I’m proud to announce the immediate availability of our Vogon Poetry application for iPhone and iPod Touch. You can get it in the App Store for $2.99.

Click here to check it out!

Now we’re cookin! 🙂

It’s surprisingly simple to get a Fictitious Name registered in Missouri, and it only happens to cost $7.00.

Simply click here: Missouri Registration of Fictitious Name and then fill out two simple online forms (takes about 1 minute), submit your credit card info for $7.00 and you’ll get an immediate confirmation of your name and PDF invoice and registration documents to download.

Very handy if you’re applying to something like the iPhone Developer Program and they need to see documentation… 🙂

Formula Sensei - iPhone formula calculator

YouTube – Fire in the Patio Fireplace at Mad Art Gallery in St. Louis

We went to the Mad Art exhibition opening tonight. This video is was taken using my Treo 700p and was of the fire in their outdoor patio fireplace. It was quite cozy and nice.

Some video I took of a cool machine mounted on the back of a truck that was hauling 3″ thick old telephone copper wire bundle cable out of the ground and chopping it up into 4′ segments to be hauled away. They were then going to lay fiber optic cable in the hole where they pulled the copper out of.

YouTube – Cool telephone wire cutting machine robot mounted on a truck

Taken on my Treo 700p. Love it… 🙂

It is glorious weather in St. Louis right now (this is one of about maybe 12 days a year where it is simply wonderful weather.) Soon it will be very hot and humid. Right now, delightful.

It’s been fun being able to take pictures of the cherry blossoms (sakura) and magnolia trees as they burst into color.

View full set of spring time pictures of walking in Tower Grove Park in St. Louis taken with my Treo 700p cameraphone

Spring has arrived in St. Louis!, originally uploaded by gserafini.

I took a bunch of pictures today of the beautiful spring blossoms exploding all over Tower Grove Park. The magnolia trees are spectacular right now.

Click here for more of my spring pictures

DiddleBug Extractor 2.1

Drawing pictures on your Palm

I use an excellent free Open Source program called DiddleBug on my Palm Treo 700p for doing small black and white drawings. The latest version of DiddleBug creates 320×320 pixel size drawings. These are referred to on their site as “high-res” pictures instead of the 160×160 pixel size drawings that older versions of the software created.

Getting DiddleBug pictures off your Palm

I used to use a nice converter on my Windows laptop called WindleBug but wanted to be able to just use my Mac laptop by itself instead.

The DiddleBug FAQ mentions using a Perl script called Didcon on Windows, Linux and OS X which hadn’t been updated yet to extract the new 320×320 pixel sized images. When I ran the Didcon script for the first time, it saved out a 160×160 graphic that had weird lines running throughout it, due to the fact that it wasn’t reading out the data for a 320×320 pixel sized graphic.

After hacking at it for a little while, including researching how to correctly indicate the pixel size of an image in a Windows bitmap in the header of the file, I managed to get a working script that correctly outputs a 320×320 .bmp file.

This is the modified script, and I’m also including a second script that you can double-click in the Finder to run the extraction process.

(more…)

I finally ventured down to explore the new Metrolink train station undeground at the intersection of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway (right near Kayaks and Washington University.) This is some video I took using my Treo 700p.

Train arriving:

Train departing:

You’ll notice in the second video the neat light changing artwork along the walls, as well as a soothing soundscape. Quite nice, I thought.

More pictures from the excursion:

So, I finally got my packages of 300 LEDs (ordered on Ebay from a Chinese manufacturer) and 100 watch batteries for the purpose of experimenting with the concept of the LED throwies today.

I made my first one with scotch tape and an orage 10mm LED. It was so exciting when it lit up. Silly, I know, to get excited about such a small thing. By the way, I had ordered the parts for my LED throwie kit earlier this week, before the city of Boston came to a screeching halt due to freaking out about a street art promotion for a cartoon show made of LED lights that caused a bomb scare. Because, well, gosh darnit, those lights must be… a BOMB! In my opinion what happened in Boston was the same result as crying FIRE in a crowded theatre. Except the theatre is the United States of America, and the person crying FIRE is the Bush/Cheney White House. Somebody is winning when our response to new promotional art is to call in the bomb squad. Somehow, though, I don’t think it is Osama bin Laden who has instilled this fear in the American people. Who wins when everyone in the country is afraid? Who gains more power?

Anyways, I was very excited to open the packages and construct my first LED throwie. The magnets haven’t arrived yet, so it’s not quite a true throwie but it is still fun to play with. Then it was time for my nightly dog walk with Kuma, going to Tower Grove Park. Tonight it is about 14° F out (pretty cold) and the park still has a light covering of snow and ice from yesterday. As I was walking along, holding my ever so precious glowing orange LED and playing with it, it occured to me that it might be neat if I attached it to Kuma’s leash so that it would track her movements as she ran around sniffing different squirrel tracks.

This is a short movie I made of her dancing movements with her own personal LED throwie light tracer dog leash modification.

It’s kind of neat to see Kuma’s movements captured by light. I took the video using my Treo 700p cameraphone. You can hear the crunch of my footsteps on the snowy pavement.

More pictures from the walk are here.