Cavalcade of Mammals

State and local tax rates
Marine nudibranches
Big farm in a Chicago warehouse
Conspiracy theory poll results 2013
Study of patents effect on innovation, expected results found
On Ezra Klein’s mea culpa on the Iraq War
Magazine review of sleep technology: modafinil, armodafinil, Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), and TMS are the best yet
Niumbaha superba a rare African vespertilionid bat reclassified. Badger-striped!
Bunny Huang’s open source radiation detector $799 from Medcom, and the bGeigie Nano kit, $450
Vaccine story
Anti-vaccine track record

1) Calculate object heights using the orientation sensor. Walk off (or use Google maps, or GPS) the distance to an object, then use the angle of base to top and trig to determine height.

–I checked The Play Store, and there are 2-4 apps that already do this.

2) Cute baby / ugly baby. Have people submit pics of babies, other users score them. A lowbrow app. Mostly used by friends or random passersby taking pictures of babies and submitting them. The app could also show the cutest / ugliest babies locally, by state, by country. Easy to implement. Definitely should be a pay app.

Weight and Mortality
Updated list of Illinois makerspaces/hackerspaces:
Little Bits Workshop in River Forest, Illinois
Wanger Family Fab Lab at the Museum of Science and Industry
Makerspace Urbana in Urbana, IL (webpage broken) See here
Pumping Station: One in Chicago (north side), IL
Workshop 88, Glen Ellyn, IL
Deficit down 50% since 2009, national press ignores the story
40% of American workers make less than 1968 minimum wage adjusted for productivity gains
A guy building a CNC, posted a SLA7078 stepper driver
Google doodle for Nicolaus Copernicus’s 540th birthday
Hail Columbia!
Our Current Economic Mess, Explained With Headlines
Inexpensive GPS, Mini GPS u-blox B39 PCI-5S
Brasilian birds background audio
DIY high voltage capacitors
Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved

Improved Synthesis of Graphene Oxide. Marcano et al., AC Nano. 2010
Effectiveness of vaccines, graphic
2003 Iraq invasion timeline

Upgraded to sdcc 3.2.0 from 2.9.0, and gputils to 1.0.0. The build commands I was using didn’t work, chnages to the .c file and build commands were needed:

Changes to the .c file:
Drop:

__code char __at(__CONFIG1H) __conf1h = _OSC_INTIO67_1H;
__code char __at(__CONFIG2H) __conf2h = _WDT_OFF_2H; //out for p18f4620
__code char __at(__CONFIG2L) __conf2l = _PWRT_OFF_2L & _BOREN_OFF_2L;
__code char __at(__CONFIG3H) __conf3h = _MCLRE_OFF_3H & _PBADEN_OFF_3H; //out for p18f4620
__code char __at(__CONFIG4L) __conf4l = _XINST_OFF_4L & _DEBUG_OFF_4L & _LVP_ON_4L;


Add:

#include "pic18f46k20.h"
#pragma config FOSC=INTIO67, BOREN=OFF, PWRT=OFF, MCLRE=OFF, PBADEN=OFF, XINST=OFF, DEBUG=OFF, LVP=ON, WDTEN=OFF
//Instead of WDT=OFF, see the .inc file
//Instead of OSC, use FOSC, see the .inc file


The CONFIG settings in /usr/local/share/sdcc/non-free/include/pic16/pic18f46k20.h and /usr/local/share/gputils/header/p18f46k20.inc do not match. WDT changes to WDTEN, OSC to FOSC

Command to compile:

/usr/local/bin/sdcc -V -mpic16 --use-non-free -p18f46k20 -c p18_step_control.c -Wl"-s ./18f46k20.lkr"


Have a game of electronic (or just electric) circuits. Give the player a few parts, as many wires as needed, and a goal. The player attaches the parts until the goal is achieved. The simplest case would be a battery and a light bulb, with the goal being to light the bulb.

Other basic components can be added, resistors, caps, diodes, LEDs, etc. The game would involve only simple circuits, to make it easier and to make modeling the results from the circuits the users make easier.

Flip it

This game board is an array of tiles. The tiles have letters. The game play involves flipping a pair of letters, as if the two tiles can move through the screen on the axis that connects them. In any case, they move switches them. The goal is to rearrange the tiles to spell words.
Move:

cat --flip c:a--> act
dog ------------> dog

cat --flip c:d--> dat
dog ------------> cog

The game can be played different sized boards, and with boards with cutouts.
Variation 1: Have the tiles have both color and a letter, to distinguish common letters.
Variation 2: Have the tiles be two sided, so that flipping them exposes the other sides.

What is interesting about this is that it is a class of games easy to implement in the computer but which is hard or impossible to implement as a physical game. There is a whole class of variations on pen and pencil or board games that haven’t been tried because of this!

Squish! released for Android devices! The free app can be downloaded from the Google Play store here.

The Conservative Mind
The Long Con: Mail Order Conservatism
Stepper driver circuit using an Allegro driver
Scam School web TV show
Open States, tracks political info at the state level
Some of the history of US assassination policy

Squish is a game where tiles are moved on a game board. The starting board has the tiles out of place. The player needs to move the tiles to match the goal arrangement.

Tiles travel in a circuit when a move is made. The player click on a tile to squish it out of place. The tile displaces an adjacent tile, and this follows along a loop until a tile moves to take the place of the original tile. If many circuits are possible starting from an original tile, the choices are displayed and the player picks the move.

To complicate the game, there is a hierarchy of tiles. Darker tiles can displace lighter ones, but lighter tiles can not move darker tiles. This limits the possible moves.

I run Ubuntu on my main home machine, but the latest 12.04 LTS release has a terrible, barley useable window manager.

I’ve switched to Cinnamon, following the instructions here. Now it all works like it is supposed to.