Dabbler » Internet

Sexy Alphabet Image Generator

sethjust — Mon, 31 May 2010 21:58:57 +0000

When my girlfriend came across this erotic alphabet, the first thing she wanted was to be able to spell out various things with it. Add a pinch of python and php and the result is the Erotic Alphabet Image Generator.

The source code of the script used to generate the images is available here.

Update: Migratory Internet Junk

sethjust — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:54:26 +0000

I know it’s taken me a long time to post this, but I received my box of migratory junk on May 10! I got box INTJ-7 which had been shipped out by a nice guy from San Diego. I don’t have a lot to say now (and no pictures) but I’d like to share some of what I got out of it. Perhaps my biggest find was right on top: a Hand Held Products IT4410 2D barcode scanner. On the product page I found the manual (pdf link) which explains all of its features.

It turns out that the scanner emulates a PS/2 keyboard and will read almost any 1D or 2D barcode symbology. After a few hijinks with a loose ribbon cable and flaky PS/2 support on my computer I got the scanner working perfectly. I was even able to change its configuration by scanning barcodes from the manual displayed on my LCD (though I don’t know if it will work with glossy screens — mine is matte).

I’m planning on putting up a more complete summary of what I’ve found, but here are a few other things that caught my eye:

A solenoid-controlled proportional valve for small pneumatics or hydraulics.
A bag of large rubber grommets, one of which I cut up to replace the feet on a table lamp.
Three matched stepper motors.
A worm-gearbox connected to a large motor with integrated optical encoder.
A wide variety of IR LED/phototransistor gates.
A pile of 1.8V, 2.5V and 3.3V voltage regulators.

Stay tuned for pictures and more details on what I’m taking and what I’m going to do with it.

Heads Up: Migratory Internet Junk

sethjust — Tue, 04 May 2010 04:08:18 +0000

If you haven’t heard of TGIMBOEJ (The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk), you should definitely check it out. The basic idea is that a box of random electronic junk gets shipped between makers and tinkerers, each of whom take something and contribute something to the box, and document what they end up doing.

To make a long story short, I was recently offered a chance to receive one of these migratory lending libraries, so expect to see something in this space about it soon.

Obama Buttons!

sethjust — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:01:42 +0000

Guess what? MoveOn.Org is giving out FREE Obama buttons!

We’re giving away new Obama buttons for free, as part of a massive national visibility campaign. Want one? Click here:

http://pol.moveon.org/obamabuttons/?id=-6688660-5VxS1dx

After you’ve gotten yours, forward this email on to everyone you know so that they can get free Obama buttons too.

If hundreds of thousands of us wear these wherever we go, we’ll send a strong message that Barack Obama is the candidate with the buzz, momentum, excitement—and sincere support of regular folks across the country.

Everybody should pick one of these up and wear them!

Facebook Chat

sethjust — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:09:13 +0000

So Facebook FINALLY rolled out Facebook Chat for my network. I’ve played with it for a while and made a few observations:

It’s nice to have notifications and online friends down in the bottom bar of the window.
It gets annoying having to wait for all of the information (scripts, etc) associated with chat to load, but on a fast enough connection it’s fine.
It’s somewhat difficult to change your status, and not a lot of people do it.
The premise of Facebook chat is really sound. It’s nice to have all of your friends on the same IM service, without having to collect usernames. You never have the problem of not knowing who somebody is when they message you.
The client seems lacking. It seems that the Facebook team put some effort in trying to make it act like less than a full-on desktop application, which would get in the way of using Facebook, but at the same time, it’s too weak for me to truly appreciate. I can imagine getting it integrated into Adium, and having all of my friends pop up in a friend group there. Not only would that be awesome as all hell, but I would probably use it over AIM, if only because more people would be available to me through it.

In the end, I’m surprised by how much I like Facebook Chat. I was expecting it to be another bit of annoying noise in the already crowded IM space. It takes a lot of the likable things about Google Chat (that I don’t get the benefit of because I prefer POP to webmail) but adds some great features, like integration with Facebook status (which should encourage more micro-blogging ala Twitter as people use that status as an IM status), and a great in-browser chat experience. However, for my uses, which center around discrete applications, windows (or even tabs) for different tasks, Facebook chat throws to many things into one tab of the browser. When Adium gets Facebook Chat integration, I’ll be excited.

Flock Update

sethjust — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:21:56 +0000

So I’ve been playing around with Flock a bit more, and I’ve discovered some more. I played with the webmail integration, which isn’t great… It just detects new messages and then sends you to the website. I’d appreciate if I could get POP or IMAP into the browser, but I can live with a separate desktop app.
As to Digg support, it’s supposedly going to be integrated into the next release. I’m trying to get my hands on the latest betas, but they have a nasty tendency to crash on my machine. Oh well.
I’ve also discovered that Flock supports a huge amount of Firefox Addons. I added my personal favorites Greasemonkey, Stylish, Stealther and AdBlock Plus.

Flock

sethjust — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:57:49 +0000

So, I’ve been trying out the Flock browser which is based on Firefox. However, it’s twist is that it’s designed to integrate with a bunch of different social services. I have it set up to work with my Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Photobucket accounts, as well as this WordPress blog. It will also work with things like Twitter, del.icio.us. It also supports RSS feeds, which I’ve imported my whole set of feeds into. So far it’s replaced two applications on my desktop (Safari and NetNewsWire), and if I were to set it up with my email, I could get rid of a third.
It was very easy to set it up. I installed the 1Password plugin for it and fired it up. I was asked whether I wanted to import information from another browser, which let me grab EVERYTHING (bookmarks, cookies, history, saved passwords, etc.) from Safari. It auto-detected when I visited a site that it could integrate with (Facebook). However, to get it to add my Facebook I had to log out and then back in, which was a minor annoyance, but after that it worked perfectly. Getting my RSS feeds in was a bit harder, I had to export them from NetNewsWire as OMPL and then import them, but that was easy and quick.
If you ask me, it does its thing pretty well. It takes a bit of getting used to to use the social features, but in the end it’s a lot more polished to do it all through the one interface than to use a bunch of tools that are inconsistent. However, I miss a few things. First off, it’s slow. A lot slower than Safari and Camino, and even a bit slower than Firefox. However, so far I’ve put up with it because I like what it’s doing. The other quibble I have is that I keep wanting more integration. One notable hole is Last.fm integration, which would be wonderful, but it would also be nice to see my Digg friends in there, and be able to Digg stories.
Overall, I’d suggest that those with the time and curiosity to do so should install Flock and give it a try. It’s fun, and you might just like something.