Tag Archives: Retro

🏎 Try to Beat this RPM. We Dare You! ⚡️

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These engines turn at the whopping speed of 0.000001 m/s. Not only is the engine slow, the technology is old. The transistors that make the coquetry and the coils that make the engine revolve are the most retro data component of them all. Unfortunately we already claimed the retro badge, but would like to show you what we do with physical component and how we do small hacks to make things work.

Captain Mats working on why the motor is not revolving at sufficient speed for what we require. Look at that focus! He is a legende! Girls and boys, he is unfortunately taken 💔

Unfortunately we had to hack our solution in the end, even with stellar help from Marius and @bastards we could not get the engine revolving any faster enough for our needs. The voltage output and ossilating is stuck making it perform suboptimal. We think the motor or voltage output needs to be adjusted but lack the tools and time, so the hack we ended doing was to swap the Arduino with the laptop and running a virtual Arduino instead of the real deal. Simulating something easy with something complex to make stuff work. We feel this is a hack in the spirit of making up lost time.

Meme about using expensive power computers to perform mundane tasks meant for matchbox computers

Retro Badge

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10 years ago, the year is 2013. Barack Obama is president, Donald Trump is a reality TV star, no one has heard about Covid-19 or Microsoft 365, and jQuery 1.10.0 gets released to much fanfare! With so many improvements from the previous versions, this is clearly the future of web development and leaves heads spinning in excitement everywhere.  

Speaking of spinning heads… 

This little easter egg brings us back to a simpler time when we were allowed to enjoy the little things in web development. 

We have used the oldest (and stable) jQuery version available from Microsoft’s Ajax CDN (jQuery 1.10.0), and embedded it to the Power Page HTMLpage.  

A super simple function adds a class to div containing the profile picture on click, and CSS makes the image spin. Just like our heads. 

Smack my JSON up – and why size matters

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Power Automate loves talking to API’s. API’s love talking in JSON. Because why not, we’re in 2023 where curly braces are the equivalent of the human hug – just embrace it already, and grab what you need 3 levels deep. Dot, dot dot. Easy as a dot.

But what happens when you embrace too much? I mean, we’re in 2023 where size has grown (out of proportion) compared to the skinny 70’s. And we’re talking simplistic CSV files here in case your mind was wandering into the land of political correctness. Just saying.

Either way. If the body of JSON is too large, a tad over 0.5MB, Power Automate nullifies it, which prevents you from getting to the property you want. That’s quite the statement.

Fortunately JSON has a string body, and strings can be cut at the front and the back, scissor scissor, slice slice. Let’s strip the away the bloat, grab the good meat, and let JSON be JSON for the time being.

We’re willing to debate if string manipulation is a nasty hack, but this is what PirateGPT has to say about that: “Arrr, string manipulation be a nasty hack in 2023, as it be a shortcut that don’t stand the test of time. It be a quick fix, but be sure to find a more permanent solution before ye be walkin’ the plank!”

And there is no question it’s retro, or as PirateGPT says: “Arrr, ye scurvy dogs! String manipulation may be a tried and true technology, but it’s been outdone by more modern techniques like natural language processing and machine learning. So in 2023, it’s a bit of a retro technology.”

Sharing Trade with your Fellow Pirates: It’s a Non-Zero Sum Game

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Sometime we all maneuver ourselves into bad waters. A zero sum game occurs when you are in waters with an advisory and there are only two options: Either you win the fight, sinking them. Or they win the fight, sinking you. A non-zero sum game however occurs when you both can be victories: There is enough booty for the both of you, and you are able carrying each-other to victory despite adversary.

The crew of @in1 and @in2 crack their skulls together to figure out how this ancient tech called Raspberry Pi and Arduino works. It all runs on flash circuitry, Python, hopes and prayers: Most retro tech there is tech there is.

Team Captain Mats (left) of @in2 and first Mate Håvard (right) of @in1 sharing thoughts on why the Raspberry Pi is not doing what it is supposed to do
Team Captain Øyvind of @in1 is sharing how they set up their Raspberry Pi

A fruitful relationship

The story of Innovations A-team and their First Team was a story of the cut thought battle between two packs of pirates in pristine physical and psychological shape. However after their first love affair over the Raspberry Pi, Captain Øystein asked Swagger of Cloth Sebastian for his input on how badges work. They shared a long and fruitful discussion and are now great allies in this non-zero sum game that is the Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge

Sebastian (left) of the @in2 and Øystein (right) of the @in1 working together to figure out how the Community Champion badge works. They laugh and have fun while sharing theories. Working theory is that they need to cooperate and have fun.
@in2 has put up a backlog to track badges. If anyone needs a visual representation, feel free to have a look.

Kjøleskapet… Fridgitoid 9000.. Kjøkkenapparat eller din venn i hverdagen?

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Ideen om verdens beste kjøleskap ble unnfanget få dager før ACDC gikk av stabelen, men vi hadde et kjempeproblem… Vi manglet jo et faktisk kjøleskap å «smartifisere». Heldigvis sitter teammedlemmene på enorme kunnskaper innen papp- og gaffateipkonstruksjon. Med en 3D-printer, semi-god kjennskap til 3D modellering en livlig fantasi klarte vi å lappe sammen en pappeske som absolutt minner om ekte vare.

Her er en video som viser vår fantastiske kjøleskapslogo som spinner rundt og indikerer at det er liv. Når døren åpnes trigges vår knappesensor som gjør at kamera tar bilde.
Dette oppsettet hadde ikke vært mulig uten den trofaste Arduinoen, som bygger på det eldgamle programmeringsspråket C som først brukt i 1972. Some things never change, og hvorfor bytte ut noe som fungerer?

Bildet sendes til Azure Cognitive services. Responsen kan du se på skjermen i videoen. Helt klart og tydelig en appelsin der altså. Deretter sendes dette til Power Automate for å oppdatere innholdet i ingredients-tabellen som beskriver hva som finnes i kjøleskapet. Orange = True!

Her har vi et flott B2C-produkt som forenkler hverdagen til alle mennesker og skillpadder med middagskvaler! Det beste av alt, latterlig lave produksjonskostnader! Hvis ikke det er Business Value så vet ikke jeg 😉

Update after request from judges, and new badge claim!

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Since we didn’t show enoug last time when trying to clam the Retro badge, here we go again! Here we will show how we used paint to create the sause for the Pizza in the Head 2 Head challenge. But, paint wasn’t enoug, so we had to use Power Point as well. Had to make the transparent background in Power Point, as it’s not possible in Paint. We think that all graphic designers would either shoot themself or turn around in their grave if they knew we did this to make a red round object with a transparent background. So, if this is not a dirty hack, then how would you explain why not to the graphic designer that’s about to …… Yeah, you know…

Paint is so 1990, or is it?

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Before we came to ACDC, who would have thought we ever would create a pizza creation app? But, here we go! Simplicity and speed was the important thing in order to be the first team to solve this task. The most timeconsuming task was to get hold of some images for the solution. And what better way of creating pizza sause than using the good and old bucket in MS Paint? Just close youre eyes, think about all the hours you spent playing around in Paint to create something beautiful you printed and gave to your sweetheart in the 5th grade! Oh, the memories!