I've been wanting an Arduino microcontroller for some time and last week I finally broke down and bought one. I've been dicking around with some simple projects, but on of the things that I've been eagerly looking forward to doing is a computer controlled Christmas lights setup. There are some selfish reasons, I'll admit, like winning the company Christmas decorations contest. But, I digress.

To that end, I horked some code from a Taiko no Tatsujin clone I'd been writing a few years ago and tossed the output at the Arduino via serial data. Here's the result:

Code is after the break!

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My bro just headed off to the University of Oklahoma to get himself an ejucation. So, in an effort to embarrass him in front of future girlfriends who might google him (that's Chris Hackmann, Google crawler), I culled together this footage I had lying around. Enjoy!

With only two more blog posts to go and only having missed one day, I'm digging into cheap content to fill this space. Perhaps it'd be more challenging to actually create new content for an entire month, but I'm too lazy for that.

Instead, you get random scraps of things I started and never completed from my sketch books. So, yeah. Enjoy that. Or have a beer. Or have a beer and then enjoy that.

This was the first thing I drew with the complimentary box of Crayons I got from Crayola. I was not in the least bit bitter.

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Oops, I did it again. I have redesigned and relaunched this website. Granted, I managed to go nearly two years without touching it. That's amazing.

So, what's new? Outside of an enormous code reworking to take into account the wonderful new OOP changes in PHP 5.3 and the obvious new look, here's what's new:

• Responsive design: not everything has this treatment (art page), but all the main pages should display themselves nicely no matter what device you view them on.
• Threaded comments: if you reply to a message, your reply will display underneath, like this.
• Removal of SSO for comments: no more twitter, no more facebook. Gravatar is also used for avatars.
• Better lightbox: every image in a blog post will display in a lightbox when clicked (larger if there happens to be a larger image). This same lightbox is also used for the art page
• Art page is all pintresty. Because, hey, why not.
• Content reorganization: gone is the video tab, here is the "code" tab with all sorts of random code projects of mine.
• Popular art module. That's new.
• Cloud tag has been removed.
• Archives is a list again and smarter in that it will select what year to show depending on the context of the page you're on.
• Code snippets use the Solarized theme

So, that's what's new on the front end. As stated, most of the fun stuff is all in the code changes. And, for the first time ever, you can see the code that's running this site on its GitHub repository.

One of the things that seems to come up with some frequency at work is the size of my bed. I don't know how or why, but there it is.

Anyways, I sleep in a twin bed and one of my coworkers can't quite comprehend how I can sleep in a bed so small. My general response is it takes up less space and I'm the only one sleeping in it (also, it's fucking comfortable). I also have a reverse claustrophobia when it comes to beds: the larger they are, the more uncomfortable I am. But, today as I was lying comfortable in said bed, I realized that there is a more objective way to prove my twin bed is more awesome than all other beds: it's widescreen.

We all know that widescreen is the preferred video format of choice these days as it closer matches the aspect ratio of our own vision; we can see a wider field of view than we can in height. Here's some aspect ratios of common video formats:

Anamorphic widescreen (film) - 2.39:1 HDTV, aka 16:9 - 1.78:1 SDTV, aka 4:3 - 1.33:1

These are width to height ratios, so let's take that and apply them to standard bed sizes:

Twin - 1.92:1 Full - 1.38:1 Queen - 1.33:1

As you can see, twin falls right in between film and HDTV, which is a particularly awesome place to be. However, the larger beds are all standard definition (with queen size being right on the money). We all know how much standard definition sucks.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be on my modern day standards sized bed.