Rob A's (Im)personal Blog.

There is a fair bit of interest in my Dynamic Text blog entry. One specific request is often for caching logic. I had actually revisited the script and came up with some simple caching, so I figured I'd share it...

Over at ThinkGeek I saw a nifty clock, the TIX LED Clock The idea is the time is displayed with the number of lights representing each digits.

I played with this idea a bit, and decided it would be cool to on the web, so turning to the Processing Language I had dabbled in once before, I cobbled together my own version. Each of the digits is coloured differently, and they slowly cycle through the spectrum. To read the clock, just count the number of lit dots at any time in each area. For example, if there are 1,5,2 and 8 lit elements (from left to right) the time is 15:28, or 3:28pm. This is a the java applet output from Processing... I believe it should display your local clock's time...

The source code (PDE file) can be found here in the downloads section.

Traveling the internet I came across a most excellent site, Descending Ashtray. While flipping through it with the enthusiams of a kid with a new comic book, I found this entry for the Dual Drill. Never having seen this before, I must agree it looks like a clever idea, but I would think, that it just wouldn't be sturdy enough with the rotating head and extra mechanism.

I'll stick with my drill, the Black and Decker Firestorm. Not only did it come with a charging station that is also a radio, but the drill head smaps off to reveal a (changable) screw-driver bit underneath. Works great for me. Plus I bought it at a charity auction for a great price! I wanted to show a picture of it, but after compositing three different pictures (the base, the drill and how the head comes off) I figured, "Hey, that would make a pretty cool animated GIF!". So here it is, my first GIMP animation:

The Black and Decker Firestorm Drill. Animation done in the GIMP.