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Daily December #10

Back in the Before Times, in the Long Long Ago, I’d save up links and stuff over a couple of days, and then post a link dump on my blog. With the advent of platforms that are specifically designed to do quick hits like links and pictures and whatever dumb thing just crossed my mind, it’s kind of pointless to do that today.

But I’m going to do that today, because the whole point of Daily December is to just post something every day, even if it’s a bunch of dumb links.

Let’s start with this really cool thing that @midnight is doing! A weekly Spotify playlist of recordings by the comedians that are on the show.

How cool does Hardwick look in that picture? The answer is all the cool.

I may have bought myself a glowing Enterprise schematic from ThinkGeek because I don’t need a reason.

I did the Arduino version of Hello, World last night.

Hello, World!

A video posted by Wil Wheaton (@itswilwheaton) on

Maybe it’s my eyes getting older, but I struggled more than I expected to put the wires into the right places on the breadboard. I haven’t worked with electronic connections that small and precise in like thirty years, at least, and I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right. It turns out that I managed to get it right on the first try, so I guess I win a gold star?

My first impression of Arduino vs. Raspberry Pi is that the rPI (or RPI? I don’t know what the cool kids call it, but I know it’s something like that) is more my speed. I like the idea of connecting electronics, but the reality of writing code and getting software to do stuff is more satisfying and comes more easily to me. I had also forgotten how inscrutable C (the language, not the mathematical constant) is to me, and how much easier Python is for me to understand as a programming language. Maybe it’s because I struggled with C a lot when I was trying to learn it in my teens and twenties, while I’ve been learning Python as an adult with access to more resources to help my understanding, or maybe Python is just easier than C for someone whose brain is wired like mine is. Whatever the reason, my heart or my shoes, I’m going to have an easier time writing a Python script to annoy the Whos.

I’ll probably end up copying sketches for Arduino instead of trying to write my own, at least for the foreseeable future, and I’m okay with that. I think the fun and challenge of Arduino is in the actual use of the electronics, anyway, and not the programming.

This picture makes me so happy. I feel like the world is on fire, and I’ve been finding comfort in little things, like pictures from the RPG books I read when I was a kid and it seemed like the world would never be on fire.

I shipped all the coffee orders from the secret store yesterday. The other thing you can order in the secret store has like ten left, and I’m going to ship all of those things on Monday. If you don’t know what the secret store is, or how to get in, don’t feel bad; it’s a secret to everyone.

This is your yearly reminder that Christmas Lounge from SomaFM is the only Christmas music station you need.

I get these stats from Instagram, and they tell me that like 50,000 people on average are looking at the dumb videos I post there. I don’t know if that’s a lot, but it sure feels like a lot. I realized that something has changed in me, because instead of panicking about it, I feel like oh man I gotta make something amusing or stupid or stupidly amusing, because that’s a lot of people who I can entertain.

I got this picture of all the tires in the world from imgur, and used gimp to make it seamless, so if you wanted your desktop to be a bunch of tires for some reason, you can tile it.

Yeah I don’t know why, either, but there it is. At the very least, it can probably be used as a cool texture for some layers or whatever.

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anne made a thing!

Anne made a thing, and I’m super excited to share it with you.

They are silhouette paintings of trees that I saw at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It’s crazy. They are literally the first and second thing I painted and I’m selling them. YIPES! Even though I shared the paintings on Twitter, it’s kinda scary to make it into a thing that people can own and now that I’ve made it available, the scary feeling has been replaced with excitement. Yay!

Anne wrote about her creative journey a few months ago, and I love it. It’s inspiring as hell to me, and I love that she found the confidence to embrace the artist I’ve always known she is.

We are surrounded by so much beauty in life, and even as I visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery late one afternoon, I could see it. The cemetery is surrounded by beautiful old, gnarled trees that look like enormous protectors, silhouetted by the setting sun. I had never painted before but I had a strong desire to paint these trees, and so I got some watercolor paints and made these two paintings.

I love that she painted these trees, and I love that people liked her art so much, they asked her to make them into cards or prints. I especially love that she found the courage to risk putting them out there in an Etsy store, because I know from personal experience how scary it can be to wonder if anyone actually likes the thing I made enough to spend money on it.

She sort of soft-launched her store yesterday. We were at the hockey game last night (it would have been nice if The Kings decided to also show up for the hockey game last night), and during the game, she was getting notifications on her phone that someone had bought a box of her cards. It made me so happy to see the joy she felt each time one of those notifications popped up, and I was so grateful that I got to be there each time it happened. I’m really proud of her, and still can’t believe that I’ve managed to trick her into staying with me for almost 21 years.

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five cool raspberry pi projects that make: sent me

I have so many suggestions and ideas from the replies to my post yesterday, I could do nothing more than work on one a day for the rest of the year, and not finish all of them.

If you, like me, have no idea where to start, but are curious about what you can do without too much difficulty, Make: has you covered, with a blog post that they wrote JUST FOR ME! (But you can read it, too.)

5 Radical Raspberry Pi Projects for Our Pal Wil Wheaton

I think I’m going to make the PiRate radio, because how much fun would it be to take a low-watt radio station to a con?! I mean, in theory, never in practice, because rules are great and should always be followed.

And this photo booth thing that would push pictures straight to Twitter is super cool, and a neat proof of concept for potential shenanigans. In theory, never in practice, because rules are great and should always be followed.

But, seriously, take a look at the comments in yesterday’s post, if you’re pi-curious or leaning Arduino. There’s a bunch of really awesome stuff in there.

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these violent delights have violent ends

Seven days of a post a day, and it’s starting to feel like it’s okay to do stuff that isn’t super intense or deep, though I’ve discovered that instead of just posting whatever, I’m racking my brains for something heavy or at least in depth to write about. I guess I’m learning how to think with different parts of my creative self or whatever.

I got this thing called the triby from woot because it was on sale (I know, just because it’s on sale doesn’t mean you have to buy it) and though it has a terrible name (m’lady)*, it’s been a lot of fun to talk to Alexa on it throughout the day. It’s kind of cool that I can ask it to play me a news update, and it’ll cycle through about 10 minutes of news stuff from local to national to world news, then give me the weather. I keep wanting to thank it, the same way I want to thank my phone when Ok, Google, does something for me.

I kept hoping, all season long, that there would be some visual easter egg that gave a nod to the 1973 movie.

Hey speaking of self-aware robots: how about Westworld? I kept feeling like there was a good show inside whatever I’ve been watching for ten weeks, so I stuck with it, enduring awful exposition, two characters that are either badly written, badly performed, or both, and a criminal underuse of Anthony Hopkins … but after watching the season finale, I’m so glad I stuck it out. I’m looking forward to going back and watching it again, knowing what I know now. I still think the entire Mayve storyline is crap and stresses my suspension of disbelief more than the existence of Westworld, itself, but the other primary storyline was wonderful, and really paid off. Memo to LOST: this is how you do it without an audience-insulting shit ending.

Have you seen Ex-Machina? If you haven’t, and you liked Westworld, I highly recommend it. There’s also a fantastic episode of Black Mirror from series two called Be Right Back that provokes a lot of the same questions. Anne and I have been wanting to start series three of Black Mirror, but we’ve been investing our limited television time watching Channel Zero and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

You know, there’s so much good television right now, I feel like I could do nothing but watch incredible shows everywhere from broadcast networks to cable to online-only, and there wouldn’t be enough time in the day to see it all.

 

*I know, it isn’t Trilby, but it’s close enough.

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raspberry pi plus arduino equals something something

 Forgive this dumb Amazon thing. It’s part of an experiment … but STEM toys are pretty cool.

When I was a kid, I loved to put together electronic project kits. I’d get these things from Radio Shack (RIP Radio Shack) and build radios, super basic games, synthesizers, and other fun things. I liked that stuff so much, when I was curating my Quarterly boxes last year (does anyone want me to do that again?), I put a Little Bits starter kit into one of them.

I have spent so much time in the creative part of my brain, I wanted to get out of that part of my brain for a little bit (it’s full of bees) and do some other kind of making/creating, so I got myself a Raspberry Pi, and an Arduino starter kit. I’ve read a bit in Make and I have a bunch of cool books and junk from Humble Bundles that I can’t put onto my Kindle because they’re over 50mb and for some reason the current software on my Kindle won’t let it mount on my desktop as a device.

Um. Anyway.

using ssh to get into another computer on the LAN. Ah, memories!

I spent some time last weekend reacquainting myself with the Linux command line, learning nano (my heart will always belong to vim, but I’m trying new things), and building a super basic home server, samba server, and trying (and failing) to get a media server that I don’t need (Plex FTW) up and running.

I have just realized that there are a lot of parentheticals in this post. I’m acknowledging that right now, just so it isn’t weird if you’re like “wow that’s a lot of parentheticals and it’s kind of strange that you aren’t acknowledging it.”

Playing with the Pi has been a lot of fun. It’s quite powerful, especially for its size, and there’s something super satisfying about investing less than $90 to have a full on computer with a ton of storage (thank you, inexpensive 64GB USB drive) that is portable.

I haven’t gotten into the Arduino, yet, because whenever I open the box and see all the wires and electronics, I panic and close it.

Which brings me to the point of this dumb post: for all you nerds out there who have built stuff or made neat projects with one or both of these things: what do you recommend? I’m pretty competent and I can follow directions pretty well. I’d really dig it if you guys filled up my comments with links to tutorials, examples of your own projects, and other recommendations for cool things that I can make with this stuff. I also have a magnificent 3D printer that I can use to make cases, gears, and that sort of thing too, if a murderkillbot is a thing to be built.

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