My civic was hit a few months back and I finally have the time and money to repair it. They luckly only damaged the front bumper cover, which is plastic, so I ordered a new one along with some other new parts to create a nice new front end. This picture will help explain



The front All of the parts pictured are the current parts on my car, all of which are going to be replaced. The bumper cover and fog light covers will remain the same with the exception that the foglight covers will be paint matched black instead of silver. These are OEM honda covers but I am not a huge fan of the contrast. The front scoop, or skirt at the bottom of the bumper will be replaced with a new one with a slightly slimmer profile that is a clone of the Si scoop. The grill will have the largest change, currently it is an aftermarket chrome and black mesh grill which is starting to show its cheap e-bay quality after a year now. It will be replaced with an OEM style grill with chrome trim and a new H logo in the center to match. The reason I replaced it in the first place was the faded black plastic looked bad, now with new plastic and chrome it should look new and stock.

Just as soon as all of the e-bay parts come in I will send them out to be painted locally and then snap them all on the car.

I finished designing the Apple themed desktop speakers. They will be made from 3/4 MDF and plexiglass. I have already started working on the crossovers and specific design details. Here is a rendering of the speakers themselves.



And here is a rendering of them on a desk with a Apple 27" iMac for size reference. This is fairly close to my intended desktop setup.

I have been working on my 2.1 desktop speaker design. Starting first with the speakers then moving on to the sub. My goal is to make a pair of desktop speakers that sound much better than your standard logitech etc "computer" speakers you can buy at your local electronics store. I also want it to have a very Apple design to it so that they better match my MacBook and Apple accessories. With that in mind it will look similar to the iMacs display, rounded aluminum corners, glossy black front. Clearly, aluminum and glass are not the best speaker building materials so I will be using paint to get the aluminum color and plexiglass in place of real glass.

The design is based on a proven speaker design, the "Overnight Sensation MTM" Which I am modifying slightly to meet my goals. Here is a picture of the current design.



The overall dimensions (WxHxD) are 6"x16"x8.5", two 4" aluminum cone drivers will provide mids and lows, a 1" tweeter (shown mounted between the 4" drivers) will provide the highs. The two gray circles at the bottom indicate the twin porting necessary for proper bass extension. Speaker brackets, tweeters, and porting are shown in dark gray to show contrast. These are all black in reality. A glossy black painted piece of plexiglass will be added to the front to cover most of the mounting holes etc and will be flush with the silver edges of the box.

So that is where the design stands right now. Still a few minor details to work out in the design but the parts are all planned out so it looks like I might be able to put these together faster than I thought. More updates when I get some of the parts in or as I add more details to the design.

A friend sent me This Article about why the author is not going to buy an iPad. While interesting, the article is full of hate and biased outlook for the iPad and contradicts itself in an attempt to say open source is superior without providing any alternative product.

He starts out talking about big corps should not make revolutionary things people should... but the iPad (iPhone etc) is open for anyone to make apps for it. Yes they have to be "approved" and you can debate the merits of that all day but at the end of the day, plenty of great apps are created and available made by independent people just like us.

Then he goes off about comic books. Listen, digital copy-write isn't up to apple. Marvel isn't on android... Want to guess why?

And then he talk about the hardware... how you cant open it up. Yet you can.... in about 5 min. You can replace the screen (i did with my iphone) many web sites are devoted to opening up and replacing things. They say how you cant replace the battery and how thats "better left to professionals" but plenty of people have replaced the iPhone battery themselves etc. And LEARNED something along the way. If you change the battery on your crap phone what do you learn? nothing... its a tab that pops out the battery.... woo.

Again with the DRM.... apple has DRM on the apps so people don't steal the stuff you created and are trying to make money from. Guess what? It works! They lock it down. Their are no viruses or spy ware. Their is NO other platform that can say that.

Then he babbles on about something or other that makes no sense... and reaches a conclusion....

"If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you."

What the hell does that mean... THOUSANDS of "cool" ideas had made it... one could argue, some of THE coolest ideas today, to the iPhone platform. Just look at the app numbers, iPhone, 130,000 apps, android 30,000? "on YOUR hardware?" if you have ANY iphone or ipod touch or iPad (millions in circulation) then any app on the app store (130k) will work on YOUR hardware. But wait.. if you had an OPEN device like.. o say... android... then not every app for the android will work for your device... why? because apps are made to rely on specific hardware and software builds and no two manufactures have the same stuff. Many early devices are being orphaned and not updated and will never work with HALF of the 30k apps for android... so that statement is COMPLETELY false.

"If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn't for you."

What he is saying is basically, it's apples fault that DRM and copy write exist. Their is NO other way to legally share/give away content on ANY other platform. At least apple HAS the content like comics, no one else does... and once you have something like an entire season of LOST or a movie, you can watch on you mac/pc, iphone, ipad, laptop, apple TV etc.

"If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you."

Yeah again with the freedom thing. It sounds nice. In practice all the good apps exist on iPhone. The ones that were rejected were done for a reason, like allowing you to chew through bandwidth or because they were basically porn. Look at the user experience for the iPhone, the apps are really polished and kick ass. Even more so for the iPad.

If this person were correct, and the iPad is so terrible, then why does apple have the highest share of mobile phone internet traffic? I mean they have crappy att coverage right? Why do they have the most number of developers and 4 times more apps than android and palm? Why is everyone copying their designs and store models? Is their a better product, android or otherwise, that is better than the iPad?

People say they want open source and they want to be able to get in their PC to fix things.... when is the last time you looked at the source code for open office? Exactly, no one actually does, even though it is open source. Its just like a feel good thing, like hybrids, your not saving the planet by buying one, but it feels better than the alternative, when in actuality, its not.

You can repair/replace anything in your iPad/iPhone/iPod touch your self. Most people like the idea of messing with their PC but dont ever do anything to it. Or when they do its, "well I built it a few years ago and now the video card died so I need a new one" the iPad is built stronger than the apple laptops, same milled billet aluminum enclosure but even more robust circuit boards, I saw a video of it taking a beating from a baseball bat, the glass was destroyed.. the display underneath? perfectly fine...

Seriously, people like this piss me off. He just says "open source" a lot like some big company like Marvel is going to let out comics that will be stolen in 5 seconds. One of his friends got an iPad and they are jealous and don't have the cash to buy one them selves and they are making BS excuses as to why it is bad. As they say, its not a problem until you have a solution, well where is his "this product/apps/services are better than apple/iPad" ?

It all boils down to this, the people writing stories about the iPad/iPhone/Apple are either going to be huge fanboys or haters. They are typically tech savvy and the minority of typical apple users. Your not going to find the review of apple products from the average satisfied apple customer. But that's apple's target market, the 80% of us who just want something they can pick up and use, that just works.

I am working on a few new projects, many of them are directly related to home brewing in one way or another. I have discovered that having a brewery in my garage means that I need to keep track of the temperature in many locations. As a result I am planning on building small wireless battery powered sensors that are able to transmit back temperature data. Hopefully I will be able to have everything run from 3v and use some clever programing to make it very power efficient. The other issue is cost. I dont want each sensor to cost $20+ as I will easily need 5-10 to start.

Here is my basic idea so far. Use an ATiny85 (8pinDIP package) that runs from 2.7 to 5.5V @ 10mhz, a TMP36 temperature sensor that will also run at 2.7 to 5.5V and a 315MHz RF Link Transmitter that can run from 1.5-12v. These three parts will be combined together with a 3v watch battery and a custom PCB and hopefully some efficient code to make the sensors reliable and low power. I am hoping the ATiny85 can handle using its output pins to supply the RF Transmitter and the TMP36 with power directly enabling me to turn them on and off to save power.



Here is the basic pseudo code for how I plan to have these operate. Since they are transmit only they have no way of knowing if the base receiving device has a good transmission. For that reason we need to implement error checking and collision avoidance.

Power up ATiny
- Wait a second for TMP36 to power up
- Take a reading from TMP36
- Wait a second
- Loop through taking readings 5 times
- Take average reading/compair for reading inaccuracy
- Turn on transmitter
- Wait for it to power up
- Create a packet of data to be sent
[ StartByte ID_Of_Sensor_Bytes Temperature_Reading_From_Sensor_Bytes CRC_Checksum_of_ID_+_Temp EndByte]
- Transmit packet
- Wait a random number of seconds in case of a collision
- Transmit packet again and wait again 5 times incase of collision
- Power down transmitter
- Put ATiny into low power sleep mode for 5-10 minutes


The receiver could be any type of micro controller and would receive the data packets, grab the ID of the sensor and the temperature reading and then do something useful with it like display to an LCD or post the data to a web server. The web server would be able to assign "names" to the sensor such as "Kegerator" so that it is easily readable. I am also hoping to get the cost around $10 for the finished product. The Sparkfun transmitters come in the mail today so the fun is about to begin!

I am currently at the NYC Apple iPhone Tech Talk conference. It is a fun and useful series of talks and sessions all about developing for the iPhone. I learned a bunch of cool things last year and I hope to learn some more cool things this year.

I also had a chance to visit the new Broadway Apple store. It was huge inside. Lots of fun to play with the new 27" iMac. Hoping to go to a few more fun places like B&H while I am here. Follow me on twitter @pcmofo for more updates from the Tech Talk.