Rex The Dog, one of my favorite remixers has a new album coming on September 1, 2008. To promote, he's drawn a sweet comic strip to tell you all about it.
I especially *love* the drawing of Depeche Mode and Yazoo.
Blogwatch: BibliOdyssey
If you're not already subscribed in Google Reader to this one, do it now! BibliOdyssey is a gold mine of vintage printed materials of all kinds. It's nice to see someone preserving the history of these treasures so it can be shared with the rest of us. Most are of high resolution, suitable for printing, framing and hanging in your home.
MINI Factory Tour
;)
One of the highlights of our trip to London was a visit to the MINI factory in Oxford. We weren't allowed to take pictures during the tour but in this blog post from Paul Tan, you can get a good feel for what it was like for us.
MINI has horrific accident– occupants walk away.
Take a look at this picture of a post-accident MINI Cooper. The car ended up on it's roof after unknown circumstances. Apparently all occupants walked away. Who says that small can't be safe too?
Link via Motoring File.
More pictures via Vancover MINI Cooper Club message board.
Arduino Sensor Workshop Document
Here's a link to a great PDF document from a Purdue University professor. It details how to connect certain sensors such as different switches, serial communication and analog sensors to an Arduino board. Highly informative reading.
Rex the Dog and Punk Monkey perform Tony the Beat
I don't know why, but this video cracks me up on a consistent basis so I thought I'd share it. I love the song, and Rex The Dog's style (check out the remix he did of Depeche Mode's Photographic). Maybe you'll get it too.
For the love of 8 bits.
Some local artists who know who to rock it with only 8 bits.
/* Wait for VBLANK */
Alex Mauer
no-carrier
Floggidog
8GB
And a live event coming up..
Joan Crawford and Colonel Sanders
I found this last night while searching for the hilarious outtakes of Colonel Sanders recording a commercial. I remember it as originally just an audio recording but someone added a slideshow to it and this picture was in it. Since Crawford was a Pepsi mouthpiece, maybe this is when KFC becomes part of Pepsico?
Whats up with the hat? Reminds me of the flight attendants from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
iPhone 2.0 Location Services
So it looks like a company called SKYHOOK Wireless is powering the Wi-Fi location services in the the new iPhone 2.0 update. This is good news for first generation iPhone users as it adds really very good positioning to the cell tower service from the 1.0 release.
What was interesting to me was how they gather this data. They pay folks to drive around with one of their boxes (which I assume is a laptop of some sort with a GPS and a Wi-Fi antenna to record all positions of all Wi-Fi APs that are found along with strengths.
You can even earn some extra money by being a driver for them (if they need your area scanned or rescanned I suppose) by filling out their online form.
Let me know in the comments if you sign up and if you get accepted!
IR interfacing with a LED messgage sign, part 3
Code finished, uploaded, time to take it out for a test. I wired up everything, confirmed that the IR LEDs were in fact lighting with my digital camera (FYI, IR LEDs will glow with a purple tint to them when viewed through most cameras). The first test was unsuccessful. The sign taunted me with it's “STOP MODE” message. The sign will beep on IR received but I heard nothing. So I spent some time adjusting the pulse times. Still nothing. I spent a few more hours adjusting the code without success.
Then, as a last ditch effort, I wondered what would happen if I flipped the pulses around. That is to say, instead of pulsing the IR LED at the top of the graph (1), pulse it only at the bottom of the graph (0). I made the change, uploaded the code and was rewarded with “BEEP BEEP BEEP” coming from the sign. I then tried to remember all of the other changes I made and reverted back to them.
Like any good programmer, the first thing to write is “HELLO WORLD.” It's not without it's problems, however. The key strokes aren't always received 100% which is frustrating. Double key presses (for instance, the two LL's in HELLO) need to have a long pause inserted into them or it believes the key was held down by accident. The sign is fairly old so it may not have the best equipment inside. Or I may have gotten something wrong. Anything's possible!