Samsung Vibrant Info

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I haven’t weighed in on the current state of the cell-phone-o-sphere in some time. I beg your apologies. There are currently two phones that have me second guessing my affinity towards the HTC Incredible. Namely, the Samsung Vibrant and the BlackBerry Torch. Since I am 100% certain that I am done with RIM for the time being, I’m going to focus on the former.

Samsung + Android = solid machine. No doubt about that. My only qualms with Samsung has been shoddy user interfaces and a poor track record on the hardware side. That was completely established when the Moto Razr was the cool kid in school, and Samsung has really made improvements. The biggest improvement of all…the Vibrant is shipping with Android OS v2.1. Froyo is amazing, but eclair is no slouch.

samsung vibrant info

vibrant thang my vibrant thing yo vibrant thang my vibrant thing oh

I’ll cut to the chase. The same thing I love most about the Incredible (and too, the Droid X) is the smoking hot processor. Turns out, the Vibrant has a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor. And boom goes the dynamite. Par.

I’d be lying to say that I can afford to buy both the Incredible and the Vibrant, with the recent wedding, new dining room table, et cetera…I could, but it would be frowned upon, perhaps. Maybe more paid posts like this will change the situation, but I digress. I will say that the Samsung Vibrant Accessories have me questioning my loyalty to HTC. Not only the Samsung Vibrant Covers, cases, data cables, and what-not, but the phone is pretty sexy in general. Five megapixel camera, folks. 16 gigs internal storage, folks. Four inch screen…folks. I’m torn.

Long story short, take a look at the (I am getting paid to Samsung Accessories and see what you think. I’m up in the air, because this phone is 100% legit.

Billy.com FTW!

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Do you enjoy saving money? Sure. We all do.

When was the last time you heard that name…Sally Struthers. Wow.

The message holds true, though. We do all enjoy saving money. Well, the internet has made comparison shopping easier than ever before…and Billy.com has made internet-based savings easier than even that.

money

got my mind on my money and my money on my mind

Let’s take a look at one timely scenario. As I posted a while ago, Sweet Lou Pinella is retiring as the Cubs manager at the end of the 2010 baseball season. There is no doubt that he will move back to his hometown of Tampa Bay, where he managed before taking the position with the Cubs. What will Lou do, specifically?

Step one: locate local moving services. Billy.com can do that. No sweat. In fact, Billy can help Lou out even further. How, you ask? Boom. Tampa moving companies are there too, spelled out in a more specific nature.

I’m sad to see Lou go, but glad that he can save some money on his move. It would be pretty unfortunate to see the old guy moving his own stuff, and I’m sure he will be able to track down a veritable company via Billy.com.

Softball Injury

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I managed to hit a walk-off dinger to end the 2010 softball season. Unfortunately, my shitty co-ed league counts dongs as outs, and my walk-off was the last out of our year. Whoever penned that rule was a fun-hater.

I did manage to rip my goddamn knee open, yet again…

softball injury

ouchos

Insult to injury, I suppose.

We’ll get ‘em in 2011.

Comics that aren’t Horrible

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I have made zero effort to conceal the fact that I hate comics. They are, as a whole, utterly useless. Utterly.

In my book, there are only three people making comics that are worth reading. My first? Randall from xkcd…pretty much speaks for itself for a math dude to be all over that stuff. My other two are Drew and Natalie, and their combined four works.

Here is my favourite MTTS entry of the month…

marriedtothesea.com
marriedtothesea.com

…and what I deem to be Natalie’s best (or most random) offering…
nataliedee.com
nataliedee.com

Hit one of those ill links to get to the respective sites. They also pen Super Poop and Toothpaste for Dinner, which, names aside, are incredible as well.

World Record Hail

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Vivian South Dakota? Ever heard of the place? Yep, neither have I.

It has been a bizarre year around my neck of the woods, weather-wise. Giant hail in Bozeman, tornadoes in Billings and all over the NE corner, micro bursts near Glasgow…weird stuff.

weather != gadgetry, but
awesome weather phenomenon = science FTW

Well, Vivian (from here on out, “Viv”) South Dakota has claimed its colloquial fifteen minutes of fame, in the form of a world record hailstone.

large hail

that's-a a spicy-a hail-a-ball

1.9375 pounds. Nicely played, Viv.

I found this story amazing…some local news site interviewed one of Viv’s finest. Les Scott is a death-defying party animal…

“I just happened to see this one fall and the only reason I went out and got it is because it has all these fingers sticking out of it and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s weird.’ So I thought I’d go get that one,” Scott said.

Scott originally wanted to make a daiquiri out of the hail, but decided to contact the National Weather Service instead. Tuesday, they were in Vivian. They carefully took the stone from the freezer and placed it in a cooler with dry ice. The next stop was at the post office where the hail had a date with the federally certified scale. Moments later, the hailstone weighed in at 1.9375 pounds.

Daiquiri? Come the hell on Les. National news, buddy…pick something less feminine about which to wax funny.

Binary Red/Green Snippet

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One step closer…

Switch open yields a killer red LED…

red

stop


Switch closed yields an uber-sexy green LED…

green

go

I even tossed in some 1K resistors to keep my LEDs healthy, in addition to my 100 ohm / 10000 ohm pull-down setup.

+4 resistor

I even managed to comment my code, for a bonus win:

/*
* binary red/green led setup
* by Joseph Swanson
* http://swantron.com
*/

int led1 = 11; // green LED (pin 11)
int led2 = 12; // red LED (pin 12)
int swit= 5; // switch (pin 5)
int varr; // to read pin on/off (pin 5)

void setup() {
pinMode(led1, OUTPUT); // output green
pinMode(led2, OUTPUT); // output red
pinMode(swit, INPUT); // switch input
}

void loop(){
varr = digitalRead(swit); // store swit to varr
if (varr == LOW) { // button = pressed
digitalWrite(led1, HIGH); // trigger green
digitalWrite(led2, LOW); // ground red
}
if (varr == HIGH) { // button != pressed
digitalWrite(led1, LOW); // ground green
digitalWrite(led2, HIGH); // trigger red
}
}


+1 Snippet

I’m getting closer to having this thing behave the way I intend. Stay tuned for a while longer. I’ll have a robot up and rolling in no time whatsoever.

Pull Down Switch Arduino *Fun

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Maybe Vegas got the best of me, brain-wise. I’m struggling mightily with this pull-down switch prototype on my Arduino. I got it, after far-too-much troubleshooting.

pull down

maxxximum powwwwer

Maybe I need another frozen slushy drink. Or alternatively, a supplementary OML to get me through this…the end goal is to get some logic incorporated to ‘read’ the state of the switch, so that I don’t need my finger on the sonofabitch to keep the light lit. Or lighted…getting tired here.

Stay tuned. I’ll get this knocked out.