Technical Rockabilly

I got a free sample of CyberClean® at CES on saturday and must say its pretty cool stuff. It’s somewhere between lysol and flubber but definitely cleans the gunk out of the dark, nasty orifices of your gadgets.  The guy demoing the stuff grabs my iPhone and rams it in the back hatch with this ball of yellow gel while chanting his mantra “Just press and pull, as easy as that. Removes dust and dirt, not only dust and dirt, but also germs, kills germs on contact. Just push and pull, don’t rub.”

I was skeptical of the claims of germ killing power until I looked up a few of its ingredients on wikipedia:

• Diazolidinyl Urea – Antimicrobial
• Boric Acid – Insecticide (huh) I think this might just be used to setup the glycerin to form the gel
• Methylparaben & Propylparaben – Anti-Fungals

I’m impressed. This stuff really works. Just as advertised it pulled all the dirt, dust and hair out of the bottom port of my iphone with ease. It sure beats a q-tip and scrubbing. And it’s fun to play with.

My wife got me the advanced arduino starter kit for Flying Spaghetti Monster-mas! I’ve been having a ton of fun playing with this thing and trying to remember how to program . My office is full of blinking LED’s and beeping speakers and swearwords. This thing is great! I can’t wait to buy a dedicated arduino for my chicken coop door opener. haha

What I’ve done so far:

• blink an LED
• fade and LED
• botton controlled fading LED
• light sensing box that sounds an alarm when opened.

I give you: vulcan.troseph.com. The latest addition to my computer collection. She’s no spring chicken but she’s going to have a lot of web hosting power.

Specs:

2x Dual core 2.8Ghz Xeon Procs

4Gb ram

750GB raid 10

Ubuntu 8.04 LAMP stack

It should be up and running within a couple weeks. Wewt!

This is the chicken door opener prototype I’ve been working on. The idea is the sensor will be mounted to the top and when the sun comes up, the door opens, and frees the birds.

The circuit is pretty simple. And stolen from here.

I used identical components aside from the LED’s.

4.7k Resistor
2k-100k LDR
2N3904 Transistor
Guts salvaged from the CD drive of a Sony boom box
4AA battery holder
mercury switch