Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Idea Time - Temperature Thoughts

Published on May 23, 2008 in Home and Technology. 1 Comment

air conditioner

Creative Commons License 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.

Twitter Ultimate mashup

Published on April 26, 2008 in Technology and Web 2.0. 0 Comments

I had this idea a while ago and thought it was an alright idea, but never took the time to make it happen. Then in a chance conversation with Drew, he mentioned something along the same lines as what I came up with. Now that two people thought it might be a good idea, I decided to go for it.

The idea was to put some kind of framework together to use Twitter to collect score updates from Ultimate tournaments. I spent a couple hours today reading up on the Twitter API and hacking some PHP code together to make things work. I think it’s something that could work pretty well, the only problem with the idea is if people are too lazy to sign up for Twitter (and of course if they’re willing to take the time to submit updates).

The result of my Saturdays work is this: you can now send a twitter message containing “@bananacut” and within 2 minutes it will be snagged from out of the interwebsphere and posted here. Now I just need to find enough Ultimate playing Twitter users that are willing to submit updates.

Progress of BananaCut.com

Published on April 10, 2008 in Technology, Ultimate and Web 2.0. 0 Comments

I thought I would update everyone on the progress of BananaCut. Its been promising and the traffic has been slowly growing. You can see a graph of the unique visitors above, the nice big spike in the middle is from this (thanks DLK). I still haven’t made the required RSD post for every new ultimate site, but I wanted to make sure everything was in order before that happened. Right now I feel pretty good about it and I think the RSD post is coming up soon.

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