Scott's Blog

I'm fascinated with kinetic typography , especially the work of Lawrence Lessig . If you like to see more of the genre you can go search google. I wanted to do my own. I could always try using open office Impress or PowerPoint, but they are too limited in what they can do and repeating the same fancy effect on two slides takes twice as long. My first attempt was to use the Processing language, but it was a lot of work and the language is less than ideal (sort of old school). My second attempt was with PyGame , which I've been meaning to learn more about. It could work, but I found that the font's weren't anti-aliased (but I think I was doing it wrong) and creating the library was proving to take a long time. The I remembered Bruce , a presentation program written in Python and supposedly using PyGame . When I downloaded the latest source, I found that it was using Pyglet and Cocos2d instead. These two were exactly what I needed, powerful and flexible and I could...

I've been using the Wiring language for doing my Arduino programming and this week I played a little with it's big brother, Processing . I think Processing is a nice tool for beginners and has a great set of libraries, but not my cup of tea for programming. I think what it offers is one tools set (including IDE, libraries and language) so you don't have to waste time figuring out which libraries or IDE you'll need to download as well. I've also just come across Context Free which is a language for making pretty pictures like the one above.

I bought two OLPC (aka XO) laptops and gave one to a needy child through the G1G1 (Give One/Get One) promotion. In fact I gave two laptops since Google matched my donation (thanks Google!). It's already arrived at my Mother's house, it'll be interesting to see how it's changed since the beta machine (which I still have, but I can't upgrade anymore without bricking it). Maybe the dollar will go down in 2009 and the price of materials as well so that they can start selling the laptop at something near $100.00.

My wife, Renata, has been complaining more and more that Windows is getting slower and it's a pain downloading and installing anti-virus software all the time. I occasionally tease that I don't have any of these problems, I don't even have an anti-virus installed on my Ubuntu machine. So finally, this week, she said that she wants to a dual boot machine, like Victor has. Compounding the issue is that over the past few weeks our Internet provider had been getting slower and slower, of course, making Windows appear even slower than normal. I downloaded the DVD version of Ubuntu 8.10 which took a week with this slow connection and, of course, it didn't work (I believe her machine does like booting with a DVD). Luckily, some time on Friday our Internet provider fixed their problems and I was able to download the CD version of 8.10 in about 40 minuts. In the meantime I backed up her machine to my hard drive which was much slower than it should have been (about 8 hours). I...

It's been a long road, but we launched Google Talk in Orkut. Official Orkut Blog Post of the Launch

I bought the SparkFun LED matrix to go along with the Arduino and here's what I've built. I basically smiles when the build is green and frowns when it's broken. You can find the code at google code . I wanted to have is scroll messages across and there's code to do that, but in the end it was just too annoying since it sits in front of my desk. I have a routine ready, however if I want to give someone a message. To get the text I used wxPython and I draw the text in a buffer, then I look at the pixels one by one and those become the LEDs to turn on. One nice addition is that I can pass Unicode characters and thus it's relatively easy to show special characters like ⚘♂✔✖✈☝ although 8x8 pixels is often not enough and I have to fix them by hand. Another bonus the that program works from the command line so you can print larger messages: ./text2pixels.py --size 30 --bold --font "Delphine" Arduino ### ...

I had some fun this weekend with the sparkfun LED matrix . It's a little bit expensive at $35.00, but looks like it could have a bunch of cool uses. Programming it I had to learn about SPI and I ended up writing my own SPI routines in processing . I've put the code up at led_matrix_tools and some of it is very reusable. Note: I wrote this on October 12th, I just noticed now that I never sent it.