Archive for March, 2009

 

links for 2009-03-30

 
 

http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2009/03/links-for-2009-03-30.php

links for 2009-03-23

 
 

http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2009/03/links-for-2009-03-23.php

links for 2009-03-20

 
 
  • Liquid crystal displays (LCD) come in two main types that are of interest to hobby and DIY makers; Character LCD displays and pixel / graphic LCD displays. This intro “How To” will be covering the more popular and less expensive character LCD displays based on the very common Hitachi HD44780 controller.
  • Civil Service Job Service API
    Requirements:

    * All http requests require a key – this will be issued by CO/CivilService.gov.uk via email to cswebsite@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk
    * All data are cached for 15mins. If you have updated a job and don't see the update please wait for the next cycle
    * If you are using the API we ask that you cache the data. This will reduce load to the service and allow you to serve up your pages or content faster
    * Please let us know if you intend using the service heavily e.g. over 5,000 calls per day so we can resource this site appropriately

    Licensing:

    The information available through this API is Crown Copyright. This means you are free to use or re-use this information, including for commercial purposes, once you obtain a click-use licence from OPSI (link: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/click-use/system/online/pLogin.asp) The conditions attached to this licence can be found here (link: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/click-use/index).

  • Resource for all things 555-related
  • "Holding a smoke alarm, battery installed, is somewhat like holding an unwound jack-in-the-box. While you know that it shouldn’t go off, there’s still a nagging suspicion that it might. I get a similar feeling when I check news websites in the morning – somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspect that the world might have caught on fire while I was asleep. So, it made at least some degree of sense to me to build a News Alarm – a device that sounds an alarm when specific new stories are detected ‘off the wire’."

http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2009/03/links-for-2009-03-20.php

links for 2009-03-18

 
 
  • "Kreol was created on the assumption that people like to make music. If you are reading this, chances are that you already know how to type and use a computer. By taking advantage of that fact, Kreol breaks down some of the biggest barriers that keep the average person from playing music. Simply enough, Kreol turns the computer's keyboard into notes and chords, while the mouse is used for expressive movements."

    This is just stunning – I'm trying to imagine the possibilities in an after-hours office… No word on whether it's a commercial product, unfortunately.

http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2009/03/links-for-2009-03-18.php

links for 2009-03-17

 
 
  • You're sitting in an airport or in a cafe, and people want your money for Internet access. They do allow ICMP traffic, though (i.e., you can ping machines on the Internet). Enters ICMPTX. (If you can't use ping, but you can issue name queries, use NSTX: IP-over-DNS.) There are several resources online to point you in the right direction, most notably Case of a wireless hack by Siim Põder. There is a similar, thoroughly undocument program called itun, a simple icmp tunnel that claims to do the same thing. Also, check out PingTunnel which is not IP-over-ICMP, but rather TCP-over-ICMP and, therefore, less useful.

    Once you've followed these instructions, you basically have a remote proxy, providing you with access to the Internet. Communication between you and the remote proxy is over ICMP.

  • You're sitting in an airport or in a cafe, and people want your money for Internet access. They do allow DNS traffic, though.

    If the ISP allows DNS traffic to any DNS server (and not just their own), you might consider running OpenVPN on UDP port 53 (thanks to Norman Rasmussen for this suggestion). If they don't, however, NSTX comes to the rescue. NSTX is a hack to tunnel IP traffic over DNS.

http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2009/03/links-for-2009-03-17.php

links for 2009-03-15

 
 
  • "I have no expectation of what happens next, but here’s a manifesto. Being interesting is as important as being useful. Making things that delight and inspire is as important as creating value. Old systems are crumbling; the best you can do is be nimble, smart and make some trouble."

    Tom's manifesto for what he's going to do next. I can't wait to see what he comes up with.

http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2009/03/links-for-2009-03-15.php

links for 2009-03-14

 
 

http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2009/03/links-for-2009-03-14.php

links for 2009-03-12

 
 

http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2009/03/links-for-2009-03-12.php

Toy abuse for fun and (non)profit

 
 

3345221754_7dd629b539This is a panda who has been volunteered to donate his eyes in the cause of – well, something or other.

I picked him up in a charity shop for a pound (is there anything sadder than the toy shelf in a charity shop?  I can’t help wondering how many toys ended up there after their owners were struck down by childhood leukemia or something) so technically, he’s recycled.   I chose a panda for two reasons – one, because I happen to like pandas; and two because their black eye patches mean that you can’t normally see their eyes particularly well.  This will become more important later…

The original idea was sparked by the phrase “a bear market” – so instead, this is a market bear.   In place of eyes, he’s going to have tri-colour LEDs – which will change colour according to how well the stock market is doing.   When it’s going down, he’ll glow red, and when it’s going up, he’ll glow green.   And if there’s been no change, the LEDs will just light up yellow.

There’s also going to be a button inside his paw, which will rebase the scale to the current value of the market – so squeezing his paw will switch the LEDs back to yellow, and then they’ll change colour the next time the market changes.

Although you can’t see it from the photos, he’s actually a glove puppet.  That’s ideal for my vivisectionist purposes, because it means he’s hollow enough to stuff the electronics up inside.   These are an Arduino microcontroller and an Arduino Ethernet shield, which will connect him to the interwebs.   Ideally I’d have preferred a wifi connection because then he won’t have cables emerging from his colon, but that’s for the next generation of mutilated soft toys.

The software is in two parts – there’s a server-side component, which grabs the market data from the Guardian website (I’m using the Guardian because their site is nicely laid out for scraping purposes, and they hopefully won’t be too upset if they find out) and then does the calculation to decide whether it’s up or down.   That feeds back an “up”, “down” or “same” response when polled by the Arduino sketch – which feeds the appropriate voltage onto the analogue outputs to light up the LEDs.   Squeezing his paw fires off a message to the server to rebase the calculations, so the up/down/same algorithm can start from wherever the market is standing at the point of squeeze.

The next stage is to grab the magnitude of the change and fade the LED up and down accordingly – bright for a big change, and dimmer if it’s smaller.   But getting my head around the Arduino Ethernet library is a big enough challenge for the moment, so to start with I’m going with the simple version.   So far it’s working on a breadboard, so the next stage is to build the circuits for implantation into the eye “sockets” and paw.  Extracting the eyes was something of a challenge, because they’re fixed in with fasteners designed to withstand small children gnawing on them – so removal was a case of sheer brute force and application of Tools.   There’s a set on Flickr which documents the whole gruesome process.

[Update: Panda vivisection redux]

links for 2009-03-10

 
 
  • I’ve learned from teaching workshops that many sewers are hesitant to give their bobbin cases a good cleaning as often as they should. It seems as if some are afraid to remove the parts necessary to give their machines a good cleaning and others simply forget.

    So my partner in crime, Bill, and I have put together a series of tips and photos that should help you get started.

  • "Developing with the Content API is easy for anyone with a very basic understanding of code.

    These steps should help clarify what it takes to get started with the service, but please let us know if you need any help."

  • "The inside looks just like the fabric pressure sensors, except each stitch is connected to a separate conductive fabric tab. The downside is that separate tabs and connections to these tabs take up a lot of space, especially if you want to achieve a tight matrix of sensors. A grid of lines and columns and some code to analyze these (separately power and measure) would allow for much tighter spacing. This version is nice because it is so simple."

http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2009/03/links-for-2009-03-10.php

 
 

About

Hello, I'm Tim. I'm a geek who builds online and mobile software and also takes photographs and messes around with technology. This is my personal website.

You can find out more about me and browse through the full archives. I also take photographs, and hack around with things. You can find me elsewhere on the interwebs, get in touch, or subscribe to a feed from this site.

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