Child proof my ass.

just a little update, for anyone wanting to show support? do free advertising for me? or just in general run around with images of the genpets, I've added a cafepress account for genpet merchandise http://www.cafepress.com/Genpets

I kept the markup at 1-3$ so if you buy a shirt, you're buying me a beer! ..I mean adding to the material fund for more art... and beer.

Go buy adam a beer and wear his art.

At about 11pm lastnight I got tired of coding and needed a break to have some fun. Crystal plays alot of Nintendo (original NES) on my xbox through the emulator, but it's never been all that good with an xbox controller so I don't play much. I saw someone else do an xbox nes controller so I figured why not.

I used a hipgear controller as my base, which, was a strange one as the a b x y buttons had 3 contacts instead of 2. I had to separate the ab lines in the NES controller and basically have 2 grounds, which defies all logic but at 2am it became clear it was 2 separate grounds or no controller mod. (weird, weird hip gear controller...).

this by no means reinvents the wheel, but it IS insanely better than using an xbox controller. I'm surprissed acctually how much more fun it is.

and yes I know what you're thinking (2 grounds??) the hip gear uses ground on one side of the controller and on the other the buttons use a separate line hooked into the controller cpu rather than a common ground. 

LED's to date have been pretty good, we use them everywhere, laptops, flashlights, washer and dryer, you name it. they're the tiny little glowing lights that last for years and consume very little electricity.

but they've never been very bright. oh sure, a flashlight with a few white LEDs can light up the branch in front of you while camping, but it's no light bulb right?

Until now that is. geeks, start your finger tapping for the release of the next Ostar!

I came across this via devicepedia (link) and I'm pretty sure it's one step in changing ALOT of things in our lives, so bear with me here.

Imagine the power goes off, but instead of yelling at little Timmy to go find the candles, you simply take the battery out of your cellphone, plug it into the wall, and all the lights in your living room come back on.

Crazy and impossible you say? (or possibly shut up Adam, that's not exciting...).

Here's a quote "a 50 Watt A 60-watt light bulb emits 730 lm, while a 50-watt halogen lamp has an output of approximately 900 lm"

The Ostar emits 1000lm, and we all know led's aren't exactly power hungry and while the Ostar does draw more current than a normal led, it's still a huge step, the idea of powering up all the light in your house with nothing more than a laptop battery that you charge once per month perhaps is amazing.

From an eco standpoint these are great for power savings when retrofitted to ac, but also on a waste side. think about it, how much waste do you suppose are in those special power saving tree hugger bulbs a lot of people use these days? ya sure, they use less power and last longer, but the material WASTE of one of those things (the thicker glass, plastic, etc parts) is worse than just using 20 bulbs. seriously, take a look at the material used in both next time you go to buy one. even the packaging, your standard bulb is usually in cardboard, and those eco (we say it's eco and you're dumb enough to listen) things are in plastic + cardboard.

the Ostar though genuinely makes me happy, it uses little electricity, and it's tiny, thus almost no waste. it's a win win and I can't wait to retrofit my apartment in about a year when they're released.

Today's a big day.

I had no idea... none... mostly because I honestly never looked. My research and learning of new things has dropped lately as it's been coding/sculpting/coding/sleep/repeat.

PHP has a plug-in that can run on a server to do serial output to the ports, I knew there had to be one but I stumbled across it while reading something else, and it was far easier than I ever thought.

why is this cool? now I can combine all that funky php/mysql site coding I do, with all that funky electronics/killer robots that I do.

My first implementation will be a wall display that shows how many hits my websites get via the wonders of leds, thus not requiring me to physically check by pushing buttons.

This also opens the gateway for some more interesting art. it's like some wondrous missing link that pulls everything I do fully together. I can't wrap my head totally around how cool this will be but I have a feeling I'm going to use it for some big projects.