Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

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.

My requirements for this are the following:

• Define number of tweets shown
• Light weight
• SOMEWHAT intelligent handling of URLs, including @usernames, and others
• Somewhat Customizable (CSS style wise)
• More or less plug and play (it should work when I install it)
• Available from the central Wordpress plugin directory

And now… on to the reviews…

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In 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.

I 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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I made an order a while ago from DigiKey. I got some basic electronics prototyping stuff as well as a few sensors and LEDs t play around with. One of the more interesting things I picked up was a Ziglog ZDots PIR sensor (click to view datasheet).

Now this is not the usual PIR sensor that everybody in the arduino community usualy uses, that would be the parallax sensor from SparkFun.
This sensor, from what I saw, has a couple of distinct advantages over the SparkFun sensor:

1. It is less expensive than the SparkFun sensor ($2-3 woohhoooo!)
2. It operates in dual modes, hardware (digital) or serial mode – in which it accepts all kinds of advanced commands
3. I like to be different – the sparkfun sensor has been done before…

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So as I mentioned before, my car has been having some problems.  It all started with a “Check Engine” light about 1500 miles before my warranty went out.

After going in and out of the shop 4 times for the problem, and subsequently leaking petrol all over the garage at my house, I was assured that “the problem was taken care of”.

Thankfully too, the Audi service manager, Mike at Delta Imports, said that they would stand behind my Audi even after the warranty is up, since it is admittedly buggy (lemon perhaps?).  I am very greatful for this, but I feel that this is what should be expected when buying a high end car from the beginning.

I was just hoping not to put his word to the test so soon.