photo credit: neebong
I decided to make my first visit to the LA Public Library last weekend, which is kind of sad considering I’ve lived in LA for ~5 years at this point. The reason? I spend a lot of money buying books. I like owning them, but I really have no use for them after I finish reading them except for a choice few which I suggest to others (it’s nice to have a copy for them to read if they want). The fact that there is a huge network of libraries offering me free reading material that is the same as what I would buy is pretty hard to pass up. I also stumbled upon this blog post which suggest a couple cool features of the LA Public Library system. Apparently I can choose any of the materials available in all of LA and have them delivered to my local library branch. That way I don’t even have to drive to the library, I can just walk/bike to the branch close by.
Hopefully I can keep this up. Currently I have a bunch of books on my Amazon Wish List that I am hoping to read. My plan is to slowly work through them via the library instead of buying them on Amazon. If I really like the book, I might buy a copy, otherwise I will be saving myself some cash.
Anyone else out there utilize their public libraries? How well does it work for you? Any complaints?
photo credit: Greencolander
So I had this idea a month ago when I first had to use my air conditioner in my apartment. This is the first apartment I’ve lived in that has AC so I guess that explains why this never bothered me before. The thing that bothered me is that my air conditioner is too stupid to realize when it has cooled my apartment to a reasonable level and can shut off. This means I end up leaving it on all night when it doesn’t really need to be on that long. Definitely and engineerable moment (one of the last two words was made up).
So my plan is to take one of these guys and join it up with one of these to make a nice little network of wireless temperature sensors that can be read from any PC with a USB or serial port. This is completely overkill for my application but my data has a similar problem that he wants temperature sensors for so I’m hoping to kill two birds with one stone.
Those two devices should make my computer aware of what the current temperature is and a nice little X10 module (or possibly something more current) can hopefully make the switching of the AC on and off nice and simple.
Now I just need to pull the trigger and buy the parts to start tinkering with this stuff. It should be pretty fun.
I’ve been waiting for new MacBook Pros to be released for a while now (since X-Mas to be exact). I really just wish Apple would go for it and release the darn things. Latest rumors point to tomorrow for the imminent release although the rumor websites aren’t sure if this is for sure or not. Anyway, I’m really hoping that I can get myself a new laptop in the next week or so. My poor old PowerMac G4 is feeling its age lately.
Edit: Jackpot!
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