It was over 30 years ago that I first learned to solve the Rubiks Cube. Then 15 years ago I learned to solve it all over again. And recently, I’ve learned that learning to solve it is still good fun!
Read on to find out how this little twisty puzzle has featured in my life…
A few years ago, I walked passed a shop in London that sold a Duct Tape Wallet Kit. For about £15 it included a few lengths of duct tape pre-cut to length and some instructions. My interest was piqued but not enough to leave me with an empty wallet. Instead I invested in some Google time and a £4 roll of tape (which would have done around 20 wallets!) After about 4 years it was looking a bit battered and worn, and I had a few ideas to improve on my first one.
This time I made it with camera at the ready. Read on to learn more…
Like so many of you out there, I love listening to The Minutes podcast. Even the starting jingle gives me a smile because I know there is an hour of happiness about to arrive in my ears.
I’m sure you can imagine how delighted I was delighted to hear that the theme tune had been turned in to a ringtone. Yay \o/ However, the official download from here http://theminutespodcast.tumblr.com/post/15228052921/the-minutes-ringtone is in a .M4R format, which is fine for all the iPhone junkies out there, but not any good to most of the other 74% of mobile phone users.
So, if you like your ringtones in a good old MP3 format, I’ve converted it for you and you can download it here;
Minutes Theme MP3 Ringtone
On Android, long-click then save link, then play it in the standard music player app, menu > set as ringtone
Don’t forget, you can still listen to the latest The Minutes from here http://feeds.feedburner.com/theminutes
Enjoy!
I like hacking. I like cakes. So why not combine the two? (I’ve decided to call it Cacking!)
If you have ever wanted to get Diabetes but wasn’t sure of the quickest ways to get it, or if a sugar coma is still on your bucket list then read on for a recipe that will make even Willie Wonka raise an eyebrow…
Rubiks Cubes have been around since the early 80′s, and Unicycles have been around since, well, the invention of the wheel as far as I can tell. And in that time every possible new idea around either one has been done. Until now that is!
Although there are a lot of people that can ride a unicycle, relatively few can ride an inverticycle (Probably around 20-30 people in the UK). Solving the standard 3x3x3 Rubiks Cube isn’t that rare. However, if you drew a Venn Diagram of people that could do both, it would be a very very slim slither of overlap. If you add to it the people that have done both, and have video evidence for it, I believe that will give you an intersection with one person in it. Me!
I will be getting in touch with Guinness shortly to see if there is any kind of category for this record
Well it only seems like 6 weeks ago that I was posting about how this site was all nice and virus free. Well, less than 2 weeks later, my hosting company, Dreamhosts announced that loads of their sites were infected. Yup, that included mine! Well, I’ve finally found the time to switch hosting company and hopefully I’ll stay clean this time.
I had planned to move to LCN as they have some pretty good packages at decent prices and they come highly recommended. Sadly, though, they need the domain transferred to them so they can managed that in order to provide hosting. Even after a discussion with a very nice guy in pre-sales they still have needed my domain transferring.
I then looked at www.tsohost.co.uk. They were rated highly for security and WordPress hosting and within an hour my old site was up and running on their new servers!
The setup and transfer process was very straightforward, although I’ve had to reinstall all the WP plugins I liked on the old site. I have lost a few embedded photos too, so you’ll have to bare with me with some of the posts here until I get a chance to find the original pics.
Fingers crossed I won’t be needing to do another ‘virus free again’ for a long long time now!
A while ago I started logging temperatures to Pachube via a Nanode. For the most part this works fine, but sometimes something breaks and I might lose a few hours or days worth of data. It might be the Nanode that’s gone down, or Pachube, or (most likely) my Internet connection. So I decided to build a simple 3 stage external Watchdog Timer that would monitor the status of the feed and start taking steps to rectify it.
If you have seen my previous blog entry, you’ll know I have been playing around with an ATtiny85 for an upcoming project (more on that later…). Using an Arduino (or, in my case a Xino from Ciseco) is easy enough, but when a sketch needs lots of tweaking to fine tune it, it means the ATtiny spends most of its time going in and out of the breadboard. So I decided to build a dedicated ATtiny programmer
One of the most appealing things about the Arduino and ATmega328 is their size and simplicity. After working with desktop and server computers for years I just loved how a small little chip could be programmed easily to achieve things that I cannot get a full blown computer to do. I have never been a computer programmer though, but I know they don’t interface with the ‘real’ world too easily.
If a 28 pin micro controller is good, wouldn’t an 8 pin micro be even better? Well, I started to research the ATtiny85 and discovered that it is almost as good as its big brother in some situations. But best of all, it can be programmed from the familiar Arduino IDE
Those of you that read my blog regularly, either at the main sowen.com site or through feeds at planet.nottinghack.org.uk, may have noticed I’ve been very quiet for the last couple of months. Some of you have even noticed that my site had been infected with nasty gremlins. Well, here’s what happened;
Some nice little Russian software vendors wanted a way to reach a larger audience, and found a loophole in my websites security that allowed some visitors to my site to be redirected to their site. As it happens, their site either doesn’t exist, or is blacklisted by all the ISPs I’ve tested with, but that’s not the point. The point is that when I went direct to my site, it was fine. Everything looked as it should, and worked normally. Visitors coming in from Google, or other search engines, however, were sent off to Russia. Google realised what was going on, and I found that sowen.com was on their blacklist!
I spent time cleaning the site, running checks, installing updates, resubmitting it to Google, and generally pulling my hair out. Despite my attempts at fixing things, I just couldn’t get Google to recognise it as clean. So, all that time I didn’t want to add any more posts to the blog because that just causes embarrassment when I tell people I’ve got a new update.
Eventually I had to concede that I wasn’t able to fix things myself. So I turned to the clever bods over at Nottingham Hackspace and asked for help. I owe big thanks to all those that offered help, but most of all to Marcus. He found the .htaccess that had a conditional redirect in it that was causing all the grief.
I’m proud to say that I’ve been virus free for over 3 days now, and Google has removed me from their blacklist. Security has been improved on too so I shouldn’t be in this position again. I’m now ready to start turning all the mental blogging I’ve done in the last two months in to real blogging!
Thanks again to those that pointed out the problem and the good guys at Nottingham Hackspace. I’m sorry if any of you have been worried that you could have been infected (I’m assured that you couldn’t), and I’m sorry for the lack of updates recently.
I’ve been working on a few Arduino projects recently that will hopefully result in varying levels of home automation. The effect so far has been to stick a box here, plug this in there, and dangle a wire from over there, with a general haphazard (with emphasis on the ‘hazard’ bit in some places!) outcome.
If this is to work with any degree of success, it needs some more permanent infrastructure. It needs power. It needs internet connectivity. It needs to be centralised. It needs easy access to things I want to monitor and/or control. It needs to be tidy and out of the way, but easily accessible. There’s a shelf in my cloak room that meets most of those criteria, so this weekend I started getting it prepared;
These days displays are all digital readouts or multifunction LCD screens that give you indications of pretty much everything that’s going on. What seems to be lacking though is a good old fashioned analog dial with a needle pointing at a number. Of course, a dial is normally limited to a single use, but I wanted to see if I could make something that’s the best of both worlds.
As regular followers of the blog will know, I love Arduinos and all the stuff they can do. Those that know me will also know that I don’t love Christmas, particularly the seasonal decoration stuff. So this project was a nice mix of the two!
I decided to make myself some Arduino powered Xmas lights that vary their ‘chase’ speed based upon how close people are to my house.
Intrigued? Read on…
This week I… Built a Xino Basic for Atmel as sold on http://shop.ciseco.co.uk
This is sold as a kit that anyone with even the most basic of soldering skills can put together. This is just about the cheapest way to get an Arduino compatible board that fits the standard Arduino shields. It also boasts a nice little prototyping area at the top which will mean that a lot of smaller projects can be completed without the need for additional shields. (See my Xino Dice post for an example of how the prototyping area can be used)The main kit comprises of the PCB, processor socket, connector headers and some resistors, capacitors and an LED
I’ve been messing about with Arduino derived micro controllers, and have been looking for a way to get them to send simple messages to and from each other. Something simpler than TCP/IP (which requires special hardware and relatively large libraries to run it), but more generic and flexible than just connecting an output pin on one device to the input pin on another.
aProtocol (or LLAP as it’s also known) as defined on OpenKontrol seems to fill that gap just nicely. So, in 16 lines of code, I got a simple acknowledgement working;
String msg;
String reply;
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.print("aDDSTARTED--");
}
void loop(){
if (Serial.available() >= 12){
if (Serial.read() == 'a') {
if (Serial.read() == 'D' && Serial.read() == 'D'){
msg = "";
for (byte i=0; i<9; i++) msg += Serial.read();
if (msg.compareTo("HELLO----")) reply = "aDDHELLO----";
// else if ...
Serial.print(reply);
} } } }
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A couple of days ago I got a Xino board like this one. Not is this about the cheapest way to get an Ardunio compatible microprocessor, but it has the benefit of a nice little prototype area on board too. So, although it fits standard Arduino shields, many simple projects can be completed on just the one board.
I wanted to do something simple and nice with it, and with components and hardware I had to hand. I realised the prototype area would be great for mounting LEDs, and so the idea of a digital dice was born. I gathered a few bits and bobs and got the soldering iron out.
A decent multimeter is great, but there’s times when you just want to have a quick check to see what signals are high, low or neither. A logic probe is ideal for this, but the cheap ones are about £15+, so I decided to build my own. For less than a quid!
A couple of months ago I bought a Nanode, which required self assembly. Whilst I was building it, I thought it would have been nice to get a photo of each stage of the build. Well, when I bought my second Nanode, I decided not only to photograph it, but to make a little animated video of the build. Enjoy!
Less than 3 months ago I didn’t even know what an Arduino was. A couple of times I had stumbled upon them with various web searches, but quickly dismissed them as well beyond me even if interesting. Then a few coincidences consipred to make me sit up and take note. The first being the Nottinghack Openday. This didn’t actually promote Arduinos, in fact, I can’t even remember them even being mentioned. But the were there. Several of them. And that must have got in to my subconsious. A few days later was a discussion at work about how to read the switch status of many switches via the network and log them on a database. I had found a device for about £120 that could read 8 switches, but with the ~100 we were looking at it would be expensive. Multiplexing (MUX) was mentioned and I started to Google…
3 days later and a package arrives on my desk. Inside is an Arduino Uno, a beginners kit (consisting of LEDs, resistors, breadboards and a few other bits), an ethernet shield and a MUX shield. My professional and personal Arduino adventure had started
14/6/11 – First Arduino arrives at work. Go beyond Blinky to 3 LED traffic lights
16/6/11 – Use ethernet shield and MUX shield to display analog inputs on a web page (Note the two shields are not compattable with each other)
24/6/11 – Use ethernet shield to connect Arduino to Twitter. Tweets whenever a button is pushed
26/6/11 – Parts have arrived to start work on custom MUX shield that will be integrated to ethernet shield. This will be part of a work project to detect the status of multiple switches in welding bays
2/7/11 – First Nanode arrives. 16:59 start work on building it.
2/7/11 – 18:10 Nanode working and Blinky runs
3/7/11 – GPS unit tested with DFRduino
8/7/11 – Hello World displayed on LCD screen
9/7/11 – Custom MUX shield soldered up and tested
19/7/11 – Breadboard based GPS Datalogger (DFRduino + GPS + SD Card Reader) logs drive home from Hackspace
31/7/11 – LCD Screen added to GPS Datalogger
4/8/11 – Prototype for factory sounder project built (Arduino + Ethernet Shield + LCD Screen + Battery Backup Real Time Clock)
12/8/11 – After custom shield made for RTC, the Factory Sounder hardware is finished
13/8/11 – GPS Datalogger moved to veroboard for semi-permanent mounting in custom case (VHS cassette box!)
14/8/11 – “Spencer” scrolling marquee on 8×32 LED display
15/8/11 – Trying some custom graphics on 8×32 display
19/8/11 – Welders Switch project finally mounted in suitable box. The scope has been revised to cater for 10 bays (30 switches) not the 32 bays (96 switches) the hardware had been planned for, so a lot of the hardware is redundant
20/8/11 – First AVR built on breadboard (bare processor only version of Arduino). Tested with 8×32 display
20/8/11 – First PCB based AVR. Designed to be powered from a battery and run the 8×32 display as an animated name badge for upcoming Hackspace party
In this short time I’ve gone from making an LED flash to creating commercial solutions for problems that didn’t have a (affordable) solution to, to building devices the size of VHS cassettes that do a small subset of what most modern mobile phones do, to designing old school style 8 bit animated graphics.
I’ve bought 4 Arduinos for use at work and 3 clones for home use plus components for a couple of AVRs. As well as several shields and prebuilt hardware modules I’ve got back in electronics at a component level and have started soldering resistors and capacitors for the first time in 21 years.
It’s been a steep learning curve in the first 77 days. I’ve got an inkling where the next 77 days will take me, but the one thing I do know… it’ll be fun!
Last weekend 8 of us (John, Gary, Kate, James, Andy, Another Gary, Mark and myself) set off from Hassop Station and headed north on the newly opened Monsal Trail. This is a 7½ mile cycle and walking path in the Peak District that used to form part of the Midland Railway route from the Midlands to Manchester. The line was closed down after the Beeching cuts in 1968, and despite being bought by the Peak District National Park, parts of it have been cut off for the public for over 40 years.
Being an ex-railway line, the route is very strait and flat. Due to the very unflat nature of the Peak District there are long tunnels and fantastic viaducts which offer either no views or fantastic vistas of the surrounding land. All in all, it was a great day out and much fun was had by all.
View Monsal Trail 5-6-11 in a larger map
Thanks James for sorting out a very fine video archive of the day.
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