• NYC Resistor: Vector Display Introduction – “Vector displays are now mostly historical oddities — old arcade games like Asteroids or Tempest, or ancient FAA radar displays — which gives them a certain charm. Unlike modern raster displays, the electron beam in the CRT is not swept left to right and top to bottom for each row in the image. Instead the beam is steered to a point and traces the lines of the displayed image.“
• Jan Monschke: Genetic Algorithms – “A problem-solving technique that works like natural evolution. Literally! “
• National Park Service: Visiting the Hoh Rain Forest – “The Hoh Rain Forest is located in the stretch of the Pacific Northwest rainforest which once spanned the Pacific coast from southeastern Alaska to the central coast of California. The Hoh is one of the finest remaining examples of temperate rainforest in the United States and is one of the park’s most popular destinations.“
• Tim O’Reilly: It’s Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing – “n short, the secret of promotion in the age of social media isn’t to promote yourself. It’s to promote others. Success comes when your success depends on the success of your customers, your suppliers, your end-users, and when you spend more of your time thinking about them than about yourself. You can even promote your competitors. In the early 90s, we distributed to booksellers a bibliography of all the best books on Unix – our competitors’ as well as our own. Our theory was that if we helped booksellers to buy the best books, the sales of the entire category would grow.“
• Engadget: Arduino Micro Shrinks Your Favorite DIY Platform Down to Ridiculous Proportions – “With the Arduino Leonardo, everyone’s favorite hackable microcontroller turned a new page. Now it’s time to bring that simplified design and slightly expanded feature set to the rest of the family, including the itty-bitty Arduino Micro. The tiny, embed-friendly board was designed with help from Adafruit Industries, one of the biggest players in the DIY market. “

• Makeblock – “Makeblock is an aluminum extrusion based construct platform,provides integrated solution cover mechanical, electronic and software aspects. It can be used to bring your creations to life. With Makeblock you can make professional and stable robots, machines or even art-ware. It’s super easy-to-use. The only limit is what you can think of. “
• Epic Tinker – “Our memories of our first electronics projects were fond ones. These experiences sparked imagination and creativity (and, well, sometimes it’s just sparks and magic blue smoke), but we learned from these experiences each time, and it helped develop the inventor and innovator in each of us. We learn by doing, trying, experimenting. It doesn’t matter if you are making a LED blink for the first time, or if you are a seasoned tinkerer, we hope you enjoy your projects and the wonderful memories they help create.“
• A Lego a Day: New Lego train Coming in 2013 -10233 Horizon Express – “And it’s awesome looking! I have a fascination with trains that I can’t quite explain. I don’t have a desire to have a huge train layout, or even to motorize them, but I do love the Lego trains. I’ve bought several of them here and there. I think I really like the size and scale of them. And I feel they use the latest and greatest building techniques. You can learn a LOT about building from these Lego train sets.“

• KHK Stock Gears – “8399 types of Stock Gears for Robots.“
• Welcome to RobotShop U.S.A. – “RobotShop, the World’s Leading Robot Store for Personal and Professional Robot Technology. Here you will find personal robots, professional robots, robot toys, robot kits and robot parts for building your own robots.“
• Norris Labs – “My name is Steve Norris. This is my personal web site. Here you will find a collection of robot projects that I have built over the past few years. You are free to use the schematics, diagrams and source code to build your own version for non-commercial use.“
• Minds-I: All Terrain Robots – “The MINDS-i’s vision results from the belief that the world of competitive robotics can and should do more, and the fervent desire to stimulate young minds and bring that excitement beyond the classroom“
• ATOP – “Atop is an ASCII full-screen performance monitor that is capable of reporting the activity of all processes (even if processes have finished during the interval), daily logging of system and process activity for long-term analysis, highlighting overloaded system resources by using colors, etc. At regular intervals, it shows system-level activity related to the CPU, memory, swap, disks and network layers, and for every process (and thread) it shows a.o. the CPU utilization, memory growth, disk utilization, priority, username, state, and exit code.“

Time to clean out my browser menu before the holidays:

• BrickPicker: The End of Life is the Start of Profits) – “Missing out on a great LEGO set is a gut-wrenching feeling that happens all too often for the casual LEGO investor. The two-year rule is nothing more than a vague LEGO barometer for when a set might go EOL. As with almost every rule there are exceptions…in this case many exceptions!
• Adafruit Industries: OLED LEGO Train Schedule – “I started thinking about various ways Adafruit electronics and LEGO bricks could be combined. I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a minifig scale video display instead of a sticker or printed brick. So, I decided to give my minifigs a dynamic train schedule.“
• Core Developers Team: UPCORE G1 Bluetooth Receiver for Power Functions System – “PCORE G1 has 9 connectors to control your brick creations and models. 3 connectors are fully proportional, you can regulate your supply motors M-motors, XL-motors, LEDs and other appliances in the range 0-100%. 5 connectors is non proportional, these connectors can control their creations as well as with non proportional control Power Functions.“
• LPE Power: Pneumatic SYS Inline 3 Cylinder Engine – “The LPEpower team is most proud to present you this new inline 3 power plant, we consider it to be an epitome of efficiency. Compared to its predecesor it is more powerful, smaller and lighter. “
• Robot²: Segway with Robot Driver – “This project is based on my universal balancing robot code. These small balancing robots are fun, but I wanted to make something that more closely resembles a real Segway.“
• Big Ben Bricks – “Big Ben Bricks manufactures and sells train wheels specifically designed to build trains with LEGO. Five Train wheels are currently available in 8 colors. “
• YouTube: Akiyuky – “Lego Great Ball Contraption (GBC) in my house. my own 17 modules“

• OpenBeam – An open source miniature construction system – “$10/meter, ~$1.00 per joint, 100% off-the-shelf fasteners. By eliminating specialty screws, you get the best bang for the buck! “
• Tam Labs: Behind the Scenes: Injection Molding – “Every day, we come in contact with objects that are injection molded – one of the cornerstone technologies that define our modern world. Injection molding allows designers to create extremely complicated parts with relatively low part cost after a (usually expensive) initial investment in an injection mold. “

Back by popular demand, I present to you the definitive list of outdoor movies for the Puget Sound area. I’ve scoured the web to find every single venue. If I have missed any, leave me a comment or send me an email (jeff@vertexdev.com) and I’ll update the list ASAP.

I have moved from last year’s calendar format to a more convenient and easier to generate agenda format. Click on the movie name to view the IMDB entry or the venue name to learn more about the schedule.

Some movies are free, others require a modest payment or a donation to a specified charity. Most of the venues are family-friendly, but the Red Hook Brewery seems to attract a fairly young and very energetic crowd, so be prepared.

So, grab a folding chair, a blanket or two, and some snacks and get out of your cave. The summer is here and it is time to have some fun.

I can’t believe I haven’t had time to write a single post so far this year. Here’s what I have been up to:

• Blogging up a storm on The AWS Blog.
• Taping episodes of my video podcast, The AWS Report:
  • Episode 1 – Rob Frederick of Gripwire.
  • Episode 2 – Saad Ladki of the AWS Elastic Beanstalk team.
• Getting back into Lego, for the second or third time.
• Taking one class per quarter at the UW’s MCDM program. I’m now taking my sixth class; just three more to go.
• Cooking pizza in our wood-fired oven.
• Assisting my children with their own college work and graduate school applications.

I have a ridiculously long TODO list, and plenty of things to write about. Stay tuned!

• Mastering Emacs: What’s New in EMACS 24 (Part 1) – “With Emacs 24 looming around the corner I figured it was time I took a close look at all the new features and changes” Part 2.
• Tilted Twister: Tilted Twister 2.0 – “LEGO Mindstorms Rubik’s Cube solver.“