Titles I’ve covered range from Hybrid Humans and Open Circuits to Ladybird Books and AI drones. See for example:
Hybrid Humans – Dispatches from the Frontiers of Man and Machine
This has been a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and sounds fascinating, but I must admit I missed it: Hybrid Humans, with the subtitle, Dispatches from the Frontiers of Man and Machine. The author is Harry Parker, who suffered losing his legs when in the British Army because of an IED (improvised explosive device) in Afghanistan. And in the book he explores whether, to some extent, all humans are becoming hybrids – to what extant technology can address disability and the use of prosthetics.
Build AI-Enabled Drones with the Raspberry Pi 4
Here’s a new entrant for our virtual Gadget Library: a book about autonomous AI-enabled drones and the Raspberry Pi 4. Published by Apress, it’s full title is: Intelligent Autonomous Drones with Cognitive Deep Learning: Build AI-Enabled Land Drones with the Raspberry Pi 4. Basically, it covers near fully autonomous, AI enabled drones, based around the Raspberry Pi 4 board. It aims to enable you to develop “a fully autonomous drone that incorporates object-oriented design and cognitive deep learning systems that adapts to multiple simulation environments”.
Open Circuits reveals hidden design of everyday electronics
Time to slot a new book onto our Gadget Master Library shelves: Open Circuits – The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, by Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer. This looks interesting – it’s described as a “photographic exploration of the beautiful design inside everyday electronics”. Basically, cross-section photography, accompanied by explanatory text, bids to unlock a “hidden world full of elegance, subtle complexity, and wonder”. Very impressive it looks.
Turn the pages with a Ladybird book for electronics
As one who fondly remembers more than one Ladybird book from my childhood – particularly the illustrations, for the history ones – it was great to see this comment on the site, involving a Ladybird book for electronics… It was from Ian Clifford and is about the one titled ‘Making a Transistor Radio’, to be precise.
The Computers That Made Britain
I missed this one when it first came out, in 2021, but a post #PiDay price drop now enables me to welcome it to the Gadget Master library… The Computers That Made Britain. The subtitle ‘The Home Computer Revolution Of The 1980s’ gives a clear outline of its focus, we’re talking Dragon computers, the BBC Micro and Amstrads… Published by Raspberry Pi Press, it has an RRP of £12 but is now available online for £9 from the Raspberry Pi Press website.
Gadget Book: The Magic Conveyor Belt
When it came to this book – The Magic Conveyor Belt, by MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi – I came for the robotics and AI but I stayed for the supply chain story… At first glance I wondered if supply chains – however mysteriously opaque but characteristic of our times – would keep my attention, but it turned into a very interesting read. It covers such areas as whether AI will be a job creator or destroyer, the successive industrial revolutions that have preceded current AI developments, how modern production systems are structured and why they are so complex, and how vulnerable the systems can be at each different level… If you ever wondered why supply chains are so involved, there is one detailed example of tracking a t-shirt manufactured in Bangladesh on its journey to a high-street retailer in the United States.
See also: Gadget Master ‘Book library’ gets new shelf…
