Yay! pre-orders for the Pleo has begun,  I ordered twins!

http://store.ugobe.com/store/

Orders should ship early to mid October, and it sounds like the specifications should be pretty open from what I’ve heard so I can’t wait to hack in all kinds of stuff.  I hope this really takes off, I think this is really a great robotics company.  I had a chance to play with one at RoboGames in SF this past weekend, and while I can see some room for inprovement it’s definitely a great looking product and really responds well to human interaction.

I wanted to mod my Digg button with a USB power source so it wouldn’t waste batteries, but didn’t really like the splicing of cables as demonstrated on the originial site. Instead I opted to get a couple mini USB female adapters from SparkFun. I didn’t use enough glue the first time so I went back and added a lot more on the second round. I also tried to use a conductive pen to trace +5V and GND connections, but I wasn’t really happy with how it looked or the conductivity so I went with wires. (If anyone has suggestions on making new traces on boards please let me know, could be useful in the future). Happy with the results now, and the glue seems to be holding. On to the next electronic project, which is getting my AVR Dragon up and running and re-programming the Digg Button chip to do whatever I desire…

The “pearl” on my blackberry pearl hasn’t been working so great lately. Because it’s such a core part of the phone this is really disabling, and I really only want my phone to last until the iPhone comes out. I decided to take it apart and do some cleaning, to my dismay it’s a very good lint (and who knows what else) magnet. After some cleaning (and breaking a couple plastic parts that aren’t really necessary), the pearl works like new!

One of the “benefits” of dating a bioengineer is that he brings home cool green stuff in glass bottles. He says it’s just liposomes, but I’m sure I’ll turn into some super-(hero|villian) if I ingest it.

While I didn’t do nearly as good of a job as the original, I’m pretty happy with my new moleskin drive. If I had to do it again,

I’d have to make sure that I cut a big enough whole and that I took a little more time. It’s a little tedious and having to go back to clean up and trim doesn’t make it much better. I had to move the led around a bit, but that was a pretty simple process, and let me configure them however I wanted. I’m a little concerned about it being a fire hazard, but it doesn’t run hot and I never leave it home alone.

So we all got drunk and did a podcast, which was a lot of fun and cost a lot of bribe money. (Sometimes it’s just good to still have a job and know you’ll have to sponsor the next thousand PHP conferences.) The recording talks about how to pronounce “PHP”, APC@Facebook, security, brewery pubs, cities in Canada for 500, and CSRFs. All around it was a pretty good time, although some people had a bit more of a “good time”. Gotta go buy drunkfacebookguy.com now and tie up some loose ends….

Just finished my very first PHP talk at PHP Tek 2007. Went well, but could be improved some too. Slides and the handout are up here and here. Looking forward to adding more information on this and hopefully presenting again soon.

I’ve added very crude support for Python to the libm40h library. I’ll continue to refine this into something stable, but for the time buing you can build using the “python setup.py build” and “python setup.py install” commands.

I’ve fixed a few bugs in the Monome m40h library, so it should be at least usable now.  After compiling the main C library with ./configure && make you can run phpize in the php directory followed by the standard ./configure && make && make install.  Python is next on the list, after that I’ll clean all this up a bit so the build is more friendly.

Last night was Yuri’s Night 2007, and it was pretty cool. It was held at a hanger in the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. Ihave some pictures here, but for actually good pictures go checkoutLaughing Squid’s post on the night. The tour of Ames Research Centerwas very cool it included the ArcJet, Columbia super comptuer, and Future Flight Central.