We’ve reached a point now where smartphones are ubiquitous. I myself have a Blackberry Curve, the iPhone 3Gs is out, the Palm Pre is there and by summer’s end a number of Google Android powered phones are expected.
So far the trend has been to build more and more computing power into the devices so they can run plenty of applications. That’s not where things are headed though.
Switching gears for a second back to traditional Desktop computing: Pano Logic [LINK] make a tiny little box that completely virtualizes the computer. …

Steve Chamberlain [LINK] has achieved the ultimate in home-brew electronics: Creating his own CPU from basic logic chips. Absolutely amazing. The photos alone are a thing of beauty but to know this thing actually works is incredible.
From Steve’s site:
“Big Mess o’ Wires 1 is an original CPU design. It does not use any commercial CPU, but instead has a custom CPU constructed from dozens of simple logic chips. Around this foundation is built a full computer with support for a keyboard, sound, video, and external peripherals.
My original goals were:

Build the …

Lena Antaramian is a good friend of mine and has launched her own Photography business: http://livelovelaughphotos.com/.
From her site “For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a passion for photography. On my world travels and adventures I have taken thousands of pictures of landscapes and citiscapes - covering 36 countries on all six continents. But always, my favorite subjects were people. From Buddhist monks in Bhutan, to native Himba of Namibia, to a smiling groom closer to home. After my twin daughters were born, I turned my passion into …

A while ago I designed a circuit that would power an 8×8 RGB LED Matrix (192 LEDs in all) using only 3 pins from an Arduino Diecimila and supporting Pulse Width Modulation. I’ve uploaded some videos of this project on Youtube and folks have been emailing me with questions on how it works. In this post I’ll try to answer all those questions so you can build your own.
I started with the LED Matrix component itself. I used an RGB 8×8 common anode matrix from LedSee (only $10 on ebay). …

A number of folks have asked for detailed step-by-step instructions so here’s how I added a nice Carousel to the Arthemia theme running under Wordpress. I use the free version of the Arthemia theme which doesn’t have a carousel out of the box. It’s easy to add one though and of course these instructions apply regardless of the theme you’re using so here goes.
I’ll assume you have Wordpress installed, doesn’t matter which version.
Depending on the theme you use, the pages you’ll need to edit are located in a folder …

There’s more to Running than meets the eye. Just as some folks enjoy Trail Running, Cross Country, Long Distance and so on, there is a school of runners who enjoy running barefoot.
I guess some folks really do run barefoot but if you’re not sure or don’t have the feet for it you can always grab a pair of “Vibram Five Fingers” shown here.
These are probably the strangest looking things I’ve seen, like gloves for your feet. I guess that makes traditional sneakers more like mittens for your feet. …

Twitter oAuth is working again, in fact it never went away. All that was suspended was the ability to grant new access tokens. Existing ones worked fine. At least from my rudimentary testing.
It seems like it came back sometime around 10 o’clock eastern. I immediately noticed things weren’t working on TweetARun.com but Twitter was at least providing an authorization token.
A bit of debugging revealed that Twitter no longer respects the oauth_callback parameter passed in by the relying party. It seems to be just directing the token back …

Today I learned that Twitter and Yahoo have pulled their support for oAuth on the news of a security flaw. [LINK] Open Auth (oAuth) is an open source authentication scheme which I’d just implemented in a new project I’m working on (http://TweetARun.com) and wouldn’t you know it it’s dead in the water.
This just highlights the dependency we as Relying Parties have on Identity Providers.
http://TweetARun.com is a nice simple little site that purposefully avoids the need to register or store passwords by implementing Federated Single Sign On with Twitter …

I read an article recently which attempted to make the argument that religion and science are deep down intrinsically linked. You can read this article here [LINK].
The article is filled with logical fallacies, the most basic being the redefinition of “God”. Most faiths define god as a sentient super being, who hears our every thought. Something who must constantly be glorified. Who, when we die will weigh up the good deeds vs the bad deeds and punish us or reward us accordingly, for all eternity. The article re-defines …

Checkout this screen grab of an error message thrown up by my garbage collector’s online bill pay system. This is appalling. If you develop software for a living you’ll know what’s going on here. Essentially the developer didn’t unit test their code, and didn’t handle the exception. Actually they did handle the exception but in completely the wrong way, throwing a system exception straight back to the end user.
Not only has this developer ruined the user experience but he’s exposed vital information to a potential villain. E.g. from this …