Sparkfun has a bunch of Arduinos on crazy sale today, and they're allowing backorders. It's a one day sale, ending just before midnight US mountain time, so you've still got time to buy your own! Those $3 minis are amazing.

I wound up buying the maximum amount I could, since I figure if I don't use them myself, they'll make nice presents. I have plans for two of the mini ones already, as part of one of my rainy day projects that's only a little past drawing board and into "let's practice arduino coding and reading sensor data" stage. But the rest are waiting for new plans!

I feel a teensy bit guilty about buying so many arduinos when I haven't even found a good use for the Raspberry Pi I got at PyCon last year. I did buy it a pretty rainbow case and a cable, but my original plan to use it as the brains for a homemade cnc machine got scuttled when John went and bought a nice handybot cnc router.


A pretty picture of the pibow rainbow raspberry pi case from this most excellent post about it. They're on sale today too if you order through pimoroni

I've got a few arty projects with light that might be fun, but I kind of wanted to do something a bit more useful with it. Besides, I've got some arty blinky-light etextile projects that are going to happen first and by the time I'm done those I think I'll want something different.

And then there's the Galileo, which obviously is a big deal at work right now. One of the unexpected perks of my job is the maker community -- I've been hearing all about the cool things people have tried with their dev boards and seeing cool projects, and for a while we even had a biweekly meet-up going to chat with some of the local Hillsboro makers. I joined too late to get a chance at a board from the internal program, but I'll likely be picking one up up on my own dime once I've figured out how I'm going to use it! (John already has one and the case he made for it came off the 3d printer this morning and I'm jealous!)

So... I'm looking for inspiration: what's the neatest arduino/raspberry pi/galileo/etc. project you've seen lately?

One of the things that bugs me when I'm doing book reviews is that I prefer it when reviews have a picture of the cover and link to the book of some sort, but I didn't love the output from Amazon's referal link generator, which would have been the easiest solution. I've been doing it manually, but that's a lot of cut and pasting and I kind of abhor doing tasks that are easy to automate.

Thankfully, I'm a coder and a user of greasemonkey, so I have all the skills I need to automate it. Seriously, being able to tweak web pages to suit my own needs is the greatest thing.

In the spirit of sharing, here's the script I'm using to generate the code I wanted for my reviews using the book page on LibraryThing:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        Book review header generator
// @namespace   tko-bookreview
// @description Takes any librarything book page and gives me a nice link to the book with cover and author details
// @include     http://www.librarything.com/work/*
// @version     1
// @grant       none
// ==/UserScript==

// Get all the data we'd like to display at the top of a review
var coverimage = document.getElementById('mainCover').outerHTML;
var title = document.getElementsByTagName('h1')[0].innerHTML;
var author = document.getElementsByTagName('h2')[0].innerHTML;
var librarythinglink = document.URL; 


// Trim down the title and author info
title = title.replace(/ *<span .*<\/span>/, '');

author = author.replace(/href="/, 'href="http://www.librarything.com');
author = author.replace(/<hr>/, '');

// Generate the code for this book
var reviewheader = '<a href="' + librarythinglink + '">' + 
   coverimage + '<br />' +
   '<b>' + title + '</b></a> ' +
   '<em>' + author + '</em>';

// Add code around this for embedding it into the page
var textbox = '<h4>Review Code</h4>' +
	'<textarea name="embedHTML" onFocus="this.select();" rows="5" ' + 
	'style="width: 250px;" wrap="virtual">' + reviewheader + '</textarea>';


// Find a good spot and add it to the page
var insert = document.getElementsByClassName('gap')[0];
insert.outerHTML =  textbox + insert.outerHTML;

Please feel free to consider this open sourced and free for any type of use: alter it to suit your needs as you will!

Edit: Github link, for those so inclined.

Back in one of my early, unpaid co-op jobs, I discovered that my otherwise reasonably experienced boss hadn't ever used tab completion, and it got me thinking a lot about how I learned a lot of command line habits through a combination of word of mouth and a personal conviction that the computer should be able to do anything I found repetitive (alas, I have not taught it to load the dishwasher). But the real take-home message is that there's a lot of little linux tricks that aren't really obvious to everyone. So in that spirit, here's an incredibly tiny script I wrote today that might be useful to someone else:

Moving files found with grep

I had a bunch of output files from my experiments, and I wanted to know at a glance which ones had failed, and then move those files to a subdirectory, leaving me with a smaller list of successes to evaluate in more detail.

Here's the script as a one-liner, the way I'd enter it:
for a in `grep -l -z "No repair found" repair.debug.*` ; do echo $a; mv $a notfound/; done

And here's some explanation:

grep -l "No repair found" repair.debug.*

My particular experiment prints a line "No repair found" when the run fails, so that's what I'm searching for in the output files it generates (repair.debug.*). The -l makes grep print just the filenames so I don't have to do any special work to parse them from the output. (You can also use the longer but easier-to-read --files-with-matches. I'm guessing -l was intended as "l for list" but I don't know.)

When I was googling for the -l flag, I did find some people with fancy xarg stuff you could do here, but seriously, if all you need is the filename save yourself some hassle. If your filenames have spaces in them, you may find it useful to do that and some fanciness with -z to change the delimiters to be \0s, but I didn't need to do that.

for a in ` ... `; do ... ; done

This is my favourite little bash for loop with the functional bits cut out. It iterates over whatever you gave it in ` ... ` putting each item in $a as it goes through. In this case, each $a is one of the found filenames. You can do away with the backticks all together if you just want a list of filenames that you could get from ls, though. If I'd wanted to move all my repair.debug.* output files, I could have done for a in repair.debug.*; do mv $a output/; done -- no backticks! I do this all the time for moving files out of my way before I start a new experiment, using directories with the date to keep track of what ran when.

Another useful command to put in there other than a grep is `seq 10` which will give you a standard counted for loop that goes up to 10. Very useful when I want my computer run an experiment 10 times while I go to lunch!

echo $a
I almost always run a version of the loop with *just* "echo $a" in the middle before I make one that does anything, just as a sanity check to make sure I got the expression right and I am actually doing stuff to the right files. I usually leave it in the final version so I can scan the output easily and see what was done. Sometimes I actually output the whole command as an echo for debug purposes

mv $a notfound/

The easy part: moving each file that matched into my notfound/ directory.


And... there you have it! A quick way to move a set of files out of your way and a little bit about how to automate other repetitive tasks on the command line. Probably obvious to many, but who knows, maybe this is exactly the script that someone else needs.

Honestly, I think I make more resolutions after GHC than I do at new year's. I'm always so inspired!

Thing 1: Pushing the development of the GNU Mailman UI

Two things came together for me at the conference:

1. One thing I heard frequently while working the free and open source software booth is that there are plenty of folk interested in getting involved with open source, but they're not sure where to start.

2. I came home with a suitcase full of paper prototypes and pictures from the Mailman 3.0 part of the codeathon for humanity on Saturday. I was looking at spending my evenings digitizing them and turning them into functional prototypes.

So... I asked for help! Transcribing paper prototypes isn't the most glamorous of work, but it's a great place for a beginner to start, and given that we're hoping to have a Mailman 3.0 release as soon as possible, new contributors would have a chance to ramp up to doing real code commits very quickly. Plus they'd be able to see their code go out and be used in the real world sooner rather than later!

I posted to the Systers list knowing I wasn't the only one feeling the post GHC rush, and I posted to the Mailman list knowing we had a would-be contributor who wanted to help.

What I wasn't expecting was that I'd have talked to NINE volunteers in less than 24 hours. How awesome is that? And most of them are women as well!

Now I have the problem of making sure I have enough for everyone to do, but with a variety of skill levels I'm sure we won't have any trouble finding stuff for everyone. I'm so excited, and I hope they are too!

Associated goals:
- Allocating more of my time to serious Mailman development.
- Getting more women involved in open source.
- Improving the usability of Mailman 3.0
- Speeding up development of the Mailman 3.0 UI.
- Doing some teaching/mentoring since I love it but won't be doing it at work this year.

Thing 2: e-textiles

The first thing I did after I got home from GHC11 was sleep. But when I woke up in the middle of the night, the second thing I did was order stuff from SparkFun. :)

I've ordered a couple of simple e-textiles kits and the goal will be to play with them. I made an awesome monster at the GHC e-textiles workshop and I was eager to do more. The end goal is to build a set of lights into my new coat that respond to my movement in some way (See the tentative wishlist), but for now I'm going to make a lit cuff/armband for walking at night and experiment with the neat little aniomagic chip 'cause it looks like so much fun!

Associated goals:
- meeting more people in the local community
- actually becoming a member of a hacklab to support my projects
- making it safer for me to walk home in my beautiful-but-not-visible new black coat
- experimenting with e-textiles
- doing some more hardware-oriented projects
- making sure I had a project that would take me away from the computer

Not-quite-a-Thing 3: Not biting off more than I can chew

A common theme at GHC is reminding people that we have to really be careful about time management so that we don't get overloaded, so I'm choosing those two things that cover lots of my personal goals, and I'll aim to do them well and save the other things I want to try for later. Wish me luck!

I'd love to hear how other people are using what they learned at GHC11!