In 2007 I decided it would be cool to build a digital photo frame, out of a broken laptop. I bought the laptop from a friend of mine, as it was pretty old and useless, considering the keyboard didn’t work. With some help of my grandpa and his tools, I built it. Later, I added speech recognition and control of the lights in my room.
Most of the original source code is lost, and the system doesn’t work well anymore, so I’m redesigning it. In a few months you can expect another blog post on this, but I thought a writeup of the old design would be nice.
On the last day of the school year it is common practice in the Netherlands that the building is transformed by the graduate students. There is a theme that has been kept secret for months, and an afternoon show to amuse the fellow students and teachers, usually with some pranks on the latter.
In the last few years I’ve competed in a few algorithmic programming contests, which are great fun! Sometimes performing well, sometimes screwing up, it’s always a great learning experience, and you meet people who are really, really good.
Right now I’m with some guys in a house in Putten, working on the CodeCup, so this is a nice time to take a break and write down what I think are cool contests, and what makes each contest unique.
Stichting SCN is a really cool non-profit organization I want to tell you about.
Like some of you, I was the kind of kid who dismantled every device I could get my hands on, trying to figure out how those worked. I read encyclopedias, books on computers and electronics, wrote simple Visual Basic programs and was very lucky because I got a LEGO Mindstorms set for my 10th birthday.
You probably know balloon art: done by magicians or clowns, on the street or at children’s parties. Some german guys have taken it to the next level. They thought visualizing the structure of complex molecules would be an excellent job for the famous balloon.
One of the coolest projects I have worked on resulted in the turning of heads when biking through the city, and was also a great challenge as it involves some tricky hardware and software. The result was pretty darn amazing though.
Posterous is a pretty good idea. You just send an e-mail with your blog text, some photos, video and sound, and they’ll automatically make a nice blog for you, all for free. The photo gallery is also pretty nice.
They even upload your photos to Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, etc., and put your video on Youtube and other video services. They also send notifications on Twitter, and other microblogging sites, and even on social network sites and other blogs. They have an extended list of all the sites they support auto-posting to.
However, the limitations of Posterous quickly became obvious to me. No options whatsoever to customize the design and the media options are pretty limited.
Well, there you have it. I started a blog. Now I think only people who actually have something to say should begin blogging. And I’m not sure if I’ve got something to say. So the first few posts will be postings of old projects, for my own reference and to get the hang of it. Maybe you’ll like it too!
My writing skills are average, as is my knowledge of the English language. So if you have suggestions of any kind, please, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!
That being said, let’s look at a fun little project I worked on about two years ago. I had a bet with Marcel Vlastuin that I could produce a self-enumerating pangram. This is an example of such a pangram:
This sentence contains three a’s, one b, three c’s, two d’s, thirty three e’s, seven f’s, one g, six h’s, ten i’s, one j, one k, one l, one m, twenty four n’s, sixteen o’s, one p, one q, nine r’s, twenty six s’s, seventeen t’s, five u’s, five v’s, four w’s, four x’s, four y’s, and one z.
