Build a Pi-Powered Amazon Echo, Enjoy Wearable Devices, and Find Meaning in Your Work

If you’ve got a Raspberry Pi, you’ve got the makings of an Amazon Echo, you’ll discover why Fios has gone from Verizon’s priority to fighting, change your brain chemistry with gadgets, and more.

Welcome to Lifehacker’s Monday Brain Buffet , a new series where we collect interesting, informative and thought-provoking podcasts, interviews, articles and other media that will teach you new things, inspire you and hopefully start your week with the right way. sole. Let’s start.

Build Your Own Amazon Echo with Raspberry Pi and More

Organized by Patrick Norton and Shannon Morse, TekThing is already one of my favorite weekly shows / podcasts, but this week got me excited because they discuss building your own DIY Echo with a Raspberry Pi , for which Amazon only released official instructions for a while ago. … It’s manually activated, so it’s not exactly an echo, but it’s not bad for the money, especially if you already have a Pi. They haven’t gotten the chance to put it on show, but it’s a good reminder that you can do it if you want to give it a try and see what Echo can do for you .

The full show is above, and it also covers the tech news of the week, the climax of Apple’s battle against the FBI (for now, anyway), and more. Watch, subscribe and support their shows because they are great people doing great work. [ viaTekThing ]

Introduction to Wearable Devices

In this week’s Note to Self episode, host Manush Zomorodi boldly pinned Thync , a transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) device designed to help you focus when you need to, relax when you need to, and really just use an external device. that helps bring your brain into the mental state you want to be in. (Full disclosure: some time ago Manush honored us with an interview and it was an honor for me to be on her show as well ).

Suffice it to say that the experiment passed … well … Manush says things have gotten a little weird. It’s definitely an accurate estimate, but wow, it was amazing to listen to. Click Play above or click here to check it out on the Notes to Myself main page. [ via Note to Myself – WNYC ]

J. Kenji Lopez Alt’s Simple Tips Anyone Can Do To Improve Their Cooking

On Quora , the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science , a new book and column on Serious Eats (and a Lifehacker friend who looked into the How I Work column and helped us with great cooking features ) offers some simple tips to help anyone home chef – whether you consider yourself a gourmet or just want to prepare a delicious meal on your own. Some of my favorites? Buy yourself a good pepper grinder and salt shaker and place them, for example, next to the stove. Buy yourself a good cutting board. Stop buying kitchen gadgets and think about what you do most in the kitchen.

He also speaks of our favorite affordable, knife , line Victorinox Forschner , but if it came from someone else besides him, I would not have it done . It offers an update that looks pretty nice and I’ll probably try it out and report it very soon. [ via Quora ]

How to find meaning and purpose in your work, no matter what you do

It is very likely that you are reading this at work. Monday, probably wanting to make your week look better than it actually did, or maybe you were somewhere else entirely. I can’t fully help you with this – I’m in the same boat after all – but I can help you find some meaning and maybe a little more personal satisfaction – in the work you do.

In this episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, host Shankar Vedantam talks to Yale University psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski about the research she has done on people who love their jobs and people who hate them, people who are happy with their jobs, and people who just deal with it. in order to survive, all from a job that you usually don’t find particularly outstanding – cleaning a hospital.

She explains that no matter what you do, whether you are an accountant, assistant, manager or custodian, the key is whether you can find your calling in the work you do, not that it IS a call, but the elements of the work. who speak to you and focus on them. In short, you don’t just have to have a job or a career, have a calling, and even bad days won’t be all that bad. [ via Hidden Brain , thanks to Thorin! ]

Great Boston molasses flood

I have a soft spot for Atlas Obscura (which also means you can expect more from them if you haven’t followed their videos and articles yet), but this one describing the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 was especially interesting to me because I knew it had happened, but I didn’t know the more interesting details, such as the exact extent of the damage it caused, the apparent neglect of the company that made all this molasses, and even the role of the United States ban in all of this molasses. devastation. It’s a short video, but definitely worth watching if you’re curious about such a bizarre story. [ viaAtlas Obscura ]

Verizon Fios, New York, and why you probably don’t have Fios

In this episode of Answer All, one person asks a big company a question that we all wanted to ask a big company before, when we suspect they are cheating on us: “Are you lying to me?”

Specifically, Matt, who lives in New York, asks Verizon to install Fios in his apartment. Verizon says its landlord must approve, but won’t. Matt contacts his landlord, with whom he has a great relationship, and not only has his landlord never heard of this issue from Verizon, but would happily approve of the installation if he could. Take it all back to Verizon and well … that’s where the nightmare begins.

The entire episode is very New York oriented, so for people outside of New York (including myself, at least for now) some of the details are academic, but some theories as to why Verizon’s harsh pressure on Fios seemed to be dried up. many years ago, and why installations creep in some places and stop in others, sounds absolutely true to my ears. It’s worth listening to the whole story as the host PJ finally manages to get Verizon to talk to him about the problem and what he hears when they do it. [ via Reply All – Gimlet Media , thanks to Britt for including me on this show, and thanks to Jonathan for this particular episode! ]

A month in the sky

This beautiful video is the result of a month of aerial drone footage in stunning 4K resolution (full screen if you have a high resolution display!) By ActivFilms TV on YouTube. I’ll let them explain:

While working on this film, I have incredible memories, for example, when I climbed a ridge in the Kalalau Valley in Kauai with a drone strapped to my backpack, and then sent it 3000 feet above the ground from a cliff, or got up at 5 a.m. and rode in the dark to the east coast of Oahu to catch the sunrise at Macapuu, or return to the car after shots on the San Francisco Bay Bridge to catch light elsewhere in the city, or find a waterfall blocked by rocks on the Coast On Pali with my fiancé, or chasing a half-million-dollar Lamborghini across California’s highest bridge. I will remember these moments for the rest of my life.

I love the idea of ​​ending Brain Buffet every week with something inspiring or fun, and things like slow motion videos, drone flights, space videos and the like are perfect for all requirements (so send them to me!) – so I dug around looking for it and he’s as beautiful as the first day I saw him. Thanks to reader Victorious Secret for leaving it years ago as a comment on my Hive Five on drones . [ via ActivFilmsTV ]

That’s all for this week. If you have thought-provoking stories, interesting podcasts, eye-opening videos, or any other material that you think is perfect for this series, share them with us! You can send it to me by e-mail, leave it as a comment below, or send it in any way convenient for you. Your work may be in Brain Buffet next week.

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