kittytwittycattoy.jpgArduino On My Mind Dept: My new O'Reilly book, Environmental Monitoring With Arduino, is here! So lately I've been eyeballing maker, hacker, and crafter blogs and feeds more avidly.  

I deeply admire that Mark de Vinck devoted so much thoughtful attention to  designing and building and decorating this Kitty Twitty Cat Toy -- it tweets a message when Tabby bashes at the little lure on the wire -- because my utilitarian mindset does not bend naturally toward this approach to using Arduino.  

Then again, the true Rulers of the Internet must be appeased.


Image and link via Make Magazine
He's warm and relaxed, sitting on my lap, flitting his tail expressively (very George, that) as I stroke him from head to rump.  Under my hand, it feels just like George's fur felt: soft, thick.

In the real world he's still dead, I don't forget that. But we are getting this special chance to visit together, outside of time and space.  

George front, Pushkin back, April 2009:

George-Push1.jpg


Excerpt (also, a run-on sentence, for which I'm fully culpable):

"With around five million cell phones in use around the world today -- and that number poised to only grow exponentially in the coming years, especially in developing regions -- mobile connectivity remains one of the most powerful tools that UN staff should harness, said Adam Hirsch, Chief Operating Officer of social media blog Mashable, particularly if and as online payment systems around the world start to standardize around a few protocols and systems, such as near field communications or NFC (also called "wave and pay" technology -- found most prominently in Google Wallet technology)."

Read the whole thing at Talking Points Memo Idea Lab.


(Oops, hit the publish button too early. Well, it's Friday somewhere...)