I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. This is the black and white version.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. And presumably mostly from last year.
Pinoccio - A Complete Ecosystem for Building the Internet of Things | Indiegogo. Another exciting Arduino-compatible project. Compact Arduino boards with integrated mesh networking and gateway capability via WiFi to the Internet. All of this as open-source hardware and without a mandatory central server.
i.MX233 Product Summary Page. The CPU used by the Chumby One - pretty cool what's already in the core.
Chumby tricks - ChumbyWiki. If you look around, it's quite interesting to see what all could be done with the Chumby. It was really an open platform after all. So perhaps it's not so bad that the manufacturer is gone and the infrastructure is slowly disappearing, because it shows whether an open system can really continue to live, even if the originally driving force is gone. And apart from that, it can still remain a fun tinkering project. I think I will really replace my old radio alarm clock and do more with this thing. So if I'm late for work in the near future and miss morning appointments, you know what it's all about - then my hacked alarm clock has crashed.
Falling Faster than the Speed of Sound « Wolfram Blog. Interesting analysis of Felix Baumgartner's jump with Mathematica. I'm still in the play phase with Mathematica, so such things are quite exciting to get a better feel for how to approach problems with Mathematica. Working with Mathematica is quite different from normal programming environments.
ZDoc - Browse Files at SourceForge.net. And here comes the provisional salvation - a firmware that works offline and loads the widgets and all the stuff from a thumb drive. Not everything will work, but if I can at least get a radio alarm clock working again, it's already quite okay. So, it seems like another DIY project is on the agenda.
End of Chumby as we know it... Page 1 - Chumby.com - chumbysphere forum. The cloud is not always a good idea - I also have one of these Chumby devices at home, but if the rescue plan here doesn't work, it won't even be usable as an alarm clock. It looks like I should hurry up and root the device to get local software running on it myself. Basically, the Chumby is just a small embedded Linux system with a few hardware sensors and an integrated touchscreen (well, more of a squeeze screen - it's as imprecise as the first generations of Palm Pilots were after one year of use).
Juliana and I took a day trip to Koblenz by train. There we mainly visited Schloss Stolzenfels and of course the German Corner. And otherwise just felt like tourists. It was nice, a bit cold, but lots of sun.
Metabones announces Speed Booster lens adapter for mirrorless cameras: Digital Photography Review. The idea sounds compelling - simply use optics to compress the large full-frame image circle down to an APS-C image circle (approximately) and turn the 1.5x into a 1.1x with higher light intensity. But does it actually work as well in practice as described? I'm curious to see the test results.
Permaduino | Indiegogo. Interesting project: an Arduino-compatible board designed for permanent installation but still has a prototyping character (so it comes with a breadboard for wiring additional elements). The idea behind it: prototype with one of the classic systems and then rebuild it with this board to use it permanently - video cassettes with 8mm casing are used as the housing.
Back To Top: Android vs. iOS. An article about a curiosity in Android that has also irritated me several times. On iOS, you can quickly scroll to the top if you tap the title bar. On Android, there is nothing similar as a system-wide gesture. And it is not so easy to build something universal, as this article explains.
SPT100 Pan & Tilt System. Ok, I think I know what I need. With a device like this and, for example, a camera with simple image processing behind it, you can build a follower with which you could, for example, make sky observations. Or automatically created panorama sequences for Google+. Or optical area monitoring with detection and logging of changes. And it's not particularly expensive either.
Reflow Controller Shield Arduino Compatible - Rocket Scream. Oven control with Arduino. In this case for the optimal distribution of solder over circuit boards - but you can certainly modify this for optimal baking results or for curing prototypes or whatever. Pretty cool.
the_silver_searcher - Interesting for anyone who, like me, manages and searches through large source trees. Essentially something like ack - an automatic grep that runs through entire hierarchies and additionally filters files by various patterns, taking into account gitignore and hgignore. And all this not as a Perl script like ack, but in C with various native libraries and various optimizations for searching. It doesn't get faster than this unless you use pre-generated indexes (which come with their own problems).
If you want to use the Atom publishing protocol, you now need to install a plugin in WordPress 3.5 because it has been removed from the core. Of course, the WordPress developers didn't bother to include a corrected version of the Atom Publishing Protocol server in the plugin; it still contains the over 2-year-old bug with media uploads. Fortunately, my patch still works, but now it needs to be applied to a different file. Quite a mess, what they're doing there. And when I see how the bug in the WordPress core was ignored, my hope that someone will take the trouble to fix the plugin is pretty close to zero.
Polaroids interchangeable lens camera is awful hands-on | The Verge. Well, that's probably it then. The first prototypes and images are definitely different from what actually appears at CES, and that doesn't sound good at all. Sure, things could still balance out by the release, but I wouldn't bet my money on it. There are other, better cameras at comparable prices (e.g., the V1 sale, which is currently floating around for 310 euros with the 10-30 on Amazon). Update: this is probably a different camera; Polaroid seems to have released two different models with interchangeable lenses, only one of which has Android. But that the other one is actually good, well, my hopes are rather low there ...
[[CES 2013]] Bring On The Influx Of Android-Powered Photography Machines: Polaroid Announces The iM1836 Mirrorless Camera With Jelly Bean. Could be interesting to hack. And the system really looks suspiciously like the Nikon J1 as the basis - which would be even more interesting because you could also get other lenses (and in the long run other bodies). Of course, the question remains whether Android is messed up or quite open and if it is open, whether you can also easily put your own apps on it.
Use Your iPhone, Android, Or Windows Phone To Lock And Unlock Your Mac Using Bluetooth | Redmond Pie. Nice little hack - only needs a small open source program and two Apple scripts and you can trigger actions when, for example, a smartphone comes close to a computer or moves away from a computer - here using the example of the screen lock.
Spontaneously decided while dropping off my mother-in-law at the airport, if we had already driven half the way to Aachen, we might as well go all the way there and finally take a look at Aachen. Took pictures of Aachen Cathedral. Wow. It's really quite different from what we usually see in Münster (perhaps with the exception of the Klemenskirche).