I feel like this Friday is the calm before the storm.
This week has been a non stop roller coaster of events. Getting ready for the Fall semester is always a fun experience. Everyone is going in 100 different directions, yet all working together for the joint goal of making education better for 60k students. Fall starts on Monday. Ready or not here it comes. I’m also continuing my Masters program, so hopefully I haven’t over scheduled myself.
I just got what should be the final draft of my book, I have received some good comments and suggestions on how to improve it, and hopefully soon I can tell you all all about it!
Excuse the delay, I’ve been having connection issues all day.
Hey All!
Happy Friday!
This has been a trying week. The wife and I are now house hunting, and the endeavor has been…exhausting. Oh well. Onto some good stuff.
Book Reports
The book I am writing is currently at the review stage, which is awesome. Hopefully only another month or so and the finished copies will be available! While we wait for that to be released, I have some other books I have been reading and I think this community will enjoy.
This book has a really interesting background. It was created by created by The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups and the MIT Media Lab. The book teaches you how to “program” in the Scratch language/IDE.
Scratch is really neat as it’s a drag and drop visual language that is aimed at young / new programmers. You learn programming concepts as you place blocks of “functions” in various areas to perform actions.
The book itself is well done, with comic book style artwork, narrative, and learning modules. It’s an easy read, and a good start for a young programmer.
Packt Publishing has just published this book about using the Minecraft API for the Raspberry Pi with Python. I have a soft spot for Packt, as they are the ones publishing my book, but so far I have enjoyed this book.
From the beginning you are thrown into the Python interface and start manipulating the Minecraft world on your Pi. It is relatively short, only around 50 pages, but I find that to be a good thing. It’s to the point. You go from nothing to building a full Revsersi game by the end.
I showed it off at the Orlando Science Center with FamiLAB last saturday and it was really neat to see the amount of children who ran up to see anything related to Minecraft. Some of the parents were enthusiastic about being able to bring education to a video game.
I hope you have a good weekend and hopefully enjoy these books.
This week has been kinda awesome and frustrating at the same time. We had an issue crop up at work that dealt with some legacy app, and it was a part of the system no one had ventured in for a long time. Needless to say around 3pm today, after a whole week of digging around, we finally had a fix. Feels good!
I sent the first draft of the first half of my book to the publisher for editing and reviews. Feels real good!
My buddy Jacob received his Crazyflie nano quadcopter a few weeks ago and has been having a lot of fun with it. His latest project has been to control it via a Raspberry Pi. He has been flying it around the office and it’s a lot of fun to play with. The thing is whisper quiet until you start turning and then it sounds like a humming bird looking for a kill is coming at you. Again, its a lot of fun, especially with coworkers and nerf guns.
Another frustrating thing happened this week. I needed to take screenshots of the Raspberry Pi in action playing some games, so I did some research, and it looks liked the best device is an EasyCap DC60. This device takes input from an RCA jack and goes into your computer via USB, and appears like a webcam with the video. It also has Mac drivers, which is a big plus. Now I know there are a lot of fakes out there, and newer models which don’t support OS X, so I went on Amazon, looked for the proper model, and didn’t care that it was fulfilled by a third party. It was sent via prime and said DC60. What I got was a piece of counterfeit hardware.
Now, I buy a LOT of hardware from China. Over the years I have been very lucky about counterfeits. I tend to not order anything of enough importance to be counterfeited, or its generic enough that EVERYONE makes the same product. This time I wasn’t so lucky. I got an Easee Cap DC-60++ that used a utv007 chipset. This chipset BARELY supports Windows much less OS X or Linux. The software it came with was also pirated. I decided I was going to try to get it to work first though, and see if it had any saving grace.
It took two hours but it finally displayed my video in a window. I was so frustrated. If you can get your hands on a genuine EasyCap DC60, its supposedly an awesome video capture device. I’m still on the hunt for one.
Writing is exhausting, and tough, and mentally taxing. I love it, but wow, this is a new experience I don’t really have any updates for this week. I know Nick_Tones is anxiously awaiting more PiMAME stuff. I’m sorry I don’t have anything this week.
There was an askreddit thread earlier this week about what do people do with thier Raspberry Pi? There are some amazing projects in there. I really want to try doing a Raspberry Pi weather balloon launch with the University. I also posted PiMAME to the thread and I got an additional 1700 visits. That blew my mind.
I’m going to leave you with this, Patrick Stewart being awesome:
Another long week over here. I’m glad we have a 3 day weekend, because I could use it. Going to sleep until Monday I think 🙂 Anyways, onto the fun stuff!
Book
So, I’ve been waiting ages to announce this. I have been tapped by a publishing company to write a book about a computer that means a lot to me (hint hint). That’s really all the details I can announce at this time, but I’m very excited and eager to work on this project.
BarCamp Orlando
Last week I talked about BarCamp Orlando. It was a lot of fun. There were a lot of great talks given by members of the Orlando tech community. I met a lot of cool people, and networked with some fellow educators. It was also nice to see a big turnout of my coworkers and friends from FamiLAB show their support of this conference.
I did a talk about gaming on the Raspberry Pi, and I have to say it went fairly well. I have grown to really like public speaking, and I am very interested in doing more. I did about 15 minutes of explanations and demos of the Raspberry Pi’s capabilities, and another 10 minutes of QA from the audience members.
Thermal Imaged Pi
I received an email from Bux (from the forums) the other day. He acquired a thermal scanner, so he used it to take a picture of the Raspberry Pi.
Weston Accelerated X
A very exciting development in the continuing optimization of the Raspberry Pi has been released. A release of the Weston software that allows accelerated X windows to be displayed on the Raspberry Pi. This should help with the sluggish feeling that is encountered when using the GUI. I will be testing this out over the weekend. The instructions to install it are available here: http://fooishbar.org/tell-me-about/wayland-on-raspberry-pi/ and below:
I have been keeping this tightly guarded for about 6 months now and I am VERY EXCITED to announce that an article I wrote entitled “Hacking, Learning, and the Raspberry Pi” has been published by the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The spring was released today and it is very exciting seeing my name in print.
To me, this achievement is akin to an academic researcher being published in a journal.
2600 is an amazing periodical with a long history, large following, and amazing reach. From Wikipedia: “2600: The Hacker Quarterly is an American publication that specializes in publishing technical information on a variety of subjects including telephone switching systems, Internet protocols and services, as well as general news concerning the computer “underground” and left wing, and sometimes (but not recently), anarchist issues.”
I’ve been reading 2600 ever since I found it in a bookstore back in high school. I never thought of the word hacker, or hacking, as anything bad. It was to me just a kid being curious while using a computer. 2600 solidified that feeling for me and many people in the computer industry have felt the same way. Most of the companies I have worked for even had a subscription because the information is just that valuable.
Hey all, hoping not to make [Saturday Posts] tags a habit but I feel bad that the wireless ate my last post 🙁
So PyCon is going amazingly well. I have seen some amazing talks, I gave a small talk about PiMAME for 15 minutes in the Raspberry Pi lab. Everyone who attended got a free Pi. Sourceforge told me they could easily host my PiMAME images so that’s a plus for everyone here.
I got to hold (but not wear) a Google Glass. It feels incredibly solid. Light. Balanced. I’m excited for it. O’Reilly was giving out a ton of books, and I have my reading for the next year scheduled.
A lot of the attendees were impressed with PiMAME and I’m excited to get the next version out. I’m brain fried. I will have pictures and things and stuff to post when I get back to Florida on Monday. Woo! PyCon!
What a week. I’ve been working on a presentation for the University, finally showed it off, got a ton of good jobs and awesome work. Feels like a weight was lifted. I don’t know if we will move forward with the idea, but it’s been fun so far.
Next week I will be at PyCon in California. I went last year and it was amazing, and this year’s talks look great. I’m excited.
I’ve gotten tons of feedback about PiMAME 0.6b2, and I feel like it’s going in a great direction. If it wasn’t for all you giving me tons of feedback, this project wouldn’t be even 10% as good. Thank you.
On an exciting note, a book I have been a technical editor/reviewer on has made it to the printers and is available to buy at Amazon. It’s called the “Raspberry Pi Networking Cookbook”. It’s really humbling to have my name in print, and I honestly wouldn’t have been given these opportunities without everyone’s support. That’s why my part of the dedication is to the community. Here’s to you!
The FIRST Robotics regional competition in Orlando has been going on this week. I was a member of Team 108 (Go SigmaC@TS!) back in high school. FIRST is what really pushed me into the field I’m in now, and it’s always an awesome sight seeing hundreds of students working on robots, getting excited about competition, but most importantly, making friends with others from around the world. It’s not about winning, it’s about working together.
So wooo! So glad it’s the weekend. Time to sleep until Monday!
