>Been around the distributions recently and currently loving PinguyOS. As an aide memoir to myself, if you want to remove the notifications when pressing the caps lock key (which I do, as I’ve mapped that key to control), rm /bin/lock_keys Thanks to the helpers on #pinguyos on freenode for the advice.
> Quiet on the Arduino front for the last couple of week not helped by hospital visits. I received a week or so ago some RGB LEDs from the wonderful people at Oomlout, you can see them here. Damn cheap (three for two quid), easy to setup and pretty to look at. I was playing with a colour sensor a few weeks back so my next task is to get these lighting up based on the sensor readings. A lot…
> We have three children, ages 12, 7 and 4. None of them have ever eaten a savoury pie. Today was the day we ended that. That is a Marks and Spencers’ roast chicken pie. Selina didn’t like it, Hugo and Alisa said they did but didn’t eat much of it. We won’t be having another in a hurry.
> This weekend I was going to play around with servos and motors, but due to a missing diode I only got the servo working, displayed below. Yes, that’s a matchstick attached to it with Blu-Tac. The processing language is actually very nice to play with. If I squint and pretend it’s Javascript then I can write in it without missing python too much. The whole purpose of playing around with electronics is deep down I’d like to know a…
> Hardest thing I’ve wired up so far. Not ‘hard’, just tedious. But it works!! Weeeeeeee. Buy yours here.
> OK, whilst I am here, there’s another addition. The Amicus18 could be considered an Arduino with a PIC processor. Once again, the Amicus18 homepage at http://www.myamicus.co.uk/ gives the summary: Amicus is a multifunction development system inspired by the popular Arduino board, however, the Amicus board uses a Microchip PIC®microcontroller instead of an Atmel AVRtm type For the moment I am going to focus on the Arduino, learn some .NET and do some Netduino and then play with the Amicus18…
> My last posting detailed getting my Arduino displaying a temperature sensor on a LCD. That worked fine. Soon after that I took delivery of a Netduino. A Netduino is … well … to quote from http://www.netduino.com/: Netduino is an open source electronics platform using the .NET Micro Framework. Featuring a 32-bit microcontroller and a rich development environment. Suitable for engineers and hobbyists alike. It’s basically an Arduino that you program via the .NET language. I’ve not used Microsoft languages…
> I’ve dealt with software for a long time, over twenty years. Software is quite simple really when you know the basics but to people totally outside of it, it no doubt looks like magic. I’ve always wanted to learn more about hardware. I remember buying an electronics book whilst in Japan but did nothing with it. A short while ago I picked up a starter Arduino kit. Arduino is (to quote the site) an open-source electronics prototyping platform based…
> Headed to Chester Zoo today, not been there for a year or so. Birthday treat for Alisa (four on Tuesday) and she really enjoyed, as did we all. As a grumpy old man I do wonder why things are so expensive. Five of us meant a family ticket plus another child ticket. And by default they give you the price with a 10% voluntary contribution added came to £67.45. They do ask if that’s OK but the pressure is…
>This evening I had the pleasure of looking at a system unconnected with work. The system is critical to the client and put together by a Computer Science graduate and I was asked to give an opinion unofficially for a friend. Oh my god. I knew I was in for fun when the schema had tables with mixed upper/lower case – and field names with spaces, percentages, dollar signs and all manner of exciting characters. The system had comments only…