Jason set up his ol' Commodore 64 last weekend and so far it's been a big hit with our little nerdling.  Actually, I think Zach prefers the C64 over the Wii.  It's nice to know he has an appreciation for retro gaming.

Quasimondo was able to send an image in a 140 character tweet by coding an encoder/decoder.  He has titled his tweeted image "Mona Tweeta II".  You can view more details about his coding here - Link (via ArgusWatch

Stevey, a Google employee/programmer type talks about life at the company. More importantly he debunks the fad-diet equivalent programming mantras with some real world experience of what works and what doesn't in the software development world.

This Lego rocket launcher pinpoints each of the four targets and then accurately shoots rockets at each one. 

Here are several videos of the launcher in action:
Front view
Launch view
Launcher prototype
Feeder Mechanism
Shooting bloopers

[via digg]

Previously:
Lego Music Machine, LEGO OR Gate, More LEGO Mechanical Computer!, LwL: Gamer Vid, Segway Recall, Lego Chaingun, Laptop Ban, Nintendo alarm clock, Japanese Jesus, Create your own medium format pinhole Lego camera, Cube Solving LegoBOT, The Birth of a Sexbot Farm

David Bulte has programmed his Lego Mindstorms to function like a scanner that generates sound.  The scanner is set on an arm that moves back and forth over the 'score', which is a set of various colored blocks.  The different colors are then scanned and translated into sound.

On Bulte's website you can view a demo as well as listen to some mp3 Lego Music Machine examples.  If you are interested in duplicating this, you can also download Bulte's code.

[Link]

Previously:
Lego Chooses Mindstorms NXT Pioneers, 8900 Fans in Tears, LEGO Fanatics (LEGO Star Destroyer),  Grand Theft Lego, The Mindstorms Problem: Why the killer toy hasn't taken off, Create your own medium format pinhole Lego camera, Lazy Weekend Links (Hammerhead, the Lego CD thrower), LEGO Arena

This goes out to all programmers... 

Evolution of a Programmer depicts the life of a programmer from...

high school student

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 END

to chief executive...

% letter
letter: Command not found.
% mail
To: ^X ^F ^C
% help mail
help: Command not found.
% damn!
!: Event unrecognized
% logout
 
Even if you aren't a programmer and don't understand the code (like me), that's okay, you will still get the gist of it. 

EDGELib.com and ClickGamer.com announced a cross-platform mobile game programming competition today to promote the EDGE game library for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices.

The competition starts December 7th 2005 and ends June 7th 2006.

Competition Criteria
All game entries must be submitted supporting at least 2 platforms. The judging criteria will be based on:

1. Cross Platform considerations
2. Originality
3. Game Play
4. Fun Factor

Any additional support such as graphical effects and multi-networking games will earn you extra credit!

Prize
The winner will receive a ton of cool stuff:

•  A developer edition Gizmondo unit
•  A two year commercial EDGE license
•  $5,000 worth of free advertising at Clickgamer.com for their game

Competition Judges
The Cutting EDGE Coding Competition will call upon an independent panel of Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone and Symbian Smartphone experts from throughout the world to judge and select winners for the best game entries. These experts will be contributors, helpers and associates of top mobile device (PPC, Smartphone, Gadgets) gaming websites.

Anyone interested in forming a team?  I don't have time to lead it, but if someone wants to step up to the plate, I'll definately help with the coding.

Let me start this post by saying thanks to all the readers from Make, Hackaday, and Blogcadre that helped me beta test.

Get Ready.

THANKS!

As you can guess from the post's title, PhotoPlug is finally ready for download.

Make sure you put it on someone's phone for Christmas. It's a great program - you wont regret it.

Here is the final feature list:

• Your photos play as a slideshow on your phone's homescreen
• Play images from internal storage (My Documents), SD Card, or a custom directory of your choice
• QVGA support for the new high-res devices!
• Settings tool makes configuration a snap
• Choose the photo playback speed
• Action button launches camera application on supported devices. On all other devices, the configuration program is launched.
• Faster performance and smaller memory footprint
• Battery saver: photo playback is paused when phone is not in use
• "Slideshow" theme is included with this install. Check back soon for more PhotoPlug enabled home screen themes.

Get It Now!
Click here to get the 2003, 2003se, and 2005 (Magneto) version

Click here to get the 2002 version

I'm sure that most people who had a computer before 1995 have some idea of what QBasic is. If not, I'll just have to tell you. It was Microsoft's basic development system, that got included with every version of Windows up to Windows 98, and it received such coverage worldwide that it would be very difficult to find people who started using computers back then who didn't have QBasic as the first programming language they learned. QBasic had a cousin program, called QuickBASIC, which cost money, but could compile BASIC programs into full EXE files (for DOS) - since Microsoft stopped releasing QuickBASIC, a huge underground following for the language has developed, with many sites releasing QuickBASIC programs.

Well... I got my first piece of code accepted into the KDE tree today. The product: A FreeBASIC Syntax Highlighter for KATE.

Yay,