I don't want to see negative signs in front of the temperature anymore. 🙁

Last night I ordered 1000 resistors of (50 each of various values0, and 100 superbright white LEDs off of eBay from a seller in Nanjing, China. They were SUPER cheap, cheaper than if I had bought a fraction of that locally, and still much cheaper than the online part stores (unless I bought in bulk at like 10,000 pieces.) Now I need a nice case for storing small electronic components. Any suggestions? I'm thinking of going to Wal-Mart or a hobby store and looking for something in the jewelry supplies area – something designed to hold little claspy things and beads and whatnot.

Also, it looks like I've picked up a few new RSS/e-mail subscribers! Yay to whoever you are! Leave a comment and just say hi? 🙂

The purpose of the "Helping Hands" product is to hold items in place using alligator clips and make it easier to work on small items. Things like holding a circuit board, leaving both hands free for holding components and soldering them. It can also be found with a magnifier which makes it even more useful for working with small parts.

But, look at this thing! It's a baby robot!

Helping Hands

The price (as of this post) is only $5.95! You could own your own "Baby Robot" HH55 Helping Hands w/ Magnifying Glass for less than $10!

I'm having a lot of fun playing with my new Arduino, and have created several projects using the few LEDs that I have.

I mentioned my "fake sunrise" project a few posts back, and that's one of the things I've started and am reasonably satisfied with. A few things to work on – making it easier to set the time and delay (right now it requires reprogramming the chip, I want buttons and a display instead), getting a more powerful power supply (the LEDs are brighter when it's being powered off of my laptops USB port), and getting a better supply of resistors (I'm using 330 ohm resistors where I should be using 68 ohm and 153 ohm resistors, not a big deal, the LEDs just don't light up as bright as they could.) It's more of a "fake moonrise" right now, but with a little bit of work I think I can double or triple the light output, which would be great.

Using the same setup, I've also written a program that randomly fades each of the red, green, and blue LEDs off and on. This looks pretty cool in a dark room, and will also benefit from a different power supply and a more appropriate set of resistors.

How many companies use a logo that's broken up into four red, green, yellow, and blue squarish pieces?

Google recently changed their favicon to this pattern, so I now use three services/products (that I know of, there could be more) with very similar logos.

For comparison:

One thing to note: the colors are all in the same order, simply by rotating one logo, you can end up with the same color positions as the others. Also, previous versions of the AVG logo used black instead of blue.

"There's More Than One Way To Skin A Cat" – I don't hear it very often, in fact, I can only remember hearing it come up in conversation a couple times… but, WOW! It's one of the most disturbing sayings I can think of.

I was at Culver's restaurant today eating a "southwest" burger (their current special, it's pretty good) and chipotle cheese curds (these are god awful! disgusting! and made me sick), when I heard someone mention skinning cats. My first thought was "…eeeew", quickly followed by "wouldn't it be just as easy and actually faster to just say `there's more than one way to do it`?"

I propose a new figure of speech to denote when there are multiple ways of doing something, a phrase that doesn't evoke mental images of animal cruelty. Maybe something like "pizza can be eaten crust first."

Much better.

I thought it would be a good idea (or at least interesting) to delve further into the world of affiliate marketing, so I jumped in and joined a few affiliate networks.

Holy crap. I have to say that I'm incredibly disappointed overall.

Most of the offers are shady looking to say the least – diet products, dating sites, credit reports – all kinds of places that I wouldn't personally want to give even my address to.

Sure, I bet I could start some ad campaigns, promote the heck out of these, and make a lot of money – but these darn moral things are getting in the way. The most successful offers seem to be the ones that prey on the naive, web-novices, people with financial problems, and the vulnerable. I'm going to keep looking for a ray of sunshine in all of this, but until then – I fail at affiliate marketing.

The post office sent me an email that the package containing my arduino is sitting in my apartment now.

But.. I just realized… I'd much rather have an armadillo than an arduino. Just think how much fun a pet armadillo would be! Sure, it wouldn't be as customizable as a board designed for electronics prototyping.. but.. AN ARMADILLO!

Anyone have one? I'll trade my new unused piece of electronics for it. 🙂