Wow, I just discovered EEVblog which has awesome video material for electronic geeks. This one will definitely help me choosing a new multimeter + its just fun to watch – stay tuuuned!
Here a very late shout out to an interesting project: control your Arduino via the browser! Basically its a browser plugin to get access to your machines (virtual) serial port. With that you can use javascript to send and receive any data – how cool is that!?
http://www.zambetti.com/projects/seriality/
Yay the Carambola Board arrived today from Exp Tech. Time to start hacking!!
Good place to start with:
To start with: http://www.8devices.com/wiki_carambola/doku.php/
oh yeah, I guess I finally got the basic difference between a Transistor and a MOSFET:
Transistor is current driven, a MOSFET via voltage! Thanks to Pete, and his fabulous SparkFun screencasts:
yieha! Watch ‘em all: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9EF3C374FD903ACE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSFET
I had the problem of my Mac not going into sleep when external screen is connected and closing the lid. Luckly I came across this advice which indeed, did the trick:
1. Disable external Monitor
2. Type `sudo nvram boot-args=”iog=0×0″`
3. and restart
Voilà!
For the record: Here’s my favorite realworld hack I got once told by my lovley coworker Roel:
How to clean a messy whiteboard.
Remember the situation when one used the wrong pen for the whiteboard and can’t clean it? Just take another pen which can be erased and go over the non erasable parts – suddenly everything gets clean away:
Or in the words of TvLesson:
Take another dry erase marker (preferably darker than the marks that you are trying to remove) and draw on top of the messy marks. Then wipe the marks away with a dry erase eraser or soft cloth.
The new layer of dry erase marker will lift and loosen the underlying marks. It’s simple but may not work for tougher messy marks.
http://www.tvlesson.com/article/13405_how-to-erase-a-messy-whiteboard.html
Here are two *very* good update-to-date sources of Rspec howtos and best practices:
The first on by Andrea Reginato(@lelylan) gives a very good overview. Start here:
The second one by Jeff Pollard features ninja-kick-ass shared spec examples:
http://bitfluxx.com/2011/05/23/some-rspec-tips-and-best-practices.html
Andrea did already a good job with the Google Doc, but what about collection all tipps into git repo so everyone can easily collaborate – let’s fork, PR and drive it forward!
More sources to follow – spec it, run it, kick it!
[kind of unrelated but nice picture 'borrowed' from global nerdy]
Uh, long, long time ago, (aka. last year autumn) I’ve been to GoTo Conference 2011 in Århus to present SoundCloud. For the evening program, a Lego Mindstorm Sumo fight was organized which, for sure, we couldn’t miss. Watch our sweet robot in action -
the first round of the sumo battle, where Team SoundCloud flips over the opponent!
Unfortunately that was already it’s glorious time – we dropped out for the second round. Anyway – it was big-huge-massive fun. Make sure you grab some lego bricks and build your own.
In case you’re interested in the code, it wasn’t much and nothing to be proud of – but worked!
https://gist.github.com/1280779
Here’s another little AppleScript I recently wrote:
DelJect – an AppleScript to delete and eject any external Cards/USB Stick
A friend asked for this little script: His problem was, that his photography camera couldn’t deal with apple’s hidden files like.DS_STORE etc. To workaorund that, he had to delete those files each time before ejecting. DelJect automates this manual process. Voila!
Download the latest version here: DelJect.app
Usage
Just run the binary, select the device (USB stick), confirm delete and unplug the stick. Done!
As a litte gotcha, DelJect will remeber the device – so next time, just confirm & go.
Thanks to Niels for the idea and thanks Icon-Land for Icon.
https://github.com/rngtng/DelJect
Wow! After more than two years I finally got my hands dirty hacking the Nabaztag rabbit. The release of the source code last summer were very encouraging here! Expect some awesome results in the next time 
Let’s start with NabaztagInjector, an Arduino Library to inject data:
What bothered me for long was the missing possibility to connect external devices to the rabbit. How awesome would it be to use the rabbit for sending data into the net? Imagine it as WIFI shield you Arduino.
Guess what – that’s possible: replacing the RFID reader with an Arduino (both use the I2C bus) running a simulation of the RFID reader chip, enabled me to inject any custom data to the rabbit. Hacked!
As result, I created this tiny Arduino library to encapsulates the full process behind and easy API:
Check out the full Readme, Source code and Examples here:
http://www.rngtng.com/nabaztag-injector-arduino-rfid-hack/