Arduino...WOW

Today, I'm here to talk to you about a fascinating technology..Arduino! What is Arduino? Arduino is an open source  single-board microcontroller, descendant of the open-source Wiring platform, designed to make the process of using electronics in multidisciplinary projects more accessible. It's amazing the uncountable things you can do with it, the limit is your imagination.
The best way to describe an Arduino is with a few examples:
Want to have a coffee pot tweet when the coffee is ready? Arduino.
Want to have plushie steaks glow? Arduino.
How about getting an alert on your phone when there’s physical mail in your mailbox? Arduino.
Want to have a Professor X Steampunk wheelchair that speaks and dispenses booze? Arduino.
Want to make a set of quiz buzzers for an event out of Staples Easy Buttons? Arduino.
Want to make a light-up arm cannon from Metroid for your son? Arduino.
Want to make your own heart rate monitor for cycling that logs to a memory card? Arduino.
Want to make a robot that draws on the ground, or rides around in the snow? Arduino.

That's great but how does this work?
The hardware part it's simply an open hardware design for the Arduino board with an Atmel AVR processor and on-board input/output support. As you can see in the image.

The software consists of a standard programming language compiler and the boot loader that runs on the board.

The project started in Ivrea, Italy, when a college teacher wanted to build more pratical projects that he could show to his students, to encourage them in his classes. Founders Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles named the project after Arduin of Ivrea, the main historical character of the town. "Arduino" is an Italian masculine first name, meaning "strong friend". The English version of the name is "Hardwin".

I'll just leave you with some videos of Arduino projects, google it, you will find everything you need to get your projects running.

Oh Land's album Sun of a Gun review

Just discovered a "new" artist this week on the radio. I really liked the song, so I googled the lyrics (who didn't sometime in life?) and ended up finding the group Oh Land, the music was by the way "White Nights": I'll linked you down to the Youtube video as usual in this blog.
As I really liked the song, went down to the store and bought their album "Sun of a Gun", and I was really surprised by the quality of the entire album. It sure has one of two songs more commercial and more catchy than the others, but it's very regular the entire album, really recommend you to give it a try.
I'll leave you with "White Nights", here you can feel Nanna's (vocalist) nordic accent, wich gives the music a really classy touch, watch out for when she says "pillow", it's almost magical...

Now, I'll leave you with the song that named the album "Sun of a Gun", a really nice one of course

Listening to it you feel like kidnapped to a new colorfull world, of fantasy, fairylistic with ocasional introspective smooth paths. After all, the songs that accompanied us in dreams were born in Oh Land...

FIFA 12 online review

Just bought the new FIFA 12, and I must say it looks amazing! If you liked FIFA 11 you will love this new one. As it seems a little harder to adapt to the new defense strategy it's just a matter of adaptation. But I'm not here to talk to you about the gameplay.

My point is to talk about the new online mode game,  "Head to Head Season"! It's the same as in FIFA 11, but with a great nice improve. You can choose a Season game, or a Cup Game, choose your team, press "search" and that's it, you have yourself a match! If you play season your game will be the normal 3 points  to win, 1 to draw and 0 to defeat. In an amount of games you have to make some points, to keep in the division, or to be promote. You start in 10th divison, and you are promoted until you reache the 1st one. For example, 10 matchs you have to make 7 points to mantain, or 14 to be promoted. Just an example. It is really funny to play, and to keep track of your XP, and division and trash talk at your freinds eheh

Try it, you will enjoy ;)

A nice approach on JavaScript

Just discovered a site where you can learn about JavaScript, with a nice design and cool exercises. In www.codeacademy.com, you can learn the basics on this programming language. There are 4 courses, with several exercises in each one. It's good even for someone who never programmed before, as you can take some very simple tutorials. Give it a try, as they say on the site "Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It's interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends".
Share some other sites similar to this one.

Enjoy :)

Nicola Tesla, the greatest inventor of all time

You would think you know his name, everytime you switch on a light,  or turn on your radio. His contributions are far reaching as those of Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton or even his nemesis Thomas Edison.
This misterious tall, dark serbian invented alterneting current, wireless comunication, the modern electric motor, laser and radar technology, x-rays, neon, robotics, remote control and celular technology
and even star wars tactical warfare all over 100 years ago...yet today who's ever heard of Nicola Tesla? How can history over look such an incredible legacy?
During his last moments on earth he asked himself the same question lying in a forgotton hotel room in New York, alone!
Find out more about this great man in the video below

Hope you liked it,

Enjoy ;)

Boardwalk Empire, a must see

This series, an adaptation of Nelson Johnson book written by the writer of the award winner series The Sopranos. It's an american TV series, and talks about Atlantic City during the Prohibition era. It stars Steve Buscemi as Enoch Thompson, aka "Nucky".
The first episode with a cost of $18 million (yeah 18 millions!!) was directed by Scorcese himself was the most expensive pilot ever produced in television history.
What I really like in this series is the historical accuracy, the visuals and the traditional songs, it really amazes me the effort producers make producing such a great ambience. It makes whoever is watching to feel like time-traveled back to those days.
Steve Buscemi has a great importance in making this a great show, he plays a dirty politician who controls Atlantic City during the 20's and 30's, and he interacts with some historical figures (probably the most famous Al Capone), are these kind of details (the appearance of a young Capone) that helps create the ambience I talked before.
I can't finish the post without talking once again about the wonderful soundtrack, you can find it in "Boardwalk Empire Volume 1: Music From the HBO Original Series" released in September 3, 2011. The Prohibition-era soundtrack is composed of original music from the 1920s re-recorded by artists such as Regina Spektor, Loudon Wainwright III, Martha Wainwright, Catherine Russell, Nellie McKay and Leon Redbone. I'll leave with the theme song "Straight up and down" by the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

To finish I'll just left you with a quote from Wikipedia of the critical reception
"Since debuting, Boardwalk Empire has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Metacritic, the first season scored 88/100 and the second season scored 81/100, both indicating "universal acclaim." The American Film Institute named Boardwalk Empire one of the ten "best television programs of the year"

If this can't convince you to watch it, nothing will.

Enjoy :)

Dennis Ritchie 1941-2011

Another great man from informatics has passed away. This week Dennis Ritchie left us. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie  commonly known by his username dmr, was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era". He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague, Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system, software that powers everything from smartphones to search engines.
Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. His father was Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits on switching circuit theory. Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and in 1968, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer.
Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language, a key developer of the UNIX operating system, and co-author of The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).
The C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. UNIX has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now precepts of computing.
Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. Check this video "Unix history" by K&R

To finish the post I'll let you some interesting quotes from him.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
"C has the power of assembly language and the convenience of... assembly language."

RIP Dennis Ritchie

Containers, 20th century greatest invention?

What could be more random then talking about containers? Not much i guess...Today we don't give much relevance to them, but some say they were one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. For centuries people all over the world couldn't deal with the losses, breaks, and deviations in international transactions between continents. Only in 1937, an american Malcom Mc Lean, at the age of 20 and owner of a small truck business, as he watched the slow cotton cargo had the idea of store them and transport them in steel boxes that could be shipped.
With time Mc Lean improved his labor methods and his company Sea-Land, today Maersk-Sealand (I bet you have seen some containers from them out there). World War 2 delayed the expansion of this invention, and only in 1966 the first shipment arrived Europe (Rotterdam) already the biggest harbor in the world. The ship "SS Fairland" used his own crane to unload the cargo since there were none at the harbor. Today there are billions containers, very important in our economy, it really helped global finances.

Give your feedback on the comment box below please ;)

Enjoy

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

I couldn't continue my blog without taking a post to another homage, this time not to a show but to a great man. I'm talking about Steve Jobs, who passed away last night, at age of 56 from Pancreatic Cancer. Steve was an inspiration to hundreds, if not millions of persons and I think that's the great thing a man can left behind. Steve doesn't need any kind of presentation, I'm sure you all know his career so I'll just leave here his Stanford speech in 2005, one of the greatest speeches ever. As he said "life is probably the great invention in life".

RIP Steve

PS: I find it amazing the amount of people touched by his dead, not very usual these days.

Seinfeld - homage

It seems only right, to start this blog with a tribute to the TV show that gave name to the blog. As you may or may not know, Seinfeld was a "show about nothing". Seinfeld was on for 9 seasons from 89 to 98, and was created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, who was also an actor, playing himself. The show was about nothing, i.e, it was about day-to-day situations, and that was what made it such a fun sitcom. Episodes of Seinfeld focused on minutiae, such as waiting in line at the movies, going out for dinner, buying a suit and dealing with the petty injustices of life. There are some great situations created on the show, "The Soup Nazi" was definitely one of the most hilarious ones. Check this video from this episode

Personally one of the situations I still recall today is this where Jerry responds to a telemarketer

This show was gold. Several awards tell you that, buy the DVD's and watch it, a must see for everyone.
To finish the post I'll just show you one of the most outstanding scenes from Kramer: the way he enters Jerry's apartment.

Cumps, and stay tuned for more on this blog

New blog emerge

This is not my first blog, I'm creating a new one beacause I felt the need of talking about some random stuffs that goes on. I really felt very attached to my first theme. The idea of this one is to talk about some day-to-day situatinons, some football, my college, tv series, some films, and the financial crisis we are going on all over the globe. Keep up with this one I promise you won't regret it.

Cumps