It showed up… I got excited and made an un-boxing vid. Apparently, I get twitchy when I am excited. Probably why I interview like shit. Anyhow… So, my three dollar (eight with shipping) bag of crap yielded: * Passive laptop cooling pad * Refurbished DSL router * Strawberry that unfolds into a bag? * Remote controlled Batman helicopter * Three dog brushes Not bad at all; I’m chalking this up as a win.

Greetings from 4800 feet above sea level…the ever-lovely Bozeman, Montana. Bad news to everyone to the right side of the Rockies: we are sending more water your way. Bozeman Creek is starting to hop some banks. I jumped on the CT-90 after work and headed out to survey the situation. These pics were taken in Bozeman proper…on Church street North of Kagy. There have been some road closures further North, as the stream has been running over a few roadways. Coincidentally, both major breaches have been near culverts…one under Mendenhall and one under Kagy. Poor planning, city engineers. A few hundred yards down the road from the bridge, I popped into my sister’s old condo complex. I have seen some sandbagging there in the past. A for effort, guys. Take the grade into consideration next time. This thing is slated to crest next week….we’ll see what happens. Strange year for extreme weather, to say the least.

For the most part, I have had good luck with Compiz, Unity, and Ubuntu 11.04 in general. I have said it before, but worth a repost…if you do a vanilla install of Ubuntu, the first thing you should do is get the Compiz configuration tool…I’ll even spell it out. 1) Open a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+t) 2) Run this command: sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager3) Hit enter…done. Nothing to it. Anyhow, I have seen the following bug a few times…so I finally snagged a screenshot: It appears that the workspace switcher and wobbly windows have some sort of issue with one another. I don’t see this when I use keyboard shortcuts, and I have been employing those nearly extensively to pop around. Super Key+S (Windows key / Apple key) to open the switcher…or bypassed with Ctrl+Alt+left or Ctrl+Alt+up for instance. It works slickly, once you spend some time poking around. I suppose it would be prudent for me to enter this bug into the Ubuntu QA system…I am not in the mood to search for duplicate tickets. I do that crap all day at work…enough is enough. Drop me a comment if you have seen this one in action. Or, if you have any workspace suggestions, send that over too.

Liquid crystal displays are pretty awesome. Command line interfaces are very awesome. Hmm… I started daydreaming at work about how to go about making hardware interface with an RSS feed. I have seen some projects that use Arduinos with ethernet shields to check Twitter, for example, but they seem unnecessarily bulky. Or clumsy. I spend a lot of time working on the command line, and love to put together dirty little scripts to solve problems. It sort of goes along the lines of ‘when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’…I figured that the same thing could be implemented with a little shell scripting and my trusty Arduino, sans anything complicated. So far, so good. I put together a sketch (after the bump) to drive my LCD, writing serial output to the screen. After verifying that the sketch worked via the Arduino IDE’s serial monitor, I popped open a CLI and got to work. FWIW, I am using Ubuntu 11.04 still…ctrl-alt-t pops open a terminal window…unity has me all over shortcuts these days. Anyhow, I was able to verify that I could echo text and direct it to the USB port that the Arduino was mounted to. No sweat. As a proof of concept, I decided to display the number of times that I had the word “awesome” on swantron.com. Once the LCD was shown to work, the sky is the limit…see some regex, pipes, wget, and so forth in action: Survey says: Eleven “awesome"s. Awesome. (Hit the bump for some code, an oddity, and more fun…) (more…)

I have always felt a touch of guilt in regards to the amount of coffee I throw down the colloquial hatch on a daily basis. I drink the stuff out of a pickle jar…I kid you not: It cools quicker. Bonus. My guilt was nuked from orbit today. I saw on /. this morning that the Oxford Journals published some National Cancer Institute findings, linking extreme coffee intake with a decreased chance of getting prostate cancer. The non-science-y results are as follow:

Conclusions: We observed a strong inverse association between coffee consumption and risk of lethal prostate cancer. The association appears to be related to non-caffeine components of coffee. Granted, they used caffeine-free coffee for their test…so that may offset some of my apparent benefits. I am still counting this as a huge win. Especially since this was all about the prostrate…I’ll tip a cup to that. Or a jar.

Back in my college days, I did a lot of printing. As a math major, I probably printed a fraction of the amount of pages that most students had to rifle off. Most of our work was done either by hand on paper, or done utilizing math software of some nature (Matlab, Maple, etc.) and submitted directly into a professor’s shared folder. Call it old school or just plain old, but that is the nature of the beast. Even with that on my side, I wound up printing all of the time…between my core course work and math reports (no kidding) I was constantly hitting Ctrl - P. My sample size is sufficiently large to draw a parallel between ‘important printing task’ and ’empty ink cartridge.’ Every…single…time. I don’t know how many times I found myself trying to get to Staples before closing time, in order to buy a replacement cartridge. Too many. To add insult to injury, brick and mortar retail prices are the stuff of nightmares. Those markups still blow my mind. Pretty much outrageous. Like my octopus drawing: Not to date myself, but online shopping was limited in my day. Amazon was around, but primarily for books. Specialty places were popping up…and then subsequently bursting when everything hit the colloquial fan. Comparative online shopping stuck, however. One of the things I am jealous of now are the deal pricing that you can find on ink cartridges. Very jealous…that would have put me in Cup of Noodle instead of Ramen. But, I digress. I have seen some creative stuff out there. You can buy bulk ink…shooting for the DIY fill-it-at-home crowd. Some models have cartridge reset units springing up…allowing the user to gain a few more prints per refill. The two main drawbacks of that are time (time is money) and quality. A lot of the replacements are prone to smudging…may as well pay for the real deal and do it right. At the end of it all, I have had good luck finding ink cartridges for my HP and Kodak printer online. Hit that link to see my go-to site.

I am tired of looking at wobbly windows full of Eclipse. The best and worst part of the IOIO board is the fact that the libraries are Java-centric…unfortunately, I am in the middle of a ‘worst’ phase. I am sort of stalemated. Unfortunately, my issue lies in something that should be trivial, namely naming. Once I can figure out how to orient the crap out of these object-ass pins, I will be good to go. Until then…I am going back to the basics. Processing looks so safe and warm. Coziness, for the win. How about a 20 by 4 LCD project? Okay. I have had this sitting on the workbench of bad lab for a while. Time to get after it. The unit came assembled, minus the jumpers I needed to plug this into my breadboard for prototyping. Coincidentally, my soldering station needed to come out of retirement. Sixteen pins…sounds about perfect. (hit the bump for several more pics, a snippet, and some other awesome stuff) (more…)

Tearing through my server logs, I have encountered the best search term in the world. I sure hope that the searcher found what he or she was looking for. In your butt.

I’ve been trying to snag a Bag O’ Crap from Woot since 2007. At long last, victory is mine. I verified that my card has been billed…it appears legit. I might have to post a nerdy un-boxing vid. Pretty excited here. For the record, I have used trackers in the past to no avail…this one was done with pure dumb-luck. No bots, for the win.

~~~~ WARNING: AWESOME ~~~~ My new thing has officially arrived. Both in the literal sense and philosophically. I love my Arduino, and I love my Android…now I can have the best of both. Introducing, the IOIO breakout board… I snagged this guy from SparkFun. You know how the Android is full of stuff? Accelerometers, touch screen, GPS receiver, WiFi…etc? Instead of having to start from scratch for each of my Arduino projects to introduce components, this board will allow me to use the Android/Java as the backbone of my code, instead of using Processing/C++. And that, my friends, is +++. Take a look at this awful-picture-quality-having video: Sorry about that…I had to use Katie’s old BlackBerry to record the demo. It leaves much to be desired. Anyhow, so far I have just managed to get Eclipse configured, and have uncovered several gotchas. The biggest obstacle was getting the permissions worked out and linking the libraries properly. When in doubt, chmod -R 777 * and let it rip. We’ll see what comes of this…could be cool once I dust off my Java skills. Of note: pretty sure I am the first person to get this working on a Droid 2, and likely the first to set this up on Linux. It just shipped yesterday, so the sky is the limit on this…I am very excited. Big props to Ytai and SparkFun.