Posts in the “technology” category

I took a few days off from life last week, went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and hacked the heck out of SARAH. This short new video shows some of the major changes to SARAH’s UI and capabilities:

To learn more about SARAH, check out all the details at my SARAH Kickstarter project page.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Marc Andreessen (also a founder of Netscape) recently released a series of 18 tweets regarding his concerns over cash burn rates at startups. He wrote his tweets as he agreed with a man named Bill Gurley, who told the Wall Street Journal that Silicon Valley “is taking on an excessive amount of risk right now.”

Here is the text from Mr. Andreessen’s 18 tweets:

I purchased an “IVSO Google Nexus 9 8.9-inch Bluetooth Keyboard Portfolio Case” a few days ago, and here’s a quick review of it.

First up, here’s an image of the IVSO folio with my Nexus 9. I placed a standard-size playing card on it so you can see its relative size:

I know remarkably little about using JSHint with Sublime Text 2 at the moment, but I finally found that if I installed JSHint like this from the command line:

$ npm install -g jshint

after earlier installing JSHint from within Sublime Text 2, JSHint magically started working in Sublime Text.

I guessed this in part by finding a README file with the Sublime Text JSHint install:

I’ve been working on putting together a Raspberry Pi “video streaming with camera module” system, and these are the links (and a few notes) that were helpful in the process. At the moment I’m using the “Stream video with MJPEG-streamer” approach, but it only shares images of snapshots that are taken a few times a second, so it’s not exactly what I had in mind. If I try anything next, I’ll go with the “Using nginx-rtmp” approach, which seems like it might serve up a real, live video stream.

Here are the links:

I have no idea why this works, but if I throw/slide my Google Nexus 9 tablet onto my old iPad 2, the iPad wakes up and logs in automatically. You can see it happen in this 30-second video:

I’m not touching any iPad buttons when this happens. My guess is that the iPad 2 thinks that I just removed a magnetic cover, but really, I have no idea why it does this.

I’m working on a mobile version of this website (alvinalexander.com), so I just took a few moments to look at the number of mobile users who visit here. Once I saw that number, I decided to look at one of my other websites, OneMansAlaska.com, as a point of comparison. Here’s what I saw (data via Google Analytics):

I probably spend about 10 hours a year looking at data related to website visitors, and today was one of those days where I gave it 15 minutes of time. Here’s a quick look at the data.

This first image shows what browsers the visitors are using:

I write mostly about Open Source and Macs, so if IE is a little lower than usual, it may be because of that.

This image shows the number of people using desktop, mobile, and tablet clients:

I’m working on an application/system where I have an FM radio chip in a Raspberry Pi, and I control the radio chip with a web service. The web service is written in Python, and is powered by the Python “Bottle” web server.

Here’s the Python/Bottle source code for my radio web application:

I'm just getting back to work after a long break, and here's a link to a 50% off sale at ThinkGeek to get things rolling. (Use that link if the image isn't showing below.)

Last night I finally got some time to work with my new Arduino Uno board, and created a little "Hello, world" program. This program is just the same "LED on Pin 13" program I see repeated in every book and on every website, but it really is helpful when you're struggling to get started with the Arduino hardware, like I was.

Shortly after writing my Arduino Uno Hello, World example, I read my documentation a little more, learned that Pin 9 on the Arduino Uno board is an analog pin, switched the LED wire to that pin, and created the following program, which slowly lights up the LED using an analog programming approach, and then fades the LED light out.

Here's the source code for my LED fade sketch:

As I've mentioned before, I recently wrote a series of Twitter scripts (such as this Scala Twitter client example), and the most recent version of these scripts sends me an email with the current Twitter trends. If you didn't know it, there can be a significant difference between various "Twitter trends", including these:

With the Facebook IPO coming up this week, I thought I'd take a quick look at recent IPOs from other tech companies. These charts generally show the early months after an IPO.

With thanks to Yahoo for the graphics, here are the charts:

Angie's List:

CafePress:

Google:

(The following content is from an email I sent to a relative about the Arduino. They have a college-age student who we might be interested in this.)

The programmable electronics kit I showed you is named "Arduino". Here's the main URL: arduino.cc

Here are links to some fun Arduino projects:

Summary: A look at iPad base stands.

For a while now I've been interested in finding an iPad stand that I can use in my kitchen. The idea is simple: If you're cooking something healthy, it takes a little time, so I'd like to be able to put my iPad in a stand and listen to Pandora or a show on Netflix while I'm cooking, or cleaning the dishes.

A week ago or so, a friend of mine told me about a game called Mindflex where you can use your brain waves to control a styrofoam ball. Ever since then, I've been wondering if you could do something like this with an Arduino.

This video shows an attempt at doing that:

Here's a link to that video:

Wow, in the worst story I've heard about Facebook privacy yet, it turns out that through a glitch in Facebook's programming, they gave personal user information to advertisers (reported first by the Wall Street Journal). As another Cnet article reports:

Sorry folks, I hoped to be able to release the source code I created for a Nagios Web Interface, but after starting on it a few hours ago, I'm giving up on this project. The code works just fine, as you can see from the screenshots below.

The problem is the amount of work it will take to make this code "clean" for public release. It currently has my client name all over it, and removing all those references is just going to take too long. (Unless of course an angel investor wants to contribute a few week's pay into my PayPal account.)

Picasa FAQ: How do I get Picasa to only scan certain folders/directories, and stay out of the rest of my directories?