#“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. »
#“Clay Shirky on Git, diffs and Government legislation”
The reason I like Clay Shirky’s talks so much is because he communicates complex “stuff” in a way most people can understand.
Here he ties together Git, diffs and Government legislation beautifully. If you are similar with the law but not Git or diffs, it’s well worth a watch. And vice versa. »
#“From tiny CSV acorns, many #OpenData oaks can grow. Now where is Ireland’s CIO/CTO?”
This has been a superb week in Ireland for showing what motivated geeks can do with even the most clunky of Government data. After the Oireachtas XML debacle, it was a joy to see the new Residential Property Price Register site make its data available. Sure, it was poxy old CSV files per year and it wasriddled with errors but I really am pleased with what it triggered. »