Ron Guest

At the New York Make Faire this month the Arduino team, led by Massimo Banzi, made some exciting announcements. The first was the release candidate for the IDE/sketch system. Yes it has finally reached Arduino 1.0rc stage and you can get it here if you want an early look. As you’ll see from the announcement video linked below this should go final in the next month or two.

The biggest excitement comes from the new hardware they’ve introduced. Here are a few highlights along with a photo of the spec sheet.

• Arduino Leonardo - a lower cost Uno with a simpler design but, get this, it has USB capabilities built in. It can handily emulate USB devices such as a mouse or keyboard. It's expected cost about $20US.
• Arduino Wifi Shield - finally an official, and far superior, Wifi shield is coming. I've experimented with several of the existing Wifi shields and their implementation all leave something (in fact a lot) to be desired. This official shield, coming soon for about $80US, will leverage support in the new Arduino 1.0 software as well as benefitting from a design that avoids the UART. This means it's functioning will be completely hackable. It has it's own processor so performance will also be superior as well. The Wifi shield should be available soon - but I won't be surprised if they sell out immediately.
• Arduino Due - a Arduino with a 32-bit processor but that barely tells the tale on this one as it's I/O performance will kick some serious butt. This baby is due at the end of 2011 and will clearly push the frontiers of what's possible with an Arduino.
• Arduino Robot System - this is a dual-Arduino robot system which is TinkerKit compatible. I have not yet seen a release date for this one.

Arduino Blog » Blog Archive » Arduino Is You.

Got milk?

Double espresso con panna

Man Down! Junior fell asleep this afternoon on the study floor

Live live

Beauty

Lap being warmed

Soooo cool!

NASA’s Cassini orbiter snaps unbelievable picture of Saturn

I highly recommend reading this blog post by Roger Nusbaum if you have given or are giving thoughts to your retirement plan. Before the baby boomers neared retirement the US was in a fairly high growth state. Rising home and equity values, combined with nice returns on cash/bond investments, made it easy to accumulate retirement funds while still spending fairly heavily. Things have changed for the worse and won’t get better for many years (think a decade or more). Growth is slow in all developed countries with interest rates far below the level needed to deliver a real return above inflation. House values are likely to recover in the next few years but the steady long term growth will not return. Some Asian economies are in a position to grow faster than developed ones but are far too small to sustain the global economy in the face of European and North American long term weakness. It all sounds quite negative but if you plan accordingly you can still earn nice returns and retire at a reasonable age. Act and succeed.

Random Roger: It Won’t Get Easier.

Easy to stare at this while drinking my Heineken

River time

Battleship in the lobby

Enjoying the lobby while the kids play Battleship

Pinball wizard

Three story indoor treehouse

Tractor driver

Ye olde family favorite- cheers!

Nice write-up on Gigaom documenting Adrian Cockcroft’s critique of OpenStack. Adrian is Cloud Architect at Netflix so his views are worth noting.

If Netflix is right, Amazon already a cloud champ

Sleep of the innocent

Saturday morning handyman’s kit

Window view :)

Amazon’s rumored Android-based tablet is nearing release and more details are leaking out. Without knowing details it isn’t possible to come to a conclusion but on speculation I’d say this is the first tablet that could present any sort of real competition to Apple’s iPad, especially given the price point. Of all the companies trying to tackle the iPad Amazon is the only one that can come close to Apple’s ecosystem appeal. It will still be a second rate device but should attract a solid customer base and, like Apple, generate an ongoing source of revenue as users purchase content, sign up for Amazon Prime, etc.

Upcoming Amazon tablet to undercut Apple’s iPad.

This is big news. These large telecom/infrastructure players don’t just want to license/rent enterprise software. They want to own it. Their bets on Cloud are growing quickly.

Verizon Acquires CloudSwitch.

I think this is one of those surveys that points out what everyone knows, in the back of their mind, but haven’t really processed in the foreground. And it definitely represents my experience and viewpoint.

Mobile Workers Put In Longer Hours and Like It [Infographic]

This could unite the world in peace and harmony if it pans out :)

Say goodbye to cavities: New gel could help your teeth fix themselves | Technology News Blog - Yahoo! News.