Admitting it, is the first step on the road to recovery!

You may say to yourself one day, “I seek help elevating my electronic promiscuity, so I paid astronomical dollars for a product as an idiotic higher echelon of retarded dimwits member.”

Fear not my friend, there are those of us willing to help.  But first, we need to break down your statement to better understand the complexity of your issues and to be able to give you the help you are so desperately crying out for!

“I seek help elevating my electronic promiscuity” – The solitary reason you buy Apple products is because everyone else has one, right?  You don’t want to seem “uncool” so you “just have to” buy one too.  Failure to do so will decrease your chances of being viewed as cool, which, when dealing with gadgets, seriously lowers your potential promiscuity.  This is known as an “iSheep” syndrome.

“I paid astronomical dollars” – $499 for the cheapest model, but did you stop at that?  Of course not.  You *need* that 32GB model, I mean after all, where are you going to store you movies, right?  You know, the ones you more than likely already own on DVD or Blu-Ray and enjoy watching through that 35″+ wide screen TV with sweet surround sound setup, but are about to forget all that to watch them on your beautiful 9.7″ LED with audio heard through the Built-in speaker.  Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of books that you, as an avid reader who somehow sidestepped purchasing a Kindle, are going to now purchase for your new device.  But, as said avid reader, at least you don’t have to toss out all your physical books, right?  I mean, you can’t toss what you didn’t purchase.  We call this the “iPad” syndrome.

“idiotic higher echelon of retarded dimwits” – The definition of insanity is sometimes thought of as “repeating the same process and expecting different results.”  Well, based on my observations, I can safely redefine the definition to state “when consumers buy first generation Apple products.”  The observations, you may wonder?  Simply put:  Apple releases a product and a consumer buys it.  One year later, Apple releases a second generation of the product with one or two more features, and the same consumer rushes out to purchase it.  Repeat a year later for the third generation.  It is with this third generation that the Apple product finally reaches that I would say is the “complete product” – yet the consumer isn’t asking why these mundane and basic features were left out in the first two generations, oh no.  They are to busy with their “shiny new innovative” toy to even stop and ponder the common sense questions.  This issue is collectively called the “iHerd” disorder.

An iSheep, buying an iPad to remain in the iHerd!  You, my friend, are a true and through, Apple fanboy!  But fret not, we have the cure!  Merely submit to us ten* payments starting with the forgettable amount of $0.99 and doubling every payment.  Before long, your disease will be gone and the light will have shown you the way!

*Some treatments may require twenty “doses” to be 100% effective, if you are in doubt, please do not take any chances!

This post was made by Inacurate a friend of mine I met on twitter. He is a great Nokia enthusiast and leader of the iSheep resistance.
Check out his blog here. His twitter profile reads: I am me. Learn to love me because I do everything in my power to always be right or hate me because you can’t see the effort and think I am arrogant.

First Air Application

I have been pondering about Adobe’s Air product for some time. I currently use tweetdeck which is an air application I use to handle my Facebook and twitter accounts. I really enjoy it and decided I would make my home security system an Air application. But I needed to start somewhere.

I remembered a clock tutorial from Adobe’s Devnet and decided it would be a cool place to start. So I opened the example (time2) and modified it to have a transparent background and added an event listener so you could drag the clock around the desktop… Give it a try and let me know what you think…

Download The Clock
You may need to install Air first, Do that here

Thanks for reading
David Bates

How to make a simple program to control two LED’s on the Arduino with Flash

This weekend I made a simple program that flashed on two different LED’s, one blue and one red.
The LED’s where housed on my arduino and I used AS3Glue

Extension of AS3Glue’s Blinky App

Recently I have been playing with the arduino quite a lot.
I have been working towards creating a pc based home security system that I could customize myself.
One of the goals to reaching the security system was to figure out how to get flash or php to talk with the arduino. This weekend I achieved that using Firmatta and AS3Glue. Since my sisters where down this weekend helping me with my water heater install I decided to make it interesting for them too. So below you will find a youtube video of my app. I will post source, and layout hopefully tomorrow.

-Edit:
Now you can download the Sourcecode for the video above.
blink+
You will still need to download AS3Glue in order to load the appropriate Firmata and have Serproxy.

Thanks for reading
David Bates

IPhone OS 3.0 First Look

Well, I took the plunge and downloaded OS 3.0 for my IPhone and I have to say that I am impressed… Sideways email, Search in Email, and push notifications are awesome. I do find however, that a large number of programs simply crash with 3.0 and I have updated all of them from the app store. I was also disappointed to find that voice recognition was a feature of the 3GS and not the software

I give it a thumbs up but also hope that the hackers crack it soon so I can get cycorder back

Thanks for reading
David Bates