Brian Jepson’s Weblog

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!

I bought a Nokia 6200 a while ago so I could periodically test for EDGE
speeds, and I guess I got lazy… I kept using the phone’s WAP browser to
test with DSL Reports’ mobile
speed test, and kept getting GPRS speeds. So I decided to tether and
test today, and I got great speeds from my home. All tests were with
compressed binary data, all speeds in kilobytes/second as reported by
wget:

Tom
Hoffman: “For those of us of a certain age, the Xerox machine was as
pivotal and empowering in our adolescence as the weblog is today.”

William Ryan: “where is it written that what he writes about on his own time has any reflection of how one behaves at work?”

Congratulations Tom
Hoffman and fellow panelists for their Blogucation 101 panel coming
in third
in the panel ratings at SXSW Interactive.

I just arrived in Atlanta for CTIA Wireless 2004. It
should be fun. I’ve added some pictures to my textamerica moblog. I was
hoping that I’d find a nice 1xEV-DO signal here (c’mon, Verizon,
surprise me with a cloud of 1xEV-DO this week!), but my AirPrime 5220
is connecting in only 1xRTT mode. The signal is much better here than in
other places I’ve tested, but I wouldn’t mind a taste of that BroadbandAccess.

If a book on Rotor is enough to excite
one reader, surely something exciting would happen at a BOF on the topic, grin grin, wink wink? So why not cast your vote for the Rotor BOF and find out what it’s all about?

Sam Gentile: Rotor
is the key to understanding .NET