Arduino Project Box
Hey, check out my fine art blog to see my new arduino project box. Here’s a little preview video:
arduino project box construction timelapse from stevecooley on Vimeo.
Technorati Tags: arduino, stevecooley
Archive for the ‘ideas’ Category.
jatropha tree
I would prefer to stop coal burning plants and make a serious effort into solar, geokinetic, and geothermal sources to generate the energy we need. I just read a story on CNN.com about a kind of tree that you can press the seeds of and have it produce fuel oil you can use without any further processing. Sounds awesome! I read the story all the way through and by the end, the math was bugging me. I did some thinking and some relatively weak number crunching. By my rough calculations, you would have to plant over 60,000 plants, just to supply the fuel required to run the 4 tractors mentioned in the story.
- 4 tractors
- 120 gallons each
- 480 gallons of fuel per day
- 2,400 gallons per week, guessing on 5 days of work per week averaged over the course of the year
- 124,800 gallons of fuel = 2,400 x 52 weeks in a year
- jatropha plants produce 2 gallons per tree per year, so:
- 62,400 trees would be required to produce just the fuel required to run the 4 tractors mentioned in the story. Not even taking into consideration the energy required to process the seeds.
Right now they’ve got 176 trees growing.. somewhat short of being free from diesel purchases. Every little bit helps, and I’m of the mindset that it’s better to do something *now* rather than say that since there’s no perfect solution, we should do nothing. Definitely do something now… just.. keep looking for better solutions. I mean, I guess I should be happy that there are people looking into biodiesel fuels that use a plant that isn’t something I already eat. Using food crops for fuel instead of food is the dumbest idea we’ve had in a long time.
Technorati Tags: biodiesel, jatropha
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Screenshots in iPhone os 2.0
Haha, Bill… It totally works! As seen in netnewswire on my iPhone.
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Vallco mall
This place hasn’t quite become the “Cupertino Square” they’ve rebranded it as, but its not hard to see that they’re working on it. Over half of this huge mall has atrophied to emptiness. It makes me wonder how its gotten along all this time. Befor the megaplex movie theatre went in, it was easy to call this place The Mall That Time Forgot because of its _heavy_ 1980’s design aesthetic. I don’t know how they are going to handle all the brass bar railing and colorful tile all over the place. Hopefully with a total do-over. I’m hanging out with Max at lunchtime. 
someday this mall may be cool.
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More thoughts on Twitter
> Twitter, what can I say? You’re a curiosity. I thought you were more
> than you are. Maybe I can still use you. Lots of other sites are all
> up in you now, so maybe I centralize my content authoring here and
> just send notifications to you and then you can go republish all my
> headlines out there in the world of social networks. Or at least the
> ones that won’t let me publish my feedburner feed directly. Maybe
> you’re just a destination for notifications of new posts. Twitter, I
> want you to be more, but maybe you’re just not that interesting. I
> don’t know what I was thinking. Fractioning my content across
> multiple social networks doesn’t do me any favors so… Time to take
> a step back.
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Back on the right track
After I self referentially declared that complaining about Twitter is the new “under construction” animated GIF file, I’m making a firm commitment to putting that twitter energy right back where it belongs: on my own site and without the 128 character limit. I discovered a great wordpress plugin that augments the post-by-email functionality to accept a photo attachment, thereby opening up a pretty good iPhone workflow. I tried the iphone “post photo to web gallery” feature and wasn’t 100% impressed, and I even tried the flickr photo by email and still feel like its not what I want either.
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030303
odometer on the Element having an acid flashback
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Jono and Max
Jono holding Max on my first fathers day. Jono’s shirt says “club sandwiches, not seals”. Max’s overalls say “always smile… At a crocodile”.
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interesting jobs
I’m watching NASA TV tonight since STS124 launched yesterday. the Space Shuttle Discovery and International Space Station crews are doing stuff that would be completely mundane back on earth… then it hit me:
Jobs are only interesting to watch relative to the number of people who get do them.
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Why integrate twitter to wordpress?
Well, I have 6+ years of content on my wordpress site, that’s why.
I just took a few minutes to look at my blog in who knows how long, and I realized that it’s pretty stale. Meanwhile, my twitter feed has been pretty good. When I post things to my blog, I want it to reflect something that will get a reasonable search engine hit count and will be something that begins or significantly contributes to some innovative project.
Twitter almost looks like threaded discussions in a (micro) blog format, but if you were trying to follow two people’s conversation on twitter, um… that’s not easy and/or impossible. Especially if you’re following a lot of people.
I just got Facebook to aggregate my twitter feed. It’s like layers of an onion at this point. Maybe I can get my MySpace page to repost my facebook feed. Honestly, will it help my brand in 5 years to have all that content spread out across multiple platforms? I’m inclined to think not. Facebook, myspace, twitter, friendster, tribe.net, linkedin, ryze, orkut… these all suck from a long term perspective if you’re serious about owning your content. There’s no guarantee that any of them will continue to exist in 5 years… But I’ll bet you a dollar that my domain will continue to exist in 5 years… So, I’m glad that twitter makes it easy to get a feed of my content out of their system because that will make it easier for my to get it into my long term storage and comment aggregating platform – Wordpress. (and a thank-you-i-think to Alex King http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress for his twitter tools plugin)
update: Maaan, I don’t know what I want twitter tools to do. I don’t want my wordpress site clogging up with badly titled 160 character posts. And I don’t think digest posts of daily tweets would be good for me either. I guess having twitter tools notify my twitter account of new posts works well because then my other pages get notified when I post something big here. Ok, yes, that’s worth a dollar-thirty-five.
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Sure sign that things have cha…
Sure sign that things have changed #4 You have a good idea and then you forget what it was, not even 2 minutes later.
