A constant problem with pervasive computing environments, whether it's a sensor mesh, or a gang of robots, or just a group of haphazard interconnected devices is aggregating collected data and displaying or processing it in a useful way. 

So now that I have access to a MakerBot, I've been playing around with building models in Google's SketchUp software. 

My first was a vt100 model, which printed pretty nicely:

I also have these stargate coasters, but they lack a good...

Recently, I found myself looking at creating borders for photos I've posted online. Here is a really simple action set that will give an image a drop-shadowed "lightbox" type of border like so:

Original	After Border

Because the steps...

So I recently set up cross-realm authentication and AFS between two realms, for added fun, one KDC was MIT and the other was Heimdal. 

I spent a while looking around the net when things didn't exactly go right, so I thought I'd share my...

I'm a big fan of retrocomputing - I've always had an interest in playing around with old hardware, ever since I can remember. 

My first computer was a Atari 130xe, which I loved to play around with, learning BASIC and the like. When I was in 3rd grade or so, I got a Mac Performa 600 - as my elementary school was big into the 90's teaching kids how to use a computer thing and wanted papers typeset, and my parents decided it was time for a "real" computer. As exciting as the 1400b (external) modem and CDROM were, I still thought the 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem was...

So a further extension of the RFID project was the ability to give people a username/pin combo and have them be able to unlock a door (for house-sitting, etc) - So here's the smartphone browser shot:

How it works:
A daemon process on a PC (written in python, using the pySerial and MySQLdb libraries) opens a connection to an RFID reader (ID-12 reader with FTDI for serial over USB). When a tag is received, it polls the database and checks to see if the tag is valid and unexpired. If successful a connection is opened up to the arduino which acts as the servo controller and the lock is unlocked! Either way, the key scanned goes into an "access attempts" table, along with the date/time and whether or not it was successful.