LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0

LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0For Christmas, Santa brought my daughter and I the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 buildable/programmable robotics kit. Sweet! Of course as luck would have it, LEGO just announced the next generation of the Mindstorms line at CES this week, but that won’t damper our enthusiasm for building robots and programming them to do our will! 😀

My daughter has prior experience with the Mindstorms kit, having gone to a robotics camp over the summer, so while I was figuring out how to put together the quick start robot, she was already installing the software on her laptop and working on her first program (too bad the software won’t run on her Surface).

After writing the obligatory Hello World program, I fleshed it out a bit as I got familiar with the development environment and soon had our robot displaying animated graphics on the LCD screen, playing sounds, and moving around. Very cool!

my Hello World program for the Mindstorms robot

We’re both looking forward to seeing what we can do with the NXT and its sensors. The new EV3 kits will support iOS and Android out of the box, something the NXT doesn’t. I was able to install LegoDrive on my jailbroken iPhone 4S, however, and drive my quick start robot around by tilting my phone (the dogs were not amused). Maybe I’ll even get my Raspberry Pi involved in our tinkering somehow.

I, for one, welcome our new LEGO robot overlords.

Freshening up for the New Year

As part of my annual new year’s cleanup, I’ve upgraded to v2.0 of SriniG’s F2 theme, my first facelift to the blog since 2010. I still have a few minor CSS tweaks and fixes to make, but for the most part everything should be good and look nice, especially on mobile devices.

To streamline things a bit, I’ve moved the Categories and Posts by Month dropdowns and the tag cloud out of the left sidebar and onto the new Archives tab in the top menu navigation. This also replaced the old Index tab which just contained a list of every post on the site. That list is still available, but it made more sense to be part of the Archives tab along with those other archive browsing options.

If you see anything messed up, let me know in the comments!

We won’t be staying at Holiday Villas anymore!

Yesterday evening, before leaving for LEGOLAND Florida, we  made “hotel” reservations at Holiday Villas in Kissimmee, a place we’ve stayed at before when travelling with a large group to the Orlando area. We got a 4-bedroom/3-bathroom villa for the 8 of us for a very good price. We got a confirmation e-mail and our credit card was charged accordingly for the reservation. Can you guess where this is going?

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Miniature mania at LEGOLAND Florida

We had friends from Ohio visiting after Christmas who wanted to hit some of the Orlando theme parks during their stay. Their primary target was Disney World, but having younger children they also wanted to scope out LEGOLAND. We had always meant to go check it out, and I had recently received a flyer in the mail about the new Star Wars Miniland grand opening, so we were (I was) more than happy to spend a day at the (relatively) new theme park.

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A holiday slice of Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized ARM-based Linux computer that costs just $25. It’s intended to be used as an educational device and instantly appealed to my inner tinkerer (and gadget freak).

I ordered the Model B (256mb RAM, 2 USB ports, HDMI/composite video/audio jacks, and Ethernet) from Allied Electronics back in late September but ended up getting the newer revision with 512mb instead (nice!) by the time it arrived the first week of December. Considering my first Linux server was an old 486 with 16mb of RAM, the Model B’s 700MHz ARM1176JZFS CPU in a Broadcom SoC (system on a chip) is a powerhouse! Per the FAQ: “The graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.”

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Going “all in” with Google

Two weeks ago I came across this post on The Verge that talked about using CardDAV and CalDAV to sync Google information to iOS devices which, along with the new GMail app promised better synchronization and better battery life and a break from the current ActiveSync/Exchange method I had been using. I’ve been using multiple Google Calendars for personal and family items but my personal contacts were all in my Outlook account at work. I decided it was probably a good idea to clean all of that out and move it elsewhere.

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Microsoft Surface RT tablet

Surface RT tablet

Last month I picked up a 32gb Microsoft Surface RT tablet as a combined birthday/Christmas present for my daughter. In a bit of pre-planning I upgraded her laptop to Windows 8 so she had time to get familiar with the new OS before she finally got the tablet last week. So far, it’s been a hit, despite some of the setbacks of WinRT, but I’ll get into those later.

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Disney Cruise: back home (and recap)

No sleeping in today! We woke up early (6:30am) to find the ship already docked back in Port Canaveral. Since we were using the Express Walk-Off service we decided to skip breakfast on the ship and just debark and get through customs. In hindsight, we should have not been in such a rush to leave, but being one of the first families to debark meant no lines at all. In fact, by 7:15am we were through customs and 15 minutes later we were in the car and on the road home.

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Disney Cruise: Day 3

After turning in late (early) last night I ended up sleeping in a bit this morning. When I woke up around 8:00am my daughter had just woken up herself and my wife had gone to exercise in the fitness center. At some point overnight (or earlier that morning) the Dream had docked at Castaway Cay, Disney’s private island in the Bahamas.

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