#“My 4 years of Android today and Ireland’s first Android App” Today is the 4th anniversary of me paying $499 on eBay for a HTC G1, the first Android phone. Whilst some of my tech predictions over the years have been a little off (cough iPad) I couldn’t have got it more right with Android. When I heard about the Android project mid-2008, it was obvious Google wasn’t going into things half-heartedly. »
#“The Fixer’s Manifesto - Spread The Word” Just got this from Jane in Sugru. Already printed and on my wall. It manages to capture everything we should do to replace our dumb generic disposable consumer culture. More on the site and a PDF too. »
#“Sib\u00e9al’s Halloween Eye of Deatttttttttth” Myself and Sibal put together a really simple but effective spooky eye for Halloween recently. It caused great interest in her school during Halloween dress-up day just before mid-term. It simply consists of an old ping-pong ball with a hole dremeled into it and large bright red LED inserted into the hole. That’s connected via a resistor and long wires down her arm to her wrist which has a PP9 battery taped to it. »
#“The @RaspberryPi Doorbell of Dooooooooommmmmmmm” We had some good fun last night with the neighbourhood kids making use of ourDoorbell of Dooooooooommmmmmmm. I’ve had a bigger doorbell project planned for quite a while but 2 weeks ago decided we should do a simpler Halloween one. Using various bits bought from Sparkfun and Maplin along with a great tutorial from Adafruit (more below), I finally got something we were happy with, working late last week. »
#“Open Data Ireland’s first meetup tonight in Engine Yard” Great to see this Meetup happen and big props to Eamon and the crew for hosting.If you are interested in getting involved in OpenData in Ireland please attend. Registration is here but the event is free. Ireland needs to get beyond talking about OpenData and start increasing the number of people actually Opening Up The Data in a big way. The Irish tech community has to lead by example and that means just doing it. »
#“Google Hangouts Extensions point to a richer Google+ Platform future” Yesterday I read about a delightful project involving LEDs, Arduino, Processing, Node.js, Google+ and Google Hangouts. I was originally interested due to the Arduino angle but then I realised there was something extremely powerful going on with Google+ Hangouts and had to dig in more. Have a look at the video first, it’s an extremely cool mashing together of a bunch of things. »
#“MIT App Inventor Official Open-Source Release” I’m really pleased to see this release happen. Dec/Jan was an awkward time as Google dropped App Inventor and MIT didn’t have their site ready. MIT has done a sterling job since and it’s great to know that the full up-to-date source code is available. I hope a community of contributors to the codebase now starts building up. One issue we ran into in our school with accessing the main MIT site and GAE was a lack of bandwidth. »
#“E is For Electronics, Other Good Kids' Stuff and What’s Next?” Limor “Ladyada” Fried of Adafruit has put together a really lovely colouring book called E is for Electronics. It has everything from A-is-for-Ampere to Z-is-for-Zener-Diode. You can buy it online for $10 or just print it off using the booklet setting of your printer. I printed one for our 8 y/o daughter and she is a big fan. I’ve just done another copy our 7 y/o son. »
#“Playing 1980s games on your Raspberry Pi and remembering Mike Singleton” This post was going to be just an up-to-date summary of many other articles out there on this subject. With the rapid rate of change in the RPi world, even very recent guides have proven to be unusable quite quickly. However I’d first like to remember Mike Singleton who died last week. I didn’t know his name until today when I read this lovely piece about him. »
#“ClassicMap - Google Map overlays on Apple Maps in iOS 6” Oh look, Rosscarbery has a lagoon again. GitHub Page App Store. »