August 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Nod your head, zombie bunny: A paper robot driven...
Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend a very special workshop. Manuel Odenthal aka wesen gave a hands-on introduction to building robots made out of paper and we built one of his own designs, the zombie bunny. Apparently, there is a whole scene of paper robot makers (as one would have expected on the Internet), but the idea of using servos and an Arduino with the paper animation is new....
4 tags
Getting the Order of Things Done: Life Hacks and...
Before poststructuralism struck, life was easy. Powers and governmentality were seen as relatively simple things and in order to become one of the good guys, you just had to go to the other side. Then suddenly everything became a process, a discourse that continuously defined and redefined players in the game. New tools were needed for that definition work and among the mightiest of these tools...
March 2010
1 post
5 tags
FireCheckIn
A little tool I wrote and deployed on Google App Engine got quite some publicity recently — well, for a very small tool with an extremely limited target audience of geolocation geeks. The point of FireCheckIn is to sync your check-ins at Foursquare to FireEagle. Foursquare is, in their own words “part friend finder, part social city guide, part nightlife game.” It can be played at...
February 2010
3 posts
5 tags
In praise of Sugru
Sugru is one of the things that you don’t know you need before it surfaces in your world. It’s a tinkerer’s dream, an adhesive that cures into a soft silicone material at room temperature. It’s probably best explained in the little video that you can find on their homepage:
There are many reasons for me to love sugru, but here are a few:
It’s cheap. So cheap...
4 tags
What time is it?
Can there be a question much simpler than this? And yet, when I had to answer this question in a little piece of code some days ago, little did I know what i was getting into.
Of course, time and dates are confusing and although they were about the first thing to be measured with contraptions and automata, their units are simply too human (read: insane) for machines:
Our units of temporal...
4 tags
Turning your Google Profile into a nice-looking...
Did Google Buzz catch you by surprise? Maybe you noticed that you have a Google profile for the first time ever because of Buzz. I’ve been using this apparently little-known profile thing for some time now, (partly) generating my homepage at http://www.johl.io/ from it. johl.io runs on Google AppEngine — the way I see it, Google gives me a server for free through AppEngine and with the...
January 2010
1 post
4 tags
MintyBoost
Minty Boost: A small battery-powered USB charger. Designed by LadyAda. www.ladyada.net/make/mintyboost/index.html
I bought this thing at 26C3 from Mitch Altman, soldered it together and since yesterday, it even works: My friend Sebastian at C4 spotted the mistake I made — I put in the boost converter chip the wrong way (there were even notches on both the chip and the socket and still I managed...
November 2009
1 post
3 tags
O HAI
My coolest birthday present so far is this piece of code that is behind johlcat, a Twitter bot that retweets everything I say on Twitter in LOLSPEAK.
You can find the git Repo at GitHub, of course.
April 2009
1 post
1 tag
Kneipenstricken
One of my goals for 2009 is to knit more. The possibilities for crafting are endless, but alas, so are the excuses I can make up for not doing it: I don’t have time for it, I would have to leave the computer, I don’t feel like knitting in hot weather, it’s boring to knit alone… these are just some of my favorite reasons.
When a friend and vintage hardware geek asked me...
October 2008
1 post
1 tag
Finally knitting the bunny
For months I’ve been knitting a very simple pattern and there are several reasons why it took me so long. I started at the annual EasterHegg event this year, a workshop weekend during Easter, organized by the Chaos Computer Club. Inspired by Rose White’s talk on The History of Guerilla Knitting at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin in December 2007, pallas of the CCC...
August 2008
1 post
3 tags
Frotzuino: Switching on the lights in a text...
When I visited NYCResistor in July, i brought gummy bears and Kinder eggs with me which were apparently very much appreciated. Zach Hoeken handed me a little anti-static bag and mumbled something about “electronics in exchange for candy”. It was a prototype for the Sanguino board which he had developed. Last week I finally had time to play with it.
The Sanguino is basically a better,...