Matt Warren

I got my new Kindle in the mail on Friday and have been devouring books all weekend.

The first thing that you notice when you pick up the kindle is the size and weight. It's very thin and light. Pretty much the perfect size for an electronic device. I can see now that the size is much more convenient than the larger iPad sized device. It's light enough that it's easy to hold with just a few fingers without losing grip or having to adjust reading position from time to time.

The second thing that you notice is the screen. The black and white screen looks almost exactly like looking at paper print. It's actually kind of peculiar because it makes the device seem like it's not a piece of advanced technology.

And yet it is very advanced. The screen is state of the art. The battery lasts all month long without requiring a recharge and the internet has been abstracted upon to provide syncing, book purchasing and downloads as if by magic. It's a purpose built device that provides a great experience. The Kindle is the future of book reading.

I think what I like about the Kindle most is that there are no distractions. When reading a book there is no clock in the corner ticking away, there's no wealth of applications hiding just under the surface tempting you to play games or check email. Just simple page turning. It's easy to get sucked into the reading experience.

I very highly recommend getting one.

Yesterday when I was looking for programming details on the atmel atmega328 chip that will be powering the IO on our robot I found this promo video for atmel's touch controller chip.

Watching some of the demos of various tablet computers makes it easy to see why this is the future of computing. the iPad has been doing pretty well but I'm pretty confident that something more customizable will eventually take 80% of the market. I'm hoping for an Android based tablet for Christmas.

I have been pretty lazy about changing my license since I moved to Calgary. But today I am finally getting my new Alberta plates for the motorcycle.

This will finally allow me to cancel my overpriced BC insurance and will immediately remove a large monthly payment from my cash flow.

My new license is in the mail.

I'm hoping to take the motorcycle to Banff this weekend for some camping.

Yesterday Colum and I made some real progress towards getting our robot working.

We picked up the few electronics parts we needed and got to work on the newly built workbench in the garage. I soldered together a motor controller board and Colum put our motor gear boxes together.

it took us about 1 hour to get to the point where we could put it all together and load a test program to see that the motors and board were working. And they were!

Next steps are to get a secondary higher voltage DC power supply for the motors rather than use what power we can pull from the USB connection. That will give the motors enough juice to get up to full speed. I can also start programming the micro-controller with something useful to allow the computer to communicate with the board, motors and eventually sensors.

Yesterday we ordered our first bunch of robot parts from solarbotics.

We're going to be building a robot based on the arduino microcontroller board as a way to interface a computer with the motors and sensors of the robot.

Arduino is perhaps the coolest thing out there to play with right now. It's basically a simple microcontroller chip with USB connection for programming it and a bunch of easy to access digital and analog IO lines. this $30 board enables hundreds of thousands of tinkers to build rather cool projects like the KegMate:

I'm getting rather excited about playing with these parts.

Colum and I have started doing some research for building a robot. We've built the workspace in the garage and we have starting reading and doing some market research.

Turns out that industrial quality robots are pretty expensive devices and can sell for $10,000-$30,000 each for something that seems relatively straight forward to build and program. These are things like UAV gliders, and remote controlled tracked vehicles with a wireless camera attached.

That got us thinking that beyond being a cool hobby to get into and something that would potentially be career boosting for both of us building robots could turn into a nice small business to operate.

Robotics has not yet taken off in the same way that mobile is right now, but I suspect that it's time is coming due to the increasingly low barrier to entry for getting into robotics projects. We've been looking at the Arduino boards as a starting point and after reading a bit about them it seems like it's almost trivial to get some fairly sophisticated electro-mechanical devices put together. Even with multiple sensors and complex logic, these $30 boards seem quite capable.

Next step is going to be to start getting some tools and some electronic components to start tinkering.

When Amazon announced the new Kindle last week I made the impulse purchase and ordered one. Now after a week of mulling over that decision I am actually more excited about getting my new e reader when it ships at the end of August.

When we moved to Calgary by far the heaviest thing we packed was the bookshelf full of books (and we threw out a bunch). Being able to have all my future books packed into a small light 8.7 ounces reader should be quite nice. And the battery that lasts all month long means I won't have to bring adapters around with me.

I installed the Kindle app on both my iPod Touch and my Mac and bought a book to try out how the reader works. It's pretty neat. tap a word on the iPod and it gets the definition. When switching between the iPod and Mac it knows what page I left off at and picks up at the same spot.

One neat feature is that it highlights parts of the book that other readers have underlined. This social integration into the reading experience is kind of interesting. It's like buying used text books with all the important bits already highlighted for you.

Being able to buy books and read them immediately, without driving to the store or waiting for mail delivery may mean I end up buying and reading way more books which I hope will displace TV watching in the evening.

Redfall is taking everyone in the company to the Kid Rock Concert tomorrow for Stampede and though I'm not the biggest fan of Kid Rock I am looking forward to the opening act.Orianthi. She's an amazing guitarist and was in Michael Jackson's last tour.

Here's a video of her playing with Steve Vai.

Apparently UPS does not know how to deliver packages. So it looks like I won't be getting a new laptop. It's going back to the factory.

The good thing though is that I will hopefully get my money back soon and can use it for something a bit more important - like a down-payment.

Today I'm working from home.

One of the bonuses to having Linux at the office is that it makes it much easier to work from home and get stuff done.

I think it's possibly the biggest perk over my last job where they used Citrix to work from home. Citrix is probably perfect if you want to use email, and Microsoft office. For development it is a pain in the ass.

To get stuff done, I need to use the command line, web browser, and IDE all at once, then spin off compute and memory intensive operations like compiling, and running tests. On a shared Citrix server this becomes too taxing, and cumbersome.

VPN makes it way more flexible. I get set up with the secure keys I need to connect and then I have full access to everything I need at work. I can ssh into my workstation, or VNC. I can view intranet sites on my regular browser rather than a citrix IE window. I can pull my work to my local computer and work on it locally without any network lag if I wanted to and then push my work back to the office.

It is working really well. I feel so good to finally be rid of Microsoft Windows.