I think this will be my most… well thought out…. project yet! Woohoo!
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My good friend Neil Chan recently participated in a dive photo ’shoot out’ contest in Byron Bay.
He just told me that he had some of his photos posted on his blog over at
www.neilchan.com – the photos are AMAZING!
Some background – Neil is my dive buddy from Australia. He is a marine biologist by day, dive instructor by night, and fits in some time for photography in between. He actually recently won a pretty sweet prize for being one of the top fundraisers for the Life On The Edge Challenge – which was really cool.
Anyway, when I was in Australia nearly 3 years ago Neil was just getting into underwater photography, with me prodding him along the way. Since then he has taken the plunge into the deep end (haha) and gotten pretty serious about it, so I offered to set up the photo-blog site for him. So now all of us in the northern climes can live vicariously thru Neil and his adventures in Australia.
Neil tells me that Byron Bay is one of the top reviewed dive sites in all of Australia, and the photos prove his point. Neil captured some great photos of somewhat rare creatures including peacock mantis shrimp, cuttlefish, anglerfish, and several nudibranch – go check out these oddities at his byron bay page.
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This morning I spent a good amount of time attempting to get a decent twitter widget set up on this site to simply put my Twitter status into the widget sidebar. Fun part is I can actually justify this pursuit as work – we have been asked to integrate Twitter into a website we are currently working on that will be powered by Wordpress.
For a while now I have had Twitter integrated here – both directions. I use WP to Twitter to do Twitter notifications of new blog posts – it works quite well sofar – it integrates with the cli.gs URL shortening service automatically – which works great although requires signup for an API key. My only real gripe with this plugin is that it does not allow you to move the “WP to Twitter” field, which is shown when creating a post. I wish I could place it directly below the content area of a post, as I am editing, so that I would not forget to customize the Twitter message.
The other function I want to have (and our client wants) is a widget in my sidebar with recent Tweets.
Comments rss TrackbackIn addition to the stuff from NKCelectronics I got in the mail yesterday, I also received a box from Mouser. It seems like Mouser and DigiKey both have similar things, but there are always parts that you can find at one and not the other, as was the case with the digital multimeter I wanted – the Extech EX330.
So – why did I choose this DMM? Well, unlike some other people I know, I do not have ‘all too easy’ access to $400 Fluke MM’s a work. I wanted something good enough for most everything, but I didn’t really want to spend a LOT of money on it.
After consulting the EE buddy, Nick, he said that the one nice feature I should look for on a low-mid range MM would be frequency. The EX-330 has that, great.
It also has a couple of nifty features that are a bit more unusual for a DMM in this price-range - temperature probe and a non-contact voltage detector (for high voltage, above 100v). That was pretty cool.
And of course, a more qualatative measure took a bit of weight in the decision process – I thought this model of MM looked nicer than some of the others in this segment.
I was perhaps a bit wrong on that estimation – I thought the MM was red and black. As is plainly shown in the photo at right, they opted for a much more orange and green scheme which is a bit off IMHO – ahh well, they aren’t racing stripes so the performance will not be affected.
Aside from the DMM, the other parts I got from Mouser are not too exciting – yet. The list includes some higher power n-fets and a couple of ICs for driving high power LEDs. Hopefully these will be in action soon.
Comments rss TrackbackI got some more gear in the mail yesterday. Below is an image of what my Arduino Ethernet Shield, from NKCelectronics looked like when I got it out of the packaging. I was totally willing to keep this, and repair it myself, but NKC stepped up to the plate and hit a customer service home run!
Read more to read my email corospondance with NKC that left me more than satisfied.
Bent arduino ethernet shield
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