Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Somebody please do this

    Hello pubgoers. Today I come to you with a little request. I don't really know how to do this, since I hardly even use the web anymore. But if somebody were to do it, it may just be a nice thing.

    You know one of those crowdfunding sites? Why not create a crowdfunded reward for the capture, dead or alive, of the orange emperor, you know, the pedophile, that guy?

  • Alex Schroeder’s Diary — Episode 57

• Technology and Free Software

  • Particle Comes Full Circle, Becomes Part of Digi — Whose XBee Inspired the Company's Founding

    Internet of Things (IoT) specialist Particle has announced that it has been acquired by Digi International — the very company that inspired chief executive officer and founder Zach Supalla to create Particle in the first place.

    "Imagine you’re a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 27-year-old entrepreneur who wants to build a smart lightbulb in 2012. Where do you start? There was exactly one option available: the XBee from Digi," Particle's Zach Supalla recalls. "While the XBee got me off the ground, it was designed for local communications over a Zigbee network. I wanted to connect my product to Wi-Fi and control it remotely via a cloud service and developer API [Application Programming Interface]. I swapped out the XBee for a Wi-Fi chip and quickly discovered that nobody had greased the skids for Wi-Fi and cloud-connected devices the way Digi had for Zigbee. After the lightbulb project crashed and burned, we pivoted to build exactly that product: the Spark Core, heavily inspired by Digi's XBee."

  • Rishabh Jain's AirMIDI Is a Simple, Four-Component MIDI Theremin-Style Contactless Instrument

    Maker Rishabh Jain, also known as "Mr_Electronaut," has designed a MIDI controller with a difference: inspired by the classic theremin, it doesn't require you to touch it in order to play music.

    "As a long-time music lover, I've always been fascinated by how performers connect with their instruments," Jain explains. "Whether it's a guitarist bending strings, a pianist flowing across keys, or a DJ shaping sound with nothing but hand movements over a mixer, there's something powerful about expressing music through motion. I kept thinking about DJs and live performers who move their hands in the air, controlling sound almost instinctively. What if those gestures could actually become music?What if motion itself could trigger beats, samples, and effects? That question became the spark for AirMIDI."

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Who'm I trying to be online, anyways?

      I have a couple of ideas for 'portfolio' posts I want to write, Because I'd like to put together a portfolio website at some point. I like the idea of being able to show who I am professionally, and the weird career path I've had; One idea is an overview of the data format of aircraft black boxes, since I worked on those for a few years. Another is a generic 'weirdest bug I ever fixed' kind of post about inconsistent behavior between Chromium and IE. And one about cool type systems, because I just think they're neat.

      If I ever end up making a professional website, though, I'd probably keep it pretty separate from my "hush" identity because of how diaristic this blog gets, particularly writing about my struggles with doing work. And thinking about it has me wondering who I really want to be. There's a part of me that craves community more than a wall to post to, and that part of me is considering taking down my blog and retreating into tilde.town, using the internal blogging and microblogging systems there and just cultivating a presence that only those members can see. I think that part of me also values simplicity, and it would certainly simplify things to not have a blog generator and feed readers and an external-facing email.