kollektief

http://johnsmyth.ie/blog/

He has some cool commentary.

I discovered it through some early morning research i was doing on sugar beets. Did you know 30% of the world’s sugar comes from sugar beets?

This is a big pile of them waiting to be processed in late winter Ireland 2005.

Irish sugarbeet production completely shut down in 2006 after the government stopped subsidizing it.

The Czechs make a kind of rum from sugar beets called Tuzemak, apparently little czech grannies use it when they are making christmas cookies. That sounds nice.

I spent saturday afternoon cleaning up and wiring up a piano interface that star gave me:

That evening I implemented a serial communication protocol for the attiny2313 that I hoped to adapt to an atmega16 for the Xbee. Turns out the mega16 spent all of sunday giving me odd problems because I was writing to one of the registers rudely and incorrectly. But ultimately I ended up with this, notice the ah, lack of wires between the two xbees, i swear they’re talking to each other:

and this is what it said to me:

so at the beginning of june i went to el paso to see my relatives and met up with my parents there. i just tackled the annoying yahoo kingdom of flickr so there are some pictures – some ok ones of this refinery and the clouds were just too cliche to not photograph from the plane. maybe i’ll actually take some dancey pictures at some point during this festival… maybe.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/35754957@N05/sets/72157620548509369/

here’s a good idea, what if we used sign posts as resonators? we could hook up mics to each one and listen to all the sounds of the night. or the day, they could be broadcast into our bedrooms to help us wake up. or listen for car alarms. each one could broadcast on a local fm frequency.

ergh, working with windows is pretty frustrating, i don’t know if it would be this bad if i had a dedicated windows box, but i’ve definitely become pretty firmly entrenched in the mac camp. I think the real teeth clencher is running windows update through internet explorer, there’s something about it that drives me nuts. knutes.

Last night I had yet another dream about finding a rattlesnake in our yard. Maybe I should carry some kind of rattlesnake protection thing when we go out hiking. There was in fact a real rattlesnake in our backyard a few weeks ago.

wildlife that has appeared into our yards:

• 1 lost baby duck
• 1 rattlesnake (9 rattles)
• several frogs
• several toads
• a cute little bat that had trouble flying
• multiple calf legs (thanks to our dogs)
• several deer
• very loud ravens (especially this morning)
• tons of lizards
• plenty of squirrels and chipmunks
• several species of birds (both alive and not)
• jackrabbits
• cottontail-like rabbits
• monarch butterflies
• a medley of spiders and bugs
• an enormous fish with a missing head (dogs)

That’s all that comes to mind right now.

Last night we also hung out with a group of students that were staying here at the observatory for a week. I thought they would be getting really drunk and all being their last night here… they did not! I on the other hand only had 2 glasses of wine and I was totally gone. Where has my tolerance gone?

emo cartoons
eggplant
round tomato like sea creature
chris mastrangelo fluble
boy that would not hoe corn
kollektief solid state
bummlers
funny iceland
howtogamit
clown fish eggs
why do designers hate shiny
kitting architecture
cartoon loser
ceramic tomato set

i found an apple script online and edited it to be a little more convenient:

set baudList to {1200, 2400, 4800, 4800, 9600, 19200, 38400, 57600, 115200, 230400}

end tell

I’ve been getting back into AVR microcontrollers. Today I received in the mail an FTDI USB to TTL cable, which is pretty hot.

The FT232R chip that powers it is apparently capable of the standard bit rates, but also USB 2.0 rates, up to 3Mbaud. That means with the right microcontroller I could build my own audio input completely by hand!

In addition I’ve started using screen as my serial emulator. From the mac os terminal, all I have to type is screen /dev/serial-device 9600 and viola! i’ve got a connection!