Connect a BlinkM up to an arduino and set it running:

Combine the two and you have a home-brew ambient orb:

Next step, do something interesting with it.

I’ve been on the lookout for suitable materials to make an ambient orb for a while - particularly something to diffuse the light. My original plan, which I may still do, was to take an ordinary lightbulb and put an RGB led inside it. However, modern lightbulbs prove quite tricky to take apart without shattering something. When I spotted these lights in M&S last week I knew they were exactly what I wanted. So I bought three.

They were pleasingly easy to dissect - just some gentle persuasion with a craft knife. The led’s they come with, which you can see here, are going to be handy to reuse in the future.

I still need to work out how best to mount the BlinkM beneath it. Given their I2C interface, it is going to be very easy to chain lots of them together, working as a group.

Ambient orbs are fascinating interfaces - they provide an abstraction that can convert an data source into a simplified, yet powerful, source of information.

Converting data into information is something I have been meaning to write about for a while. But given it’s my wife’s birthday and we’re heading out for the evening in 5 minutes, that post will have to wait for another day.

So, for still no reason in particular, I present to you JavaScript Mario. Enjoy.

| View | Upload your own

Although I took some notes through the day of the other talks I went to, Roo has done a much better write-up than I would. So I’ll point you his way.

I’m sure it has been done many time before, but as I’ve said before, reinventing the wheel can be quite fun sometimes.

So, for no reason in particular, I present to you JavaScript Tetris. Enjoy.

Yesterday was the awesome Interesting2008 organised by Russell Davies. Roo had told me all about last year’s Interesting2007, so I was very much look forward to it - and I wasn’t disappointed.

The talks covered a diverse range of subjects and they were all interesting - as you would hope for such an event. Here are some of my highlights of the day.

Roo opened with 3 minutes on Lego. With 30 slides playing through behind him, he even remembered to breathe. A great start to the day. Roo has now posted his slides with audio on slideshare.

Michael Johnson gave us tour through the history of guitar music and graphic design. Was this just an excuse to play Jimi Hendrix on a stage in front of 300 people?

Matt Dent spoke about the new coin designs he did. Fascinating insight to the amount of detail that goes into this type of thing.

Lloyd Davis played the ukulele and then helped the whole room meditate and bring the mountain within. And relax.

Anna Pickard just about kept a straight face whilst talking about unintentionally funny words. I was most pleased to see Plinth on the list.

Andrew Walkingshaw explained why naming things is hard.

Jim Le Fevre amazed us all by showing off his turntable-based zoetrope. I could have watched this for hours. Definitely something to play with in the future. Update: Russell has linked to a YouTube video of this stuff - amazing.

Russell did a great job of organising the day - I’m very much looking forward to Interesting2009.

From Roo’s del.icio.us stream, I came across Wordle by IBM Research’s Jonathan Feinberg.

It is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide”. The results it produces are absolutely stunning. Tag clouds are quite a common thing these days - it would take a couple clicks to add one in the sidebar of this blog. But they are often quite dull. Wordle shows this doesn’t have to be the case.

The site lets you specify a list of words to generate the cloud from, or it will do it from your del.icio.us tags. You can see my tags in the cloud above.

At the moment it is a java applet - but it would be great to see it run as a web service so these clouds can be integrated more readily.

Last week I was involved with an event at work for ’showing off’ interesting things around linux. I was signed up to demo the N800 internet tablet, but I stretched the definition a bit and had my arduinos out as well. Ian took some photos of the event. Here you can see talking to someone about the arduino’s whilst James plays with the Wiimote paired with my N800 and here you can see my rather hastily built custom Wii Sensor bar. I’m glad I had my box of arduino bits with that morning, otherwise I would have been stuck! For more on what else was going on, check out Graham’s write-up of the event.

A couple weekends ago, we finally got the veg beds planted. Click through to flickr for a very well annotated list of what we planted. Sadly, last night the neighbour’s blasted cat dug up half our carrot seedlings. I’ve laid out some temporary netting and this weekend I’ll be building a better cat trap defense.

The third thing I wanted to mention was the Super Secret Side project that Roo and I have been hacking on for the last week: shewentofherownaccord.com.

This is an idea that has been bouncing around between us for years - but only now have we done something about it. It is essentially a (growing) collection of the most pun-tastic jokes out there for all to share. After a fairly frantic week of hacking in the evenings, we managed to coax together enough of a site to reveal it today. We still have plenty of features to add, so keep an eye out for updates.

In summary, the challenge is to state how many unqiue paths there are across an arbitrarily sized chessboard from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner, but only moving down or right at each step. Graham has written up his solution, along with the original question on his blog.

He has gone straight for the proper solution using a simple formula… and some perl to handle the fact the numbers involved are beyond most desk calculators.

I decided to go for a bit more of a brute force approach… and some python to handle the fact I haven’t touched perl in a while.

Here’s my solution:

#!/usr/bin/python
# the dimensions of the board
w=54
h=30
lr = [1]*w
for y in range(1,h):
   lc = 1
      for x in range(1,w):
         lc = lc + lr[x]
         lr[x] = lc
print lc

The secret here is that for any given square on the board, the number of unique paths is equal to the sum of the number of unique paths from the squares immediately to the right and below.

Here’s an attempt to express it slightly more formally:

f(x,y) = f(x+1,y)+f(x,y+1)

where f(w,y) = f(x,h) = 1

The next question of the treasure hunt is due any minute now…