603 with SL-808, a different hearing-aid SKU, across an entire finished ad — was a different shape of problem. It's not "change one section," it's "change every mention of the product, everywhere it appears, while keeping literally everything else the same." Two direct quotes from the editor drove the whole five-PR arc: the transcript editing was too rigid for word-by-word changes, and separately, "the music, voice, etc. should retain the same, we should keep the quality the same, and not make it do a lot of changes." If a re-render can degrade something the editor explicitly asked to keep untouched, the render path is wrong for the job — no matter how good the model is. The cheap fix first: let editors actually edit PR #67 shipped before any product-swap work started, because it was the cheap, high-value half of the same feedback: "I am just able to select word by word here but I am not really able to change the whole sentence a lot easier," and separately, "I'm able to double click on these words and then just type it in." Both were UI gaps in the transcript editor, not pipeline gaps — selecting by sentence or scene instead of only by word, and retyping a line verbatim instead of only substituting individual words. Shipping this first, standalone, meant the harder product-swap work that followed didn't also have to carry an unrelated UX fix in its diff. A product catalog the tool never had PR #69, stacked directly on top of the transcript work, is pure groundwork with no user-visible feature of its own: a product catalog, because Variant Multiplier had no concept of "a product" at all before this. The editor's own framing made the requirement explicit: "have a product selection right here, for Pro Bluetooth, for [the other SKU], and maybe other tons of products" going forward. The catalog data itself is mai

On the AI video ad platform I work on, every scene goes through the same painful loop: write a prompt, send it to an AI video model provider, wait two minutes, open the result, squint at the frame, and decide what went wrong. Camera too wide. Product missing from the hero shot. Color palette drifted warm when the brand brief says cool neutrals. Avatar looks like a different person than scene three. That loop was manual, slow, and expensive. Each regeneration burns GPU credits. Operators were becoming prompt engineers by accident — and still missing subtle failures until stitch time, when fixing scene four means re-rendering everything downstream. The insight behind vision-in-the-loop prompt authoring is simple: the model that wrote the prompt can also look at its own output and rewrite the prompt with surgical fixes. Not a full replan — a per-scene correction grounded in the actual generated frame, not the operator's memory of what they hoped would appear. The manual loop we were trying to kill Before this work shipped, the swipe iteration flow looked like this: Plan — Claude generates a scene-by-scene script with visual prompts Generate — each scene renders independently through an AI video model provider Review — operator opens the portal, compares frames to the reference ad Rewrite — operator edits prompts in a text field, often guessing at what the model misread Regenerate — repeat until acceptable or budget exhausted Steps three and four are where throughput dies. An experienced operator can spot "product not visible" in three seconds, but translating that into prompt language — "medium close-up, product centered in lower third, shallow depth of field" — takes another minute per scene. Multiply by twelve scenes and three swipe iterations, and a single ad creative consumes an hour of human attention that should be spent on brand strategy, not frame inspection. The generated frame is ground truth. The original prompt is a hypothesis. Vision-in-the-loop closes the

Nowadays most social and pen‑pal apps are built around speed. Swipe left, swipe right, quick short messages, endless notifications. Platforms reward fast replies and surface‑level first impressions. We can chat with dozens of people every day, yet many of us still feel lonely. Connections are easy to start, but rarely grow deep. Even some existing pen‑pal apps gradually move toward swipe‑driven matching, focusing heavily on profile pictures instead of real thoughts. I wanted something different. What if we slow everything down? What if friendship starts from long, thoughtful letters rather than instant small‑talk? That is the original idea behind SlowInk . I am a solo indie developer building this application with Flutter. My goal was not to make another popular social product. I just wanted to solve a pain I felt myself: missing genuine, low‑pressure cross‑cultural communication. During development, I made several intentional product trade‑offs: No swipe matching mechanism. You will not judge people within one second by just looking at avatars. No real‑time instant chat. Communication happens through complete letters. You take your time writing, and others take their time replying. Reduce noisy notifications. There is no pressure to reply immediately. Focus on long‑form writing, for language exchange and sincere pen‑pal friendship. These choices brought technical challenges. Building a letter‑first social system is quite different from building typical instant‑messaging software. I spent a lot of time thinking about user privacy, spam prevention, and how to keep the atmosphere gentle for global users. Many features got cut in order to keep the core idea intact. SlowInk is still an early‑stage project. It is far from perfect. There are bugs to fix and features to polish. As a side‑project developer without large‑team support, every improvement moves forward little by little. If you feel tired of fast‑paced swipe‑based social media, or you enjoy writing and receiving

Uber is updating its teen account feature to allow parents to use the selfie cameras on Uber drivers' phones to check in on their teenage children during ridehail trips. Since first launching teen accounts in 2023, Uber has touted the myriad ways parents can keep tabs on their children, from PIN verification to live GPS […]

Looking to better protect your Kindle or add a little personality to your favorite e-reader? From cases and covers to page turners and even charms, this is the guide for you.

Home theater projectors are getting better and better, and have quickly become my favorite way to enjoy movies.

These WIRED-tested dual-purpose air purifiers also function as heaters, fans, art pieces, and more, offering the best of both worlds.