Brian Jepson’s Weblog

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When you read an article like this one, and when you’re part of a community that has an answer to the question, it’s hard to stay quiet. Joey deVilla gave Toronto a shout-out in his blog (and he has an awesome graphic to go along with it).

Although Providence wasn’t mentioned in the 37signals post like Toronto was, I think Providence is one of those cities where some similar stuff is happening/can happen. And even looking beyond our borders, some of the folks who’ve spoken at Providence Geeks manage teams that are spread out all over the world, so I think it’s not just a question of whether the city is good for building a team, but sometimes it’s whether the city is a fun and livable headquarters/underground lair for the benevolent dictator/evil genius running the company. But the really key point is you can start a company anywhere. I keep hearing about interesting, successful Rhode Island companies that are located well outside of Providence, down in my neck of the woods. Just check out the map on RI Nexus.

I’ve got a lot of interesting stuff queued up, but I lack the time to play around with it. But I promise to get to them soon and blog/twitter/flickr/blip.tv all about them:

Chemistry set

I’ve been helping out with the editorial work on Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, so I picked up a basic glassware/lab gear set from Home Science Tools.

Hydra

Andre Lamothe, creator of the Hydra, sent me a Hydra SD Max for review and evaluation. The back story behind this is that I tried, and failed miserably to build one of these after he gave me the prototype Hydra SD to help me demo the Hydra at Maker Faire. I did get enough XP in soldering to level up, but not before ruining my Hydra prototyping card.

Mach 64 Programmable Logic Starter Kit

This is also something Andre sent to me, to evaluate and review for Make. This is the sort of thing I’d fall into for 3 days.

Sun SPOT development kit

Sun sent one of these along to me for evaluation and review. They make Cylon eyes at you when you turn them on. They are full of all sorts of good stuff: Zigbee wireless (can I get it to talk to an XBee?), accelerometer, battery, temp/light sensor. The price may seem steep, but you get two sensor boards and a base station. It’s pretty much ready to roll.

XBee breakout board for the Make Controller

Everything in my house will be talking to everything else very soon now.

There’s much more than that, though: I’ve got so many unbuilt kits, I haven’t hacked the XO in weeks, etc. I’m going to have to hold an open house soon and invite Providence area geeks to help me hack this stuff!