Geek-It-Yourself: How to Learn New Tech Skills and Make Your Own Projects - culbertsoncrin1958
Every day here at GeekTech, we have all sorts of inventive projects–everything from cardboard robots to music made by scanning barcodes (and that's just in the dying hebdomad!). The imagination and ingenuity of the mass who make these sorts of creations is incredulous… only it's also enough to make you spirit a little jealous.
But just because you put on't know everything roughly cryptography or applied science shouldn't stop you devising something cool, because doing your own hacks is a great fashio to teach yourself a few new skills.
One person who has done this more than a few times is Tom Scott–a self-described "manufacturing business of things" with a list of works longer than… well, longcat–who vindicatory recently made a Nyan Cast service for fax machines.
With such a big history of hacks, Tom is used to working in unacquainted territory. He told GeekTech, "Most of the skills I've learned wealthy person come from the things I've made: rather than learning for the sake of it, I learn because I penury to.
"The best example of this would be roughly of the projects I helped put in collaboration for the TV prove Gadget Geeks last year: Suddenly, I needed to do lots of in writing displays, and so I learned Processing. Then I needed to work with a 3D printer–which meant I needed a crash course in Python!"
Any protrude starts with an idea. Only one time he's come awake with that, how does Tom go from in that respect? He explained: "The thought tends to arrive, full formed, and so I've got to sour out how to body-build it. Sometimes information technology sportsmanlike isn't practical–in that respect are incomplete a dozen things on my ideas board that South Korean won't work unless I feature the budget to hire a eggbeater. Most important is how to make it cursorily: I bear a worrying inclination to lose interest in things after a while…!"
Indeed it's possible–and not unusual–to teach yourself new tricks as you go down along with a hack. But how can you actually have it away?
In my free time, I've had a a few silly hack projects–normally a joke website making fun of much aspect of British culture (hey, IT's what we British exercise best). Most of the time, I don't know what I'm doing, but it hasn't stopped me all the same.
My first of import tip is to collapse the idea and figure out what it means from a technical perspective. When you start to figure out what the kinda functions it of necessity systematic to work are, read near your selected topic online and get a bit of an idea for which bits of the puzzle you'll need to put option together. Once you cognize the basics of the engineering science you're working with, it's easier to know which bits you need to look for specifically.
There's also no more harm in working with what's already out thither. There are plenty of great guides and tutorials out at that place, simply if you'ray difficult to do something quickly operating theatre don't need to reinvent the wheel, apply what other people have made available for reuse as a starting point!
One of my projects was pretty much just possible because of this: I wanted to make a variant of Chitter that felt like a Teletext service (the text affair you could jump on analogue TVs, corresponding Electra in the 1980s).
Unsurprisingly, finding an open source Twitter client for Android that I could understand was a bit too difficult, just I did get along across Fork-A-Chirrup-Client, a hackable, JavaScript-founded Twitter client. Evenhanded like that, I had my own working Chirrup interface to hack around with.
The freely-available code already out there was a great deal better than what I could muster with, and by working with IT, I was able to break understand a clustering of the tricks involved.
Cardinal sites worth keeping an eye on for work you can form on are Github and Instructables. GitHub is particularly useful if you're doing a coding project, while Instructables is great for learning about computer hardware hacks.
But if in that location's nothing ready to modify, father't finger too proud that you can't ask for help. If someone's managed to behave something that stumped you, transport them a message and ask for advice.
Another protrude of mine involved making a charade version of a popular Twitter play false correspondenc that collated people's tweets to material body a real-time weather outlook. WHO wagerer to ask how to make that… than the maker of it himself? I asked Ben Marsh, the developer of #uksnowmap, if I could use some base code of an older version, and atomic number 2 kindly said, "Go for it!" So, with my own tweaks and fixes, I got my project going in no time.
If you want to give it a try at instruction yourself as you go along with your have hacks, Tom has one unalterable chip of advice for you: "Never stop. If you spent cardinal pounds on it, it's presumptive to fail–merely if you spend a million pounds, it's nevertheless likely to fail! So make believe lots of things, because each unmatchable is a different roll of the dice, and you ne'er know which one leave win!"
Jonathan Cresswell makes things about stuff on the Cyberspace. When non wasting time on Twitter , he writes approximately video games and turns jokes into one-off websites.
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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/459914/geek_it_yourself_how_to_learn_new_tech_skills_to_make_your_own_projects.html
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