Dave Bullock / eecue : Programmer | Photographer | Admin | Human

"To continue you must first add this this website to your trusted sites in Internet Explorer" ... I was running Windows Update. Nice! 

I have been using Newsfire since February of last year. It was the first RSS reader that I've ever paid money for. Newsfire had a good deal of issues that I didn't like. I emailed the Newsfire developer and asked if a bug could be fixed, but he replied that NewsFire wasn't in a development cycle. He wasn't very nice about it either. Anyhow, I had been tempted to go back to NetNewsWire for some time now, but never did because I didn't want to pay for a second RSS reader. Luckily for me NewsGator is now giving away NetNewsWire for free! I have switched back and I am extremely happy so far.  

A few months ago, before the iPhone was released, I put my email address into an AT&T/Cingular form so I could be notified when it was available for purchase. I later decided that AT&T's horribly privacy (NSA) track record was enough reason not to switch to their service so I'm sticking with T-Mobile for now. I just got an email from them, trying to get me to buy some random crap, and I decided to click on the "Remove Me" link at the bottom of the page. That link brought me to the following page:

It appears that they want your address, cell phone number, landline number, name and email address to remove you from their email list. It turns out that they just want your first and last name and your email address for the removal to work, but the form is certainly not clear about that and I'm sure plenty of folks fill out the whole thing. I didn't put my actual name into the fields, but added something a bit more colorful that I'm sure nobody will actually read. Anyhow, the mass email should really just have a link that removes you, instead of taking you to this horrid form. 

I just landed in Reno, NV for the Super Computing '07 (SC07) conference. I am here on assignment for WIRED News. Keep an eye out here and on wired.com for photos of clusters, supercomputers and various other cool and interesting toys from assorted government and industry nerderies.  

So I won a Basic Stamp kit from ebay last week. Last night I had a chance to play with it. I went through the included book, and got through most of it. In the end I built the following:

That is a servo on the left, the basic stamp has some code in it that detects the position of the potentiometer in the lower center of the breadboard using capacitor discharge timing and then moves the servo to match the pot's position. The 7 segment display lists a number between 1 and 10 depending upon the servo's position. The white colored LED actually flashes either red or green depending on if you're rotating the pot clockwise our counter-clockwise. It was fun to build and actually not that hard.

I am really excited about programming microcontrollers and I'm looking forward to my next projects. At some point soon I feel like I'll be able to finally hack the Furby. You can check out the code I wrote here.

Update for Riyad:I made the thing on the left spin when I turned the little white knob on the right. I did this using magic. 

Thanks to Scott Beale I now have a Yahoo! Mash profile. I also have invites if you need one. It would be helpful if mash included a way to invite from a vcard file, but otherwise it seems pretty cool.

UPDATE Ok so I know this is still in beta, but the fact that Yahoo's own service flickr's module has now broken my RSS feed link is somehow pleasantly ironic:

Invalid URL: http%3A%2F%2Fapi.flickr.com%2Fservices%2Ffeeds%2Fphotos_public...

I should point out that it did work this morning.

UPDATE 2 I have added a few friends and none of them show up in my friends list, although I show up in theirs. Odd.

UPDATE 3 Ok I get it, the friends don't show up until they've claimed and set up their profiles. There are some pretty cool little modules, I like the twitter feed. 

I was watching the most recent episode of The IT Crowd, and I thought I spotted a copy of MAKE sitting on the desk in Roy's flat. I grabbed a screenshot and then compared it to my complete MAKE collection and it is clearly Volume 02 ofMAKE.  

Dear Santa Claus,

I have been a relatively good boy this year and I would like a shiny new Hitachi TM-100 Tabletop Scanning Electron Microscope. I know what you're going to say, "Dave, you already have a microscope and it can easily fit on a tabletop." Yes, that is true, but I have an old optical microscope and if I had an electron microscope just think of the photos I could take! They would by much cooler than these I took last year.

The TM-100 will be on display (hopefully a hands on display!) at the 2007 WIRED Nextfest. 

I just signed up for an interesting social aggregator website called Jaiku. It has the same functionality as twitter, but it can subscribe to and display your RSS feeds. I'm not sure I'll use it as much as twitter, but it seems like a useful application. You can check out my Jaiku page here. I heard about it via a twitter from Jason DeFillippo, who was waiting to get in to the Jaiku launch party in SF, but apparently ended up leaving with Scott Beale due to the long, motionless line.

Update: As it turns out, but Scott and Jason made ended up going to the Jaiku party, as evidenced in this laughing squid blog post. 

My Blackberry Pearl's trackball just stopped working again. This is my second Pearl that failed for the same reason. The trackball scrolls, but does not click. According to T-Mobile, this is a known issue with the Pearl. They are sending me a replacement... again. 

I have unlimited invites to Joost and Dopplr. Shoot me an email if you would like one. 

I've recently started tracking my RSS feed information through FeedBurner. So far it seems pretty darn cool. If you don't know what I'm talking about, RSS is a way to keep track of your favorite sites without having to constantly visit them to see what is new. There are a bunch of different online and desktop RSS readers. I used to use NetNewsWire, but I switched over to NewsFire. I actually kind of miss NetNewsWire, so I may go back at some point. Some good online readers are Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes and Newsgator Online. Here is a link to the rss feed if you want to subscribe. You can also now subscribe to email updates by clicking on this link.  

A few months ago I signed up for twitter, but I really didn't see the point to using it. I've decided to give it another try, so I've been updating my info and I've invited a bunch of my friends and neighbors to try it out. So far it has been pretty darn cool and I can see how this could be really useful for organizing spur of the moment things. You can check out my twitter page here. 

I just signed up for the Dopplr beta, so far it seems pretty cool. I think it will be ever more helpful when more of my friends sign up for it and we can coordinate our travels. I have a few more invites, so if you want one, shoot me an email.

I also have unlimited invites for the Joost beta. Right now it only works on Intel Macs and PCs. If you are interested in an invite, let me know. Over the past couple months that I've been using it, the amount of content has exploded. It still doesn't have everything I watch, but it definitely does have a bunch of interesting shows on there.  

This blog post is a reminder to myself to use the interrobang (‽ in html) more often in my writing. Heck yeah‽ 

After many years of using X10 products to control various aspects of my house (apartment actually) I ended up stowing them all in a large box several years ago and eventually selling them all on eBay right before my wedding.

I decided some time ago to start over with Insteon products, I'm glad I waited a couple years for V2 stuff to come out, as from what I've read they fixed some annoying issues. So here is what I bought:

• 2 x dimmer switches - $40 2876DB
• 1 x control panel switch - $70 2486D
• 1 x appliance module - $35 2456S3
• 1 x usb control module - $70 2414U
• 1 x tabletop control module - $35 2430
• 1 x 3 prong dimmer module - $35 2456D3

As you can see I didn't buy any RF extenders, which was my bad, I figured they were only for large houses, and as I live in a fairly small loft I didn't think I would have any issues. For some reason I thought every module had an RF transmitter in it, obviously I was wrong, but luckily 90% of my loft is on one phase so most everything works. I will be ordering a few more lamp modules and a pair of the RF extenders on Monday.

Unfortunately the ICON on/off switch was DOA so I'll have to return that, hopefully it won't be a painful process.

The only issues I have so far is that the table top remote control, the Smartlinc puts out a really annoying high pitched whine. My wife couldn't hear it, but I can hear it quite clearly. It wouldn't be an issue, but I am using the control on my nightstand. I will talk to SmartHome about it on Monday when I call to return my faulty switch.

We are an Apple and FreeBSD based household, so currently I am using Indigo 2 in demo mode, I will probably buy it, although it is quite expensive at $180. When I had an X10 setup I controlled everything via my FreeBSD server using some custom scripts with a php frontend. I see that there are some linux drivers, but nothing for FreeBSD as of yet. Indigo is packed full of features, and is server / client based so it may work for me.

Obviously Insteon is leaps and bounds better than X10 and so far both my wife and I are very happy with it. She especially loves the romance mode I programmed.  

I just got an invite token for Joost now that they support OS X, (thanks for the invite xeni). So far it seems pretty cool, I watched a couple of national geographic episodes. The way in which Joost stops for commercial breaks is annoying, although it is only shows 1 short commercial, the timing of the breaks doesn't coincide with a stopping point in the actual media you're watching. The interface is really slick, and the social networking aspects seem pretty damn cool, although I didn't find anyone else watching what I was watching so some of the features weren't really useable, like chat for instance. There is also very little content in the system right now, but I'm guessing that will change rapidly. I searched for "monkey" and found nothing, while photography turned up only 2 hits. If Joost takes off I can see the big networks putting their content on it, and that would rock.  

For the last 6 months or so I've been using my trusty moleskine for taking notes, making checklists and other useful and not so useful tasks such as opening a beer bottle (which doesn't work due to the flexible nature of the moleskine's cover). Yesterday I picked up a new one as mine is almost full and when I got home did a little googling about moleskines. I found this cool site called Moleskinerie and decided to shoot them an email with some photos I had taken of my moleskine. The owner of the site recognized me from my protest photos and then posted what I sent him.  

One of my caver friends, Tom Gilleland, who co-owns a cave with some of the people from my grotto, also runs a software development company called Beach Ware that specializes in games, stock media and educational software. His software hinges on a tongue-in-cheek algorithm which he calls faith based math [faithBasedMath() ?] and which he defines as:

The act of ignoring logic to come to a conclusion that meets your personal specifications. An illogical dichotomy often used by politicians, businessmen, and other rascals to justify a one-sided, self-weighted deal.

I've been saying this was going to happen for a while now, it just makes sense that Google would create its own operating system. I actually hadn't thought too much about a cheap computer, but I suppose that makes sense, too bad WalMart will be selling it. Google just announced that they will be selling TV content via Google Video and also that they are offering the "Google Pack" that comes with Firefox, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, Picasa, Google Earth, and Adobe Reader 7. No Google OS Yet.