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:

/**
 * Simple Arduino NabaztagInjector example sketch
 **/

#include <Nabaztag.h>

void setup() {
  Nabaztag.begin(0); //0 = standalone
}

void loop() {
  // send 1337 to the rabbit
  Nabaztag.inject(1337);
  //done
}

Check out the full Readme, Source code and Examples here:

http://www.rngtng.com/nabaztag-injector-arduino-rfid-hack/

Sugru is this fantastic super modeling clay made by Jane from Ireland. It allows you to hack the world and fix stuff. First its soft, sticks on nearly and material allowing you to put it in any shape, later it hardens and keeps its form. Perfect for me!

Check my hack, where I used Sugru replacing the missing glass pieces and preventing the loose ones from falling of. My display is protected again, and the phone is working – yay!

Visit the Sugru Website and get some for yourself: http://sugru.com

In my early webdeveloper days I created a small javascript which named ‘SizeIt!’. It purpose was to resize all website elements according to the size of users viewpoint. So regardless which screen resolution the user has, the website propotions would always be the same. Honestly, it worked only in very special cases and was slooooow (these days)

But the idea was great and it even gave me second place in a competition – ‘Die besten JavaScripts’ of Internet-World in August 2000. Read the result here (german only, sorry).

Not sure where I do have source code, will continue searching archive and post it here someday – stay tuned …

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/

Follow these instructions from resque readme (apache, ngnix) and check out current resque repo. Now update following two files:
1. Add gem "resque-scheduler","2.0.0.d" to Gemfile
2. Run bundle
3. Add require 'resque_scheduler' to config.ru

Restart you webserver and are ready to go – Happy scheduling!

Both file after editing:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'logger'

$LOAD_PATH.unshift ::File.expand_path(::File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/lib')
require 'resque/server'

# Set the RESQUECONFIG env variable if you've a `resque.rb` or similar
# config file you want loaded on boot.
if ENV['RESQUECONFIG'] && ::File.exists?(::File.expand_path(ENV['RESQUECONFIG']))
  load ::File.expand_path(ENV['RESQUECONFIG'])
end

require 'resque_scheduler'
                                           
use Rack::ShowExceptions
run Resque::Server.new

source :rubygems

gemspec

group :test do
  gem "rake"
  gem "resque-scheduler","2.0.0.d"
  gem "rack-test", "~> 0.5"
  gem "mocha", "~> 0.9.7"
  gem "leftright", :platforms => :mri_18
  gem "yajl-ruby", "~>0.8.2", :platforms => :mri
  gem "json", "~>1.5.3", :platforms => :jruby
end

This weekend was Rails 3.1 Hackfest. The rails community was called to test the upcoming version 3.1 to its limits, to find bugs and or flaws and get it polished for the final release. So I did:

I’m working with the rails 3.1 since it first release candidate, but never tried in production. So I made my task to finally test this, and bring my app in the wild – on my (not root) server. Rails 3.0 is running there smoothly so I didn’t expect any problems – wrong!
Show stopper was the Javascript Runtime dependency on production. Reason was quickly found: Coffee-Script – ahrg! It depends on ExecJS, which depends on a Javascript Runtime. Unfortunately, and that’s because I’m not on a root server, I got neither node.js, therubyraser, Mustang nor Johnson installed there.

I read this article, which supposed to precompile the assets – didn’t help either and runtime is needed again.

In the End, the solution was as simple as obvious: just don’t use coffee-script in production I did, removed the coffee-script gem form my Gemfile – and tatatata: it works! Uhh! This took me quite a long time to get it right. Javascript Runtime dependecy no good for prodcution, and reading Mr. Katz it’s looking good to get this fixed for the final release – uff! Happy so get tin final one soon! Yeah!

[cheesey image taken from PragDave - thx]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are the slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/rngtng/rainbowduino

Thanks to David for recording!

It totally looks like the two long line go up, but if you apply a ruler, you see, it’s indeed straight:

A optical Illusion – weird, right?