Creating With Code

Recently (thanks to the Internet), I figured out how to remote control a digital camera over USB using CHDK. However, if I wanted my MakerBot to be able to automatically control that camera, I needed a way to wire it up!
CHDK’s remote USB trigger functionality works by detecting when it receives power over USB.  This [...]

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One problem with making time-lapse videos of MakerBot prints is the fact that the MakerBot works by moving the build platform (and therefore the object being built) around in the XY plane, resulting in an unwatchable blur.
It recently occurred to me that, since the MakerBot is such a hackable platform, I could probably make nice [...]

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One of the things I’ve been longing to do with my mobile photo-sharing site Camura is to offer image annotations, like objects and faces.  Over the last couple of years I have been increasingly frustrated by the appearance of face tagging on services like Facebook, and the recent addition of face recognition to iPhoto has [...]

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I’ve been into hardware hacking on and off for much of my life, but I’ve never really had the time and confidence to design and build my own hardware. In recent years, projects like the open source Arduino have been slowly convincing me that I just might be able to do this stuff.
When a [...]

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I find Google to be a more and more valuable resource as time goes on, especially when seeking knowledge about how to make this new MacBook act like I want it to.
One thing I noticed early on was that pressing Tab to move around various interfaces, from Finder dialogs to web pages, would only tab [...]

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I recently purchased a MacBook to use as my primary development system. One of my first plans was to get up and running with Rails on this new machine. Given that Leopard (OS X 10.5) comes with Ruby version 1.8.6 and RubyGems 1.0.1, I thought I would be in good shape, but there [...]

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I recently had the need to migrate a project from a Subversion (SVN) repository that was shared among many other projects and groups to a fresh repository where it would be the first of many projects.
My first instinct was to simply use svnadmin dump to dump out the contents of the whole shared repository, transfer [...]

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If you’ve been following all of the latest buzz about data and applications “in the cloud”, then you’re probably already familiar with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). If you’re not, or if you’ve never had the chance to play with it, then this post should help you get up, running, and able to easily [...]

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