Ron Guest

Wheels in the sky

Little man

End Piracy, Not Liberty – Google.

Hiding from the world

If you’ve heard about Arduino and want to know more about the system and get an idea of some of the projects you can implement this Lifehacker article would be a great place to start. Just keep in mind the projects listed are a tiny slice of what’s possible. Really the only limit is your imagination.

How to Start Making Your Own Electronics with Arduino and Other People’s Code.

Time for my second iPad app recommendation. Flipboard seems to get all the love yet, while I do use it, I find myself looking at Zite much more often. While Flipboard is source oriented, Zite manages personalization using topics. This generally works well and provides a more diverse mix of stories than Flipboard. Zite takes personalization another step further by allowing you to give a thumbs up or down to a story to help guide which ones it presents to you in the future. You can also indicate a preference for certain sources as you page through stories.

Navigation is easy and the usual methods of sharing stories present. I like it’s Twitter integration better than some apps because it uses what you’ve configured in Twitter on the iPad. I have a couple of Twitter accounts and Zite lets me pick which one to post to on each share.

Now that I’ve been living with my iPad 2 for a few weeks I’ve settled on some favorite apps. The first I’ll mention is the Echofon twitter client. I’m using the lite version on all my devices (Mac, iPhone and iPad - they also have a Windows version). The Lite version has ads but they’re not intrusive (to me…). One of the best features is Echofon syncs read status across all the platforms. So if I read a tweet on my iPad and then open up Echofon on my Mac I won’t see some huge number of unread tweets. And it will scroll to the point in the timeline with the unseen tweets. I use a couple of Twitter accounts and Echofon handles that just fine on all the platforms.

10 years on

Tonight’s sake sampler

L O V E

Key remote office tools

Last month I decided to get a Mifi/Mobile hotspot device and went with the AT&T Elevate. It’s a 4G LTE device (or at least claims to deliver LTE speed). I’ve played with it for a few weeks and have noticed everything seems snappier when I’m on the Elevate when compared to Wifi on my home Uverse network. So I ran a series of tests with the Speedtest app and the two screenshots are representative of the results. Pretty impressive…

This first screenshot shows typical results with an iPad connected to my home Wifi. Respectable download speed (I’m on a fairly cheap rate plan) but as always Uverse upload speed totally sucks.

Below is the result using my iPad connected to the Elevate. Damn impressive as it is 40% faster for downloading and more than 3x faster for uploads. Note for these tests the Elevate was showing a single bar of signal strength.

So if I really need to do something in a hurry I’ll be sure I’ve connected to my Elevate. The service plan includes 5GB in the base fee. Fairly generous but certainly means I can’t use the Elevate full time.

This is a very cool Arduino-based project. An awesome setup allowing you to remotely control a RC car from an iPad (with video). Check it out!

via RC Car + Arduino + iPad on Vimeo.

Air perch

Mother and son :)