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LED Firefly Idea

2008-08-25T12:36:00.002-04:00

I'm currently digging to find out how to make a cool little PIC micro controlled LED Firefly. Which can detect if it's light or dark and blink when it's dark only.

This came from an Instructables link for LED Fireflies Prototype. They are the natural extension of the "LED throwies" which are always on and are cool.

So starting out I've been digging for where to start and though I should keep track of the thing's I've found so far on here.

PIC Micro:
Found a cool development kit for only $36 which should provide a decent starting point for playing around with PIC Micros.
microchip.com the PIC12F683 or it's little brother PIC12F675
After a bit of digging I'll be ordering the PICkit 1 starter kit for $36 probably along with a couple of additional PIC12F683/PIC12F675 chips.

Next part of this experiment is to figure out how you can use an LED as both input and output. A quick Google search provided parts of the answer but to figure out how I'm going to do this will probably require some tinkering.

* Make blog: LED touch sensor
* Bi-directional LEDs

More later

Beautiful Red

2007-09-11T13:02:00.000-04:00

I am hooked and waiting on new episodes for Beautiful Red podcast by Darusha Wehm, hosted at podiobooks. I started listening and before I knew it I had listened to all 6 episodes which have been released so far, and am anxiously waiting for more episodes to be released. The story is set in a near future Technical Utopia, where technology has made crime mostly irrelevant. But then you start to be immersed in this technological utopia, and start to see some of the cracks where everything is not so nice and utopian.

Great science fiction podcast!

Nathen Lowell Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series

2007-09-09T16:05:00.000-04:00

Recently I've been listening to several books posted on Podiobooks. This week I'll tell you a bit about Nathen Lowell's series Quarter Share, Half Share, and Full Share. Which is a series of Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper. His website at http://durandus.org/golden/ provides even more tidbits and supporting information about the stories. The first book Quarter Share, you are introduced to Ishmael who through an unfortunate accident finds himself in need of a way off the planet and in need of work. He finds it in the form of a job on a solar trading clipper ship the "Lois McKendrick" as a mess attendant, in the galley. I found myself drawn in by Nathen Lowell's writing style which just draws you in and holds you transfixed while you feel like you are actually there sitting at the pub listening to the story unfolding. I don't think I'm alone after hearing that Quarter share was nominated for a Parsec Award in Best Speculative Fiction Story (Novel Form).

I would have to say these stories have been of the type that you can't put down. I have listened through all three of his podiobooks multiple times now, and am waiting for the final episode of Full-share to be released. Then I will truly be in withdraw till the spring of 2008 when he expects the next book in the series to approach completion and release on podiobooks.

Mapping for the masses

2007-09-07T15:19:00.000-04:00

Open Street Map project is an interesting open source project. Where the community is building a collection of mapping data, which is licensed CC by SA . The project which has a large following in Europe is just starting to expand in the USA with the start of integrating the freely available TIGER data sets, which promise to provide a good base coverage for the whole USA. Supporting the project many innovative tools have been built and function, including a google style map browser known as Slippy Map, an web based editor Potlatch, and a very capable java based editor JOSM . Go check out their maps at either http://openstreemap.org or http://informationfreeway.org

Good Story and Science Fiction/Fantasy Podcasts

2007-06-18T10:39:00.001-04:00

The top list of good podcasts that I currently follow are:

Geek Fu Action Grip by Mur Lafferty
Heaven all three seasons (heaven, hell, and Earth) by Mur Lafferty
7th Son by J.C. Hutchins
Singularity by Bill DeSmedt
Cory Doctrow's Craphound podcast
MOREVI: The Chronicles of Rafe and Askana by Tee Morris and Lisa Lee
Spherical Tomi: A Novel of Despair by Jack Mangan

ITEC 2007 at Detroit

2007-06-13T21:22:00.000-04:00

Today I visited ITEC at Detroit's Cobo Hall. I managed to get there for most of the Keynote presentation "Technology is Broken: How to Fix IT For Your Business" given by James Gaskin. It was an interesting presentation and he brought up many good points and seemed to push open source and Mac a lot.

I also got to listen to "Social Media and Web 2.0: How blogging, podcasting, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, LinkedIn, MySpace and more are going to affect your business." given by Kelsey Ruger of Webxites, Inc. Where he talked about current trends and how Social Media and Web 2.0 is and will continue to change the ways in which businesses advertise.

One of the interesting things he mentioned is that if a business embraces some of these new technologies and the social networking tools available, that they have the possibility to reach a much larger advertising audience. If they ignore them that it will not stop the content and discussion from happening, all that will happen is that the business will lose all influence on the discussion about them or their product.

social networking, wikis and folksonomies are some of the new buzzwords.

Blogs are a place where industry and technology news, ideas thoughts and other topics of interest can be added to. Also allows for reputation management.

At the end he recommended that if you want to get more involved:

* embrace social media
* read and consume social media
* start a blog (blogger or wordpress)
* start a podcast of a video cast
* build a mashup (openkapow or Yahoo pipes)
* integrate these into your daily work life

OLPC Human Interface

2007-01-02T09:09:00.000-05:00

Last night I just watched a couple of videos [here] and [here] about the new OLPC Human Interface - Sugar. While reading the article from the Washington post "Low-Cost Laptop Could Transform Learning" I couldn't stop thinking about Ender's Game and the computers that the kids all used, which was refereed to as their "desk". The laptop they are proposing is very interesting, and I would actually be tempted to purchase one for myself at some point in the future. I think this new design of the human interface, which they are calling sugar, is very interesting and does seem to be intuitive and understandable. It will be interesting to see how it actually performs and is regarded by kids who are the primary user of it. This will be one topic that I'll be keeping an eye on.

Blocked... Writing a Thesis

2006-12-04T08:49:00.000-05:00

I'm probably in the same position as some writers. I'm blocked! I can't seem to make any progress on my thesis that I have been working on for Way too long now.

It is a huge pile of papers

I sometimes wonder is it good enough? Will it ever be good enough? Is there enough technical information in it to be approved?

I have family and friend who would like to see me get this completed, and so would I!

I think I'm blocked. After thinking about it here are a couple of the things that I've mentally blocked on (currently and from the past):

I need an hour of uninterested time to work on it, the half hour I have right now isn't enough to do anything
Work is keeping me too busy and when I get home at night I don't feel like doing it
Work is depressing me and I don't feel like working on it (my company went through a time where paychecks were delayed and we really didn't know what future would bring)
Procrastination (games, solitaire, books, house projects, other projects, ect....)

Now I'm not exactly sure where to go from here but I had to get this written down before I just let it drop, and just throw the towel in on completing the Thesis.

I really do want to get this thesis completed (even though it is way overdue to be completed and turned in), I just need to find a way to get it done and avoid my blocking and procrastination tendencies.

PGP is 15 years old

2006-11-16T10:10:00.000-05:00

PGP Corporation salutes the 15th anniversary of PGP encryption technology. Developed and released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann, Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 set the standard for safe, accessible technology to protect and share online information.

PGP is used for encryption and signing of content, but it is under utalized on the internet. For a while I used it to sign my email messages and other communications. This is a good opportunity to go look at PGP again and check out what all has been updated and is new.

From what I did digging for finding PGP software, the Authoritative source for PGP software is http://philzimmermann.com The other sites that have related information are http://www.openpgp.org and http://www.pgp.com and for the international people http://www.pgpi.org

read more | digg story

Escape Pod: The Shoulders of Giants

2006-11-15T07:24:00.000-05:00

Just listened to EP078: The Shoulders of Giants by Robert J. Sawyer from Escape Pod, and I just loved the story. I actually listened to the story twice on my daily commute. It is a story about a colony sleeper ship who was headed for Tau Ceti, where they hoped to colonize the planet there. Their travels took them 1200 year, and by the time they did get there they were greeted by a thriving community from earth. They were honored as being among the giants that helped the community actually get there and expand. The end of it puts a new perspective to life and accomplishments that can be made.

Timeline and Risk: How to Piss Off Your Software Developers

2006-11-10T09:06:00.000-05:00

Today we're going to focus on a sentence that will make almost any developer, even a mild-mannered one, want to box up their red Swingline and head to Tahiti for early retirement.

This Article hit the issue squarely on the nail, and I couldn't agree More! The Classical Pyramid of Time, Cost and Quality still hold true today, and that good developers already are giving +100% of their time and effort to their job.

read more | digg story

Buffer Overflows and Security

2006-11-09T15:01:00.000-05:00

Buffer overflows and security are very common topics these days and Dr Dobb's just ran an article on it Illusion of Safety. They also ran a follow up article on The Unsecured Integer. The first article presents two options which can be used to prevent buffer overflows brute force and prevention by design. Brute force requires some form of verifying that all incoming data is verified for length before copying with problematic functions. Prevention by design pushes the responsibility to verify that the data doesn't overflow to the edges of the system and has the possibilities to make applications simpler, smaller and run faster, but it requires that each data flow be traced and verified. Preventions is harder to enforce than the brute force method but provides possible efficiency improvements.

One other related article Integral Security . There are 3 variants on integer errors overflow, sign errors and trundication. They reference a special publication 500-262 from NIST as a reference for how to handle Integer Safety.

Also of interesting note they referenced Secure Coding in C and C++, by Robert C. Seacord which appears to be an interesting reference book.

I, Row-Boat

2006-11-08T08:55:00.000-05:00

I, Row-Boat was a very interesting story, I first listened to it when Cory Doctorow read the story on the craphound podcast a while back. You can listen to the podcasts of the story part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. I was fascinated by the story and read it again, you can find the story as published on flurb.net . It is a story from after the emergence of AI and it follows a rowboat which has gained self-awareness. The rowboat is part of a scuba diving cruise ship, where people can project into one of the several human shells on the ship and experience scuba diving along the corral reefs. I greatly enjoyed the short story and loved it.

Tomorrow the Future

2006-11-06T22:35:00.000-05:00

Ever get into the discussions of what tomorrow might bring and what technology might look like in 5, 10, or even 20 year? Slashdot had an article today "No More Coding From Scratch?" and that tied in with lunch discussion today. What will technology look like in 10-20 years? With Moore's Law technology has been increasing at a very rapid pace. Will we see a Technological Singularity within our lifetime? (for good or bad)

What type of computer interface will you be using in 10 years? Voice interface, dynamic reconfigurable and adaptive displays? We already have multi-touch displays which have been prototyped, and another here.

hmmm....

Will we be working with easy to use systems, which seamlessly integrate into our lives and are just part of society and life or will they still be items that you buy and use when you need a computer? Will we still be driving or with the computers drive better and smarter than us and get us around faster cheaper and safer?

How long will it be before you are asked how many processor core computer do you want and how many gigabytes of ram and terrabytes of harddrive space do you want?

Podcasts Worth Listening

2006-10-26T06:40:00.000-04:00

I have distilled down my favorite list of podcasts to the top contenders.

Voices of Tomorrow - Flash Fiction brought to you every week, podcasts of stories from 365 Tomorrows.
Escape Pod - Science Fiction Podcast Magazine.
Cyberspeak - Two Former Federal Agents Talk About Computer Forensics, Network Security and Computer Crime.
Cory Doctrow's craphound.com - Podcast by Cory Doctrow, his stories and other content.
Geek Fu Action Grip - Mur Lafferty's podcast of stories and other content.
Nuketown Radio Active Podcast - Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Geekdom.

Phidgets Inc. :: Unique and Easy to Use USB Interfaces

2006-09-30T21:12:00.000-04:00

Phidgets Inc. :: Unique and Easy to Use USB Interfaces

This past week at work, I had the opportunity to work with these neat devices! They are versatile little devices which allow you to work with a TextLDC output, Analog input devices and digital input and output devices. All for very reasonable prices and what I really did like was that they have a reasonably complete software programming API which is available for most development platforms, Windows, Linux, MS VC++, Java and several other languages as well.

What I was working with was the following LCD display and a couple of other sensors

I was amazed, with only a couple of hours I had it up and working and was able to get most of the interfacing with the device done and then able to get down to actually writing the rest of the application that I needed to do.

If you are ordering from the US order from http://phidgetsusa.com/. For documentation and information or for the Forums head over to http://www.phidgets.com where the forums and documentation is slightly more up to date.

If I actually had any extra cash on me right now I'd pick up some of these for putzing around with in my spare time at home.

Computer Manages Restaurant Workers and Manna

2006-08-10T17:58:00.000-04:00

Slashdot | Computer Manages Restaurant Workers was an interesting article and a wonderful link to a story I hadn't read before but found a very interesting and insightful story titled Manna by Marshall Brain.

I would wholely recommend taking the couple of hours and read the book Manna. Then taking a gander over at the article about Hyperactive Bob. With the best quote from the article being

Hopefully, no one will tell the makers of Hyperactive Bob about the Manna story; it has too many practical suggestions for the enslavement of humans.

That is just a great quote. When I was reading the Manna book online I was very impressed and I think it is on par with 1984 in dystopic quality.

Endgame: Singularity

2006-07-15T09:55:00.000-04:00

Just ran across this very interesting sounding game review by PCBurn. An I was hooked. A little more digging and I found the Python Game Programming Challenge site called PyWeek. The actual game's page is found on http://www.emhsoft.net/singularity/index.html.

Nuketown - Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Geekdom

2006-07-13T20:47:00.000-04:00

Nuketown is a pretty cool site, and Kenneth Newquist has done a pretty good job on his Nuketown podcast as well.

Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

2006-06-23T23:22:00.000-04:00

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame looks very interesting and it is now on our list of to visit eventually locations.

Why Google OS Already Exists

2006-06-22T07:59:00.000-04:00

OSWeekly.com - Why Google OS Already Exists

What constitutes an OS?

Consider this. Google already offers e-mail, picture editing, blogging, a personal calendar and its own brand of instant messenger. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Google OS is already alive and well. The best part is that it has gone largely unnoticed by even the most observant of us. It's called web applications and the World Wide Web.

Interesting to say the least.

Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space

2006-06-14T07:56:00.000-04:00

Slashdot | Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space

Article

Interesting and provocative article about why the human race must go into space and expand there.

Podcasts that I follow, Science Fiction, Tech news, and a bit more

2006-05-29T17:09:00.000-04:00

I recently started listening to podcast a lot more, (since my commute increased to 1 hour each due to road construction). These are the list of podcasts that I follow and listen to on a regular basis.

World News

Digital Planet -BBC News and Technology report
Living on Earth
Open Source - PRI Radio

Science News

APM Future Tense - Public radio's daily journal for the digital age
Current Science and Technology - at the Museum of Science, Boston
Ockham's Razor - Presented by Robyn Williams
Quirks & Quarks - CBC Radio
Science Friday - Making Science Radioactive
SETI Science and Skepticism
Slacker Astronomy
The RedShift report - Ontario Science Center
Universe Today -Space and Astronomy News

Tech News

Intellectual Icebergs - A Good Poke in the Brain
GeekBrief.TV - Video Podcast with news about tech tools and toys.

Short Stories

Gaming and tech talk

roll2d6 - Adam and Nate talk about games, gaming and gamers
Daily GizWiz - Giz(mo) Wiz(ard) Biz(ness)........a haven for gizmo and gadgets lovers!

Music and stuff

Aural Icebergs - the music podcast companion to Intellectual Icebergs
Random Signal - tangential transmissions from a disorganized mind
Nuketown Radio Active Podcast - Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Geekdom.
Thing a week - Jonathan Coulton

Radio Stories and news

Other podcasts from comments

StarDate
Popular Science - with Jonathan Coulton

Working Engineer

2006-05-26T13:43:00.000-04:00

I just ran across this Working Engineer blog. On it they have an insightful discussion of personal Finance and Engineering Tips for living. I'll be following this blog for a while to see what other interesting entries come up.

YaZug