#“Some of the very first Tweets to/from me in 2007 via oldtweets”
Just spotted this oldtweets project which is collecting all the Tweets from the first year of Twitter. I did the usual vanity search and spotted something very interesting - we hadn’t quite mastered the use of @ in March 2007.
Here’s @conoro
And here’s conoro
And finally, here are my initial words of genius from Feb 26th 2007 onwards. Rest assured they will be treated like the collected works of Joyce in years to come.
#“The @RaspberryPi Programming Contest for Kids - Win $1000”
All the details over on their blog and in this PDF.
I’ll always remember the months I spent building a data graphing application for the ZX Spectrum for a schools programming competition back in the 80s. You ain’t seen a piechart until you’ve seen a Spectrum colour-clash pie-chart like that. Of course I didn’t even get a mention, let alone win the thing. Bitter? Me? Never.
So pass this on to your kids. Given the damned weather, it’s not like they can go outside anyway. I think I’ll try and get our eldest to do the RPi part of our doorbell project.
If you don’t have an RPi yet, you can use an emulator.
#“Hoping someone will setup Curious Jane in Ireland - Project-based Summer Camps for Girls”
We run summer camps for girls! Curious Jane is a dynamic after-school and day camp program for elementary school aged girls. We offer highly-creative, project-based activities that encourage open-ended problem-solving. Our programs give girls the opportunity to explore design, building, and science in a positive, gender affirming environment. Girls attend for single or multiple weeks, and each week they choose their favorite theme popular options include: Toy Design, Story Arts, Life Science, DIY Fashion, Zine Scene, Building Workshop and Wired 101.
Our Sibal, aged 8, would lovvvvvvveeeee to do something like that.
Actually, a quick search discovered that, within the purely science sphere and not specifically for girls, the brilliant Mad About Science people have arranged Summer Camps in Cork for kids. Their site seems to be a bit borked at the moment but it looks like they are happening in July in Carrigaline. They will be doing bottlerockets, chemistry, forensics, computers, electronics, green energy, robots etc. Unfortunately we’ll be away on holidays.
I really think there is a big opening for more stuff like this. For example, the people who run kids birthday parties where they make pottery are proving very successful. Art Summer Schools always tend to do well too. So something with all of this combined would surely be interesting for kids and their parents?
Maker Camp?
Update: Great link from MissionV on Twitter to Whizzkids who do a lot of tech summer camps and other sessions around Ireland. Well worth a look.
#“Maplin can start its \u00a340m revamp by halving its prices”
I see the new management team in Maplin is going to spend 40m to improve the business.
I’ve just been to their Blackpool Cork store and their infamous excessive prices still managed to shock me.
In the old days when they might be the only game in town for electornics, they could get away with this messing, but with this internet thingy that we all use now, it’s ridiculous. Not only that but they are even doing the old lets-screw-the-paddies-on-the-exchange-rate-trick.
So let’s take the Arduino Uno board.
In Sparkfun in the US it’s 23.82
In Alpha-Crucis in France it’s 19.95
On Maplin.co.uk it’s 24.99 = 30.26
And in Maplin Cork it’s…..40…….Double the French price!
Stop taking the piss Maplin, it’s not 1982 any more.
And as for still charging people for the catalogue in 2012, you’ve heard of Argos, right?
#“Baby Steps on our first real Arduino Project”
The kids and I have a silly idea for an Arduino project involving doorbells. So I ordered some parts from Sparkfun in the US (love that site so much) and they arrived quickly:
Then I lashed together the bare basics to make sure what we want to do will work. Press the button:
Press it again:
etc
Amazing to see the reaction from the kids, even teenage friends of theirs. I think it’s the tactility and physicality of the whole thing. If it was a piece of code running on a PC or phone, I’m sure the response would have been “whatevah”
Next steps are to add all the other buttons and then start on the Raspberry Pi part of the project.
Off we go to Maplins now to get a few more little things for it and my other far more serious project (if you can figure out what one of the parts in the first pic is, you may be able to guess)
#“Art + Tech = Oyster Ring. Go on, someone do a Leap Card like this”
Take an Oyster Card and turn it into a ring. Love it.
Oyster ring from Dhani Sutanto on Vimeo.
#“Twink proves that Recommendation Engines are still pretty useless”
This is what Bottlenose figured out I was interested in from my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Oh deary me.
#“Using your Media Player, Tablet or Raspberry Pi on a Hotel TV”
One thing that has driven me mad for the past several years is hotels making it hard to connect your gear to their TVs. Older TVs are usually easier and have a SCART at the back. LCDs bolted into a wall-unit tend to be the worst.
I usually travel with a media player, a variety of cables and a universal remote control. Most of the time I can get something working. I’ve only been beaten once by a recessed LCD where I was very tempted to take my leatherman tool to the entire wall unit to disassemble it. But I managed to stop myself.
Last week I thought I was stymied again. It took me a good 15 mins of my arm up the back of the LCD to find a HDMI socket but I finally did. However I couldn’t get the TV to switch to the AV ports no matter what I did on my or their remote.
The culprit is that Hotel TV system. You know the one, with the welcome video and the “premium” channels. It locks the TV down so you can only see what they want you to see. Very frustrating.
But I do hate to be beaten so I did a bit of googling and hurrah, it’s a doddle to work around. This should work for any Philips Hotel TV setup and possibly others.
I smugly used my Raspberry Pi running the Raspbmc distribution to play a variety of videos in my hotel room last week using XBMC.
#“If you watch one YouTube video this weekend, watch this TED one on how Arduino is open-sourcing imagination”
Massimo Banzi is one of the creators of Arduino, an Open Source hardware platform that is used everywhere from robot kits for kids to the Large Hadron Collider.
If you are, like me, bored senseless with the same old Twitter/Facebook/YaddaYadda, watch this and then watch your imagination take flight.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoBUXOOdLXY
#“Google+, it’s Magical, like homoeopathy…..”
….when there are no active users left, it will reach full power.
This is the funniest tech post I’ve read all year.
Twitter and Facebook have over a billion active users between them because of full read-write APIs providing a platform for developers and users. But the person who created Google Buzz thinks “they don’t really work”.
Keep taking the Arnica 30c Brad.
Google+, RIP, aged 1 and a bit.