1. “…disruptive technologies don’t start out better than established technologies, as would seem intuitive, they start out worse. But for all their faults in comparison with entrenched, established competitors, there’s something radically different that opens whole new opportunities, and makes them disruptive.”

    — para-meta-quoted from Not Real Programming

    I’m aware the d-word is taboo, but I can’t help but think this perfectly describes and , as well as the reactions many people have to them.

  2. Marcus Povey: Thoughts: Simple distributed friend/follow/subscribe scheme

    @mapkyca nice brainstorming, loving the idea of key discovery for private content! (I publish a link to my PGP key on my homepage, if you want to test it out :)

    Have you had a look at PuSH v0.4? It’s way simpler than old PuSH and is no longer strongly tied to RSS/ATOM content.

    Note also that the “argh my little site got popular and is dying” thing can be solved even with your simpler system, by making the endpoint an external service. Woo hypermedia discovery over well-known URLs!

  3. I think I just tried to make @nerdhaus quiche. Whether or not I accept that interpretation of the past as canon depends mainly on the degree of misshapenness of whatever it is coming out of the oven in a few minutes.

  4. Also in today: learning about I2C communications. Tips+resources:

    • @adafruit have a helpful guide to Setting up your Pi for I2C — remember to reboot after enabling I2C modules
    • All commands which access I2C need to be run as root using sudo
    • If you’re not sure which address a particular device is at, run sudo i2cdetect before and after plugging it in and see which address changed
    • If there are libraries available for easily talking to the device you’re using, make use of them. Do this first even if you want to learn about the lower level communications too to ensure that your device is working correctly.
    • Get to know i2cdump, i2cset and i2cget, they’re super useful for poking around in I2C devices

    I cobbled together a class for communicating with the ADXL345 by cross-referencing between the Arduino library for that chip and Adafruit’s I2C library, only to find that someone else had done so only hours earlier!

  5. Successfully got both my RPis automatically connecting to WiFi and serving HTTP and SSH over @pagekite. If you’re having trouble setting up SSH over Pagekite, using Interactive Testing is super useful. Turns out I had typed my secret in wrong — oops!

    At least I can not run them headless now and not keep lugging monitor, keyboard etc. into the kitchen (only source of WiFi strong enough for tiny antenna to pick up). Better for my own sanity as well as my housemates’.