Tinkerlog

This is for Mac OS X only, sorry folks.

I saw the funny command line interface to speech at Nerdlogger. Try this to play some tunes:


say -v Cellos "Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum he he he ho ho ho fa lah lah lah lah lah lah fa lah full hoo hoo hoo"


If you are brave enough, copy’n'paste the snippet below, replace USER and PASSWORD with your twitter account and it will read out loud the latest tweets of your friends.


curl -s -u user:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml | grep "<text>\|<screen_name>" | sed -e 's/&#228;/ä/' -e 's/&#246;/ö/' -e 's/&#252;/ü/' -e 's/<text>\(.*\)<\/text>/\1 from /' -e 's/<screen_name>\(.*\)<\/screen_name>/\1. . . . /' | say


Still a one liner

Some days ago I received my new PCBs. This time I tried Sparkfun’s BatchPCB. BatchPCB is a specialized service to enable even smallest orders. They collect some smallers orders and have them produced in a batch at Gold Phoenix. So the smallest order is a square inch.

(more…)

LCDs are often used in microcontroller projects. Most used are these green character displays with two or more rows to display menus, status or debug messages. With mass production of mobile phones, color LCDs get that cheap, that they can be used as replacement.
Some time ago I ordered a Nokia 6100 LCD including breakout board from Sparkfun. To test the display, I hacked a kind of small digital picture frame, that fetches pictures from Flickr. (more…)