Gencon Indy 2010

Gencon Indy 2010 was very very cool.  The dealer room had enough in it to occupy a full days worth of browsing.  Played some Dominion, Ticket to Ride and pathfinder while there and will be getting a 4 day pass for next year instead of the Saturday only pass like I did this year.

Penguicon

Was at Penguicon this weekend and enjoyed it greatly!

Got to listen to a couple of book readings by authors and I'm going to have to read more by "Karl Schroeder" and his VIRGA stories.

Also will have to pick up Dominion the card game. That is an addictive game!

Blogger Transition

Blogger announced that they are no longer supporting ftp hosted blogs, and you have to switch to a blogger hosted. I'm now using the custom domain option and have my blog as a subdomain http://blog.yazug.com/ but now I'm wondering how to update my feedburner feed since I set that up before pointing to my ftp deployed blog and there is still an atom.xml on my other site...

Finally got it by recreating my feedburner page as well as resetting up my layout for the blog.

LED Firefly Idea

I'm currently digging to find out how to make a cool little PIC micro controlled LED Firefly. Which can detect if it's light or dark and blink when it's dark only.

This came from an Instructables link for LED Fireflies Prototype. They are the natural extension of the "LED throwies" which are always on and are cool.

So starting out I've been digging for where to start and though I should keep track of the thing's I've found so far on here.

PIC Micro:
Found a cool development kit for only $36 which should provide a decent starting point for playing around with PIC Micros.
microchip.com the PIC12F683 or it's little brother PIC12F675
After a bit of digging I'll be ordering the PICkit 1 starter kit for $36 probably along with a couple of additional PIC12F683/PIC12F675 chips.

Next part of this experiment is to figure out how you can use an LED as both input and output. A quick Google search provided parts of the answer but to figure out how I'm going to do this will probably require some tinkering.

* Make blog: LED touch sensor
* Bi-directional LEDs

More later

Beautiful Red

I am hooked and waiting on new episodes for Beautiful Red podcast by Darusha Wehm, hosted at podiobooks. I started listening and before I knew it I had listened to all 6 episodes which have been released so far, and am anxiously waiting for more episodes to be released. The story is set in a near future Technical Utopia, where technology has made crime mostly irrelevant. But then you start to be immersed in this technological utopia, and start to see some of the cracks where everything is not so nice and utopian.

Great science fiction podcast!

Nathen Lowell Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series

Recently I've been listening to several books posted on Podiobooks. This week I'll tell you a bit about Nathen Lowell's series Quarter Share, Half Share, and Full Share. Which is a series of Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper. His website at http://durandus.org/golden/ provides even more tidbits and supporting information about the stories. The first book Quarter Share, you are introduced to Ishmael who through an unfortunate accident finds himself in need of a way off the planet and in need of work. He finds it in the form of a job on a solar trading clipper ship the "Lois McKendrick" as a mess attendant, in the galley. I found myself drawn in by Nathen Lowell's writing style which just draws you in and holds you transfixed while you feel like you are actually there sitting at the pub listening to the story unfolding. I don't think I'm alone after hearing that Quarter share was nominated for a Parsec Award in Best Speculative Fiction Story (Novel Form).

I would have to say these stories have been of the type that you can't put down. I have listened through all three of his podiobooks multiple times now, and am waiting for the final episode of Full-share to be released. Then I will truly be in withdraw till the spring of 2008 when he expects the next book in the series to approach completion and release on podiobooks.

Mapping for the masses

Open Street Map project is an interesting open source project. Where the community is building a collection of mapping data, which is licensed CC by SA . The project which has a large following in Europe is just starting to expand in the USA with the start of integrating the freely available TIGER data sets, which promise to provide a good base coverage for the whole USA. Supporting the project many innovative tools have been built and function, including a google style map browser known as Slippy Map, an web based editor Potlatch, and a very capable java based editor JOSM . Go check out their maps at either http://openstreemap.org or http://informationfreeway.org