hey friends it's Jeremy from tested it's my favorite time of year when I get to
share with you my favorite things of 2019 I have four things for you today
starting with Turing tumble now this was a Kickstarter in 2018 I got it for my
family for the last holiday we opened it and I was quite blown away I can't tell
you how much I love this it is successful on like three fronts check it
out okay on the basic basic level it's a kinetic ball machine and you get to
watch ball bearings tumble through these various parts in a very soothing you
know way and it just feels good to watch these chain reactions happen that's just
fun on the second level it's a puzzle game right so the game gives you these
setups and they give you all these various parts and then they tell you
these are the parts you can use to complete the puzzle and then you have to
place them and learn and figure out where they're supposed to go in order to
produce the desired output you have these blue marbles and red marbles and
they will end up on the bottom here in various orders based on the pattern of
parts that they flow through okay and all of those instructions are given to
you in the form of this comic book story where you're a woman who crashed lands
on an alien planet and you stumble upon this alien architecture and inside
there's this technology that's broken and your your life support is running
out and with your final breast you repair their computer and their computer
is what you have on the game Turing tumble itself and then when you repair
the first computer the very first puzzle the life-support systems come to life in
this alien structure and then you are presented with another piece of
technology that you have to figure out and it's alien and then once you learn
how it works it basically comes back to life and you proceed to the next puzzle
and what you end up doing is you come to this third part that turning tumble is
so good at and that's it teaches you whether you know it or not how computers
count numbers because you're basically building very simple computers here why
it's called Turing tumbles named for Alan Turing one of the fathers of
computers themselves so this mechanism right here
actually counts the number of bar of marbles that fall through the
contraption and they do so with these blue parts right here which are called
bits and when you have four bits this is puzzle number 21 I know it seems
very complicated but you get to this point you start to understand it four
bits they call a register and using that register you can actually count up to 15
0 to 15 and you put however many marbles do up here and this will actually
reflect the number of marbles that pass through it by the end of the book if you
can get through the puzzles you are making literal calculators that can
multiply any number that you give it by any number you give it and it actually
figures it out it's amazing I mean this is one that this is an aha Factory and I
highly recommend it to anyone with kids anyone who wants to take some time to
learn this stuff there's no batteries required and it's it is successful on so
many levels highly recommended now from more subversive learning to the more
overt learning we have the circuit playground Express from Adafruit
now I get asked all the time on Twitter Jeremy how should I learn Arduino I
don't know a thing about programming I don't know anything about electronics
should I get an Arduino what kit should I buy right
Arduino itself if you just buy an Arduino and you want to learn how to
program that's great but all you can really do with that little box is make
an LED flash right to do anything more you have to hook up wires maybe do some
soldering but find the right components it's a lot to ask somebody who's just
putting their toe in the water the circuit playground
comes with all of that stuff already on there you've got 10 RGB LEDs that can be
any color it detects touch capacitive touch it detects motion with an
accelerometer ok it can detect temperature it can even type light it
has IR blasters and receivers so it can communicate with another one or control
your television it's makes sound it has buttons on it a switch it has all of
that embedded right on it and it costs $20 ok this is my recommendation if you
ever want to learn anything about C++ programming Arduino microcontrollers but
even if you don't want to dive that deep if you don't want to get into actual
code your syntax and getting everything right
I know that's intimidating you can also program in Python which is a little more
user-friendly you write your scripts you drag it on over USB like a USB Drive
but even simpler than that my 9 year old daughter had no problem at all using
make code on this which is a drag-and-drop system you go on the web
you drag all your logic together you enter the numbers that you want to enter
and suddenly you've got a motion detector that like lights up unicorn
colors whenever it detects motion or you can create a game a Simon Says game or
you can you know detect what angle it's it's tilting yet you can even detect a
heartrate okay this is a great learning device major props to Adafruit this is
two years old this is the one with the IR blaster they
just came out with one that has bluetooth so you can actually control
the colors of the LEDs over your phone or any number of things great device
this I just picked up on a whim this is a work light that is battery-powered
seem useful it ended up being extremely useful I picked it up to work on pinball
machines but it's come in handy to work behind televisions underneath cabinets
anywhere where you would normally pull out your phone and get the flashlight on
this super handy has a little stand stands up all by itself and much much
brighter than your phone and it can be in bright mode slightly less bright mode
and best on Halloween put it underneath the window strobe light 20 bucks it
looks like a Dewalt product is totally not it's a no-name brand but it's
available in amazon it is waterproof and it doubles as a USB battery pack I've
got a four thousand milliamp hour battery or and they're super handy I
love these things you can get them in a packet too for slightly less last thing
anybody that knows me knows that I'm a bit of a VR nut and this was the year of
mobile VR the oculus quest which if you've read any Holiday Gift Guide you
probably saw it on there if you try to buy one in the past few weeks you
probably couldn't because they're totally sold out but this is the
culmination of the past six seven years of consumer VR this is a device that
used to require a computer to deliver the same experience until this year if
you wanted to move your a body around in space and have that
reflected in VR we call that six degrees of freedom where you're looking and
moving in any direction and tracking your hand controllers in this same
amount of precision six degrees of freedom you needed a PC it had to be
cabled to your computer you had to be running software you had to invest in
all of the video cards and infrastructure and launch your apps and
make sure everything's running now it's all-in-one it uses four cameras to look
out to map the world to see the controllers to position the headset and
everything else in space and it just works it's in VR all the time you don't
have to launch anything you just put it on and you're good to go
now personally I have this mounted to what's called the vive deluxe audio
strap which has these headphones that does not ship with the unit but I did
find that to be slightly more comfortable it's but out of the box it's
still magic I mean this is something that I didn't expect to see this early
and makes VR so much easier to adopt it is the friction the most friction free
version of virtual reality and I'm glad it's here I can't wait to see the next
iteration of this and where we're going VR is at the very beginning still if the
early days and it continues to excite me thank you for watching and from all of
us here tested we can't wait to see you in 2020 have a safe and wonderful new
year and we'll see you next year you