Funny Processing update
16 Aug 2008
Processing version 146 released. It's one better than 145. Download here
hehe. And what do you know? It is one better.
Entries Tagged as 'Geekery'
BarCampAlbuquerque
BarCamp wiki / BarCampAlbuquerque.
I’m definitely going to try to attend this, should be fun. Maybe I’ll try to present something about my experiences with Agile. hmmm…
Twitter / rands: How to yell on your iPhone:…
How to yell on your iPhone: Tap Settings, Tap General, Tap Keyboard, Tap Caps Lock, YELL
from the brilliant rands on twitter.
iPhone / Google / Outlook Calendar Sync
I’ve finally gotten my various calendars to sync and I thought I’d pass along how I do it. By sync I mean I can enter an event on my Outlook at work, my Work calendar on Google, or my iPhone calendar and it’ll appear on all 3. Pretty cool.
First, to sync between Outlook and Google Calendar, Google provides the Calendar Sync tool. I only had one calendar in my GCal so the items from Outlook just went into that one. I then created a new calendar for personal use and renamed the old one to Work so I could color them differently and differentiate events.
To sync GCal and the iPhone, there’s a website called NuevaSync that will do it for you. NuevaSync is still pretty beta but it works fine for me. They’ll also sync Contacts, Email, and Tasks but I’m only interested in the Calendar.
Once you have all 3 set up, events will be synced from all 3, using GCal as sort of the intermediary. Now, sync is one of the all-time Hard problems in programming because of the many, many failure modes so this system might be fragile for you if you’re a hard-core calendar user. I’m not though, I just want my iPhone to tell me if I have a meeting in 15 minutes I forgot about.
If you like this hack or have a similar one of your own, I’m all ears eyes.
UPDATE: Jason Brett has posted more detailed instructions on his blog
Wireless Trick
After struggling for who-knows-how-long trying to figure something out, I finally got it. I upgraded my wireless router a long time ago with the DD-WRT firmware but I never could figure out how to get the wireless clients to be on the same network subnet as the wired line. This meant I had to do various hacks to get some things to work, like accessing windows shares and more recently getting my Remote app on my iphone to control iTunes on my computer. Since they were on different subnets, Remote wouldn’t see my computer. Well, after hosing my router setup and resetting to factory defaults, I managed to find the setting I needed all this time. Under VLAN settings, if you set the W line to VLAN with LAN, it works. Magic. Hopefully this will save somebody some searches since I couldn’t find anything in many searches.
Idea Propulsion Lab update
We now have 23 people signed up at the website for the Idea Propulsion Lab. This is an awesome number. I was hoping to get 10 or so before starting to plan our first meeting so this is great. I’m planning the first meeting, which is really a “beta” meeting where we’ll be talking and planning the next meetings. I’m going to have it at my work since we have a great big conference room with a projector, chairs, tables, all that stuff. I’m probably going to present a few things so we don’t have to rely on people presenting at the first meeting.
The next thing I’ve been looking at is getting our own actual space to work. It’s a little premature I think right now but I’d love to get an office space with a few rooms to setup benches and let people come work. Like I say it’s a bit far off but something I’d really love to do.
My new electronics hobbyist / hacker club
I’m in the process of setting up a club for hardware/electronics hackers and hobbyists in Albuquerque. It’s called the Idea Propulsion Lab. I’ve setup a site for the club at http://www.ideapropulsionlab.org. Check it out.
I’ve always loved the idea of getting smart people together and seeing what new ideas can be created. Everybody always thinks it’s weird but I always use the image of rubbing a bunch of brains together and seeing what sparks fly off, what fires can be created. The thing I really loved about going to New Mexico Tech was having a bunch of smart nerds in one place, building off each other, sharing ideas, challenging everything. So I want that to be a big part of the Idea Propulsion Lab, sharing ideas and teaching/learning about hardware, robots, electronic art, whatever.
We’ll be having regular physical meetings so people can show their projects or teach classes. I’d love to have classes where somebody can teach a bunch of people to solder, or make LED art, stuff like that. I want meetings to be live action Instrucables, if you’re familiar with Instructables.com (and if you’re not, you should be). My primary inspirations are MAKE: magazine and Instructables.com.
The most important thing to me is that I want this club to be for people of all skill levels. I just learned to solder in the last month and have only just started my explorations of all this stuff. I have no interest in just having a bunch of experts sit around and talk expert stuff that’s over the head of everybody else. I want club members to teach, to show people just how easy fooling around with electronics has become.
This is going to be fun.
First Wiimote whiteboard experiment
[youtube]ZLQMWR2Hbo8[/youtube]
My first Wiimote whiteboard experiment, running on my laptop.
The Nerdiest Nerd in Nerdtown
I borrowed my friend Tom’s Wii on Friday and got my cheapo diy Wiimote powered whiteboard working just now. Whoohoo! I hit one small snag when I realized that I built my IR light pen using a normally-closed button instead of a normally-open one (which makes the light always on except when you hit the button, instead of the other way around). Oops. A trip to Radio Snack will solve that one though so no worries. I hooked my laptop up to the big TV and got things to mostly work, which is awesome.
I need to remake the light pen and then I’ll post a video of it working. I may or may not post my first video of the rig working, it’s of me writing I AM COOL on the screen of my laptop, hence the title of this post. :)
[tags]electronics,wiimote,whiteboard[/tags]
My new time-sucking hobby
I’ve wanted to start doing electronics work for some time but never got around to buying a soldering iron and related tools, finding a good project, etc. It’s not like I don’t have anything else taking up my free time though. But this year Kim gave me a really cool book on some electronics projects and told me to buy the tools and parts needed so I’m finally going to start with my new hobby. Whoohoo for me! Coincidentally, a guy at work passed around an awesome video of an electronic whiteboard you can make with a Nintendo Wii remote and an easy-to-make IR-led light pen. During this 4-day weekend I’m going to make up a couple of the light pens and a few of us at work are going to make one of these whiteboards. Another co-worker pointed out a project called Crayon Physics where you draw shapes and make them interact (it’s cooler than I’m making it sound) and once we get our whiteboard going, we’re going to either use it to play with this Crayon Physics or write our own version specifically to use with the whiteboard. Working with a bunch of like-minded geeks is highly recommended. :) I’ll be posting about my projects and about our whiteboard geekery in the coming months. I’m hoping to get an Instructable or two up and some videos as well.
[tags]electronics, wii, wiimote, whiteboard[/tags]
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Planned books:
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Current books:
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Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin Series) by Mike Cohn
Recent books:
- The Gum Thief: A Novel by Douglas Coupland
- Underworld: A Novel by Don DeLillo
- The Painter of Battles: A Novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte
- Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
- Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
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