atoms&electrons;

In the summer of 1980 my family took a trip to the East Coast, and we flew American Airlines. It was my first time on an airplane and I remember being very excited. I had good cause to be excited – I was about to have the entire course of my life impacted, but didn’t know it yet.

I was reading the in-flight magazine and came across something that boggled my young mind. It was a full-page advertisement for a computer – a personal computer that you could buy and use yourself. I must have sat there and stared at that page for 15 minutes studying the picture of this thing called a “personal computer”. I tore the ad out and carried it around with me for the rest of the trip. It took about a year of bugging my parents but they eventually bought me an Apple II with 16K of RAM.

I’ve gotten quite a few questions regarding how to hook up and drive the Sure Electronics LED matrices I use in some of my projects, so here’s a quick brain dump on what you need to do.

Also check out the Apple //e Twitter Display for another take on this idea.

I’ve partitioned my social networking life into two fairly distinct pieces. Facebook is for friends and family, and Twitter is for my technology hobbies. Facebook is for vacation photos, and Twitter is for the latest news on robotics, CNC, Maker culture, etc. One consequence of this is that I usually only check Facebook once or twice a week to catch up on what people are doing and reject requests to join The Mafia/Vampire Clans/Farmville. However, I find myself checking Twitter multiple times a day, because there’s a constant stream of interesting technology tidbits coming in. Twitter is the cocktail party full of interesting sound-bites to Facebook’s Thanksgiving Dinner at Uncle Ralph’s house.

In the spring an old man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of vacuum tubes strewn across the De Anza college parking lot, and thankfully the Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market is there to accommodate. I’ve noticed the days getting longer and it’s just about time to set our clocks forward, but I was caught completely by surprise by the return of the flea market. Thankfully folks as close by as Sunnyvale and as distant as NYC were tweeting about it last night so I forced myself to bed by 1AM so I could make the early morning trek to Cupertino.

I was at TechShop last weekend working on a project and I noticed a familiar picture hanging on the wall of the lobby. They have a wall collage of member projects on display and one of the pictures is my Spookotron Halloween pumpkin light. I recall sending in a picture of it sometime last year and apparently it’s been hanging there for months without me noticing it. Just about every time I visit TechShop I see someone making something that boggles my mind, so to have one of my projects up there really made my day.