Midnight Cheese

A few months ago for my birthday I received an Arduino board and a small 16×2 LCD screen. The Arduino is a lot of fun. It’s taken several months of off-and-on tinkering but I finally have it setup to read in RSS and XML feeds from a PHP script and display the selected data on the screen.

I’ll post the code soon, but first I wanted to just briefly go over actually attaching the screen to the Arduino. I ended up buying a parallel screen which requires quite a few more connection points compared to using a serial screen. I used this wiring scheme to hook-up the LCD. Finding the correct diagram for my screen took a little while of searching around the net, but once I found the right one everything worked well. (Sorry for the poor photo quality.)

Hookup wire. The 22 gauge wire fits snugly into the Arduino. Getting two wires into the same port is tricky, however.

Arduino with LCD screen.

Wires cut to length.

LCD connected to Arduino.

Hello, World!

The addition of the ‘Prev’ and ‘Next’ buttons in Google Reader is welcomed brilliance.

No more trying to scroll through long posts riddled with photos only to have my favorite browser buckle under the load.

Dog mounting and Scoble impressions are just two of the oddball antics that start up TWiST #13 this week. As a Graphic Designer I was interested to hear what Matt Mickiewicz, founder of 99designs and champion of spec work, had to say about his site.

If you’re a fan of Jason Calacanis(Mahalo & Weblogs, Inc. founder) you’ll instantly be lured in with his Vaynerchuk up-frontess yet invaluable industry insight which all comes out in engaging stories and personal examples. Everything any tech junky could ask for. This Week in Startups has some great segments, but this podcast is balls long.

Brutally Long
The only blaring downside to TWiST is its length. It’s brutally long. Weighing in at almost 2 and a half hours, TWiST is ridiculously lengthy. It’s really four shows mashed together. They’re kick ass shows, but it’s like a Halo marathon… eventually you have to get up and take a break.

Where My Pitches at?
The first show is pitch hour where people call in and literally pitch their ideas to Jason, which is awesome. These guys get some honest feedback about their ideas and pitch methods. Jason will call your methods donkey.

Guest Hour
During the second show we finally get to the guest, Matt Mickiewicz, who explains his success with hosting a forum for Graphic Design spec work.

The Obligatory Anti-Spec Rant
A large portion of the Design community sees services like Mickiewicz’s degrading the value of professional Graphic Design. I agree completely, but the AIGA can explain that issue much better than I can.

I’ll just say you get what you pay for with services like 99Designs. If nothing else, it groups the 80% of the 80/20 rule clients into one nicely avoidable area.

With that said, Mickiewicz is a smart guy with several successful startups under his belt. One of which includes SitePiont which he started when he was only 15. And Jason Calacanis did a good job of looking at both sides of the spec issue.

News Segment
Show four, the news segment, brings out a lot of Jason’s insight into why he is the master of marketing. In one segment he can unmercifully bash the Apple fan boys and then magically turn around and sell you on an Apple Computer all in about a 2 minute span. Andrew Warner is a bit stiff. It would be interesting to see someone as loose as Jason delivering the news.

Giri
The final of the four shows actually runs at the beginning of the podcast as 20 minutes of sponsors and Mahalo promos. This is fine and we all love Audible and the others. In fact, the sponsorship level of the show in just 13 episodes is rather impressive.

In the End
TWiST hits on about 7 of 8 cylinders in terms of concept and content. It’s classic Calacanis with his money knot and marketing mastery. He’ll call you out but keep you reeled in just enough to keep you on the line. A few more episodes under their belts and trimming out a bit of excess fat should make This Week in Startups a truly must-listen podcast for any tech fiend.

Jolicloud is a Linux based OS that’s blurring the lines between web apps and desktop apps. They do this by “installing” web apps such as Flickr and Facebook right along side traditional apps like Firefox and Pidgin. Want to use Twitter or Google Maps? Just click the application icon on your desktop like you would any other application. What Google hopes to do with their upcoming Chrome OS, Jolicloud seems to have already accomplished.

Installation And Hardware
I’ve been using Jolicloud on my Dell Mini 9 Netbook for about a week. Eventhough this is still alpha software, the install process was super smooth and this is the first Linux distro I’ve used where wireless works right away with no crazy custom kernel compiles and fanangaling.

Another nice touch is having a Flash plugin installed and working from the start. No need to install that separately.

Look and Feel
The Jolicloud interface is beautiful. We all live within the realm of the web these days and this interface is designed to fit in that world. The Jolicloud interface feels like a trim, slick web app rather than a dated and clunky desktop experience.

Oh so good, but oh so not
And where Jolicloud really shines, it’s also falling terribly short. While the Jolicloud interface is fantastic, it’s very limited in scope, as the Jolicloud interface is really only for app installation. So your desktop and application launcher, where you spend the most of your time, is a rebranded version of the Ubuntu NBR launcher application.

The Ubuntu NBR launcher is a fine app, but if the Jolicloud team can extend its app installer interface across the entire OS, they’ll really have something special. That Jolicloud interface is so well done, I want to see it everywhere!

Makes Perfect Sense
Wanting to edit a document from Google Docs, it feels so natural to just click on the Google Docs icon on my desktop. It performs so much like a traditional app, yet it’s all being run from the cloud in the sky. This is the future and Jolicloud is leading the way.

As a side note, this post was written with photos imported and resized entirely with Jolicloud.

In 4 short months, Follow Friday on Twitter has morphed from a great way to showcase interesting people, to a gluttonous spamfest now resulting in people jamming as many screennames as possible into 140 characters over and over again all day long.

Follow Friday needs to get back to its roots. Choose ONE interesting person, post their name, and explain WHY they are worth following. That’s it.

Remember: ONE interesting person per Friday and explain WHY.

P.S. Also, as an aside, rambling about your personal health problems is the quickest way to garner an unfollow. No one wants to read that. No one.

For over a year now my server has been pulling down an hourly snapshot of the current NOAA weather alerts.

This is a one year time lapse compiled from these images from March 2008 to March 2009. A snapshot of alerts was taken every hour. At 24 frames per second: 1 second = 1 day.

The homemade DTV antenna has been assembled and installed. Everything seems to be working well. All the local channels tune-in just fine. My TV doesn’t display signal strength, so I don’t really have any way of knowing if the signal is any stronger compared to the rabbit-ears. But it does get rid of the ugly antenna in the living room.

I placed the antenna in the attic above the garage and set-up an A-B switch to allow switching the living room TV between antenna and cable, should we ever subscribe to Comcast again.

Larger washers might be helpful, but other than that, the Make instructions worked out well.