flurries of latent creativity

fitbit for bonsai trees

2013-08-06

Things have been kindof busy lately but I’ve been on-again / off-again working on a little project to wirelessly track the temperature, light level and soil moisture of my bonsai tree, so I can track its progress and know when to water (and more importantly, when not to).

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Wixel

2013-06-23

I’m working on a project (more soon!) which needs to sample a few sensors and send data wirelessly at low power. After testing out an Arduino Uno + Bluetooth shield (too flaky, too bulky) and deciding that all the BLE solutions out there are not quite ready yet (though some look promising), I discovered the Pololu Wixel.

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Introducing PiUi: add a simple mobile phone UI to your RaspberryPi project.

2013-03-20

I’m excited to introduce you to a project I have been working on for a few weeks in my spare time: PiUi. A lot of folks asked how to use my RPi Timelapse Controller without the LCD Plate - which is kindof expensive and not everyone is comfortable to solder one up themselves.

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Raspberry Pi Website Hit Tracker

2013-02-04

You just made a funky neon sign flash in my living room. How? I have just completed my latest project which is a neon lamp which lights up every time someone visits my website.

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Raspberry Pi Timelapse Controller

2013-01-13

A few weeks ago, I found this beautiful video on Youtube – a timelapse video of stars and the Milky Way. Seeing the stars appear to rotate overhead (due to the rotation of the Earth) and the intricate structure of our own galaxy gave me a profound feeling of the scale of the universe that we move through on spaceship Earth.

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Raspberry Pi webcam; a gentle intro to crontab

2012-12-27

Here's a quick and easy first project for new [Raspberry Pi](http://www.raspberrypi.org/) owners - turn your Pi into a webcam, and learn about Linux's ability to run repeated tasks at scheduled intervals with the `cron` utility.

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My bacon talk

2012-12-26

The awesome folks over at devslovebacon have made my talk available on youtube. It's a pretty good quality recording, hope you enjoy it.

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Living in the future

2012-11-20

Paul Graham’s latest essay - How to get startup ideas - is a great read. I was struck by the Bucheit/Pirsig conjecture: "Live in the future, then build what's missing." and the following paragraph regarding ideas that come out of folks' experience at college.

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Parsing huge XML files with go

2012-06-19

I’ve recently been messing around with the XML dumps of Wikipedia. These are pretty huge XML files - for instance the most recent revision is 36G when uncompressed. That’s a lot of XML!

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