Viewing profile — mellis

So very sad. Ben Fry is one of my heroes. He's done an amazing job with Processing, over a very long time. I can't think of any other open-source project with the same consistency …

There's a great discussion of state in one of the original lambda papers: "The Art of the Interpreter or, the Modularity Complex" by Gerald Sussman and Guy Steele from 1978: https:…

One thing that I think is lost in a lot of the comments here is that, to a large extent, privacy is experienced, not factual. That is, in many cases, the breach of privacy is the a…

There are use cases for things like Arduino (a microcontroller development board). We'd like to allow uploading to Arduino boards from an online IDE. We'd also like to allow for in…

This is great! A few things that might be nice to add are the ATmega32U4 (on the Arduino Leonardo and Micro, among other things), the ATtiny85, the ATtiny84, and these resonators: …

My former advisor, Leah Buechley, and other friends created this introduction to programming and electronics via e-textiles and the LilyPad Arduino: http://sewelectric.org/ More he…

As someone who's tried to get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley without a car, I'd love to see companies like Google advocating and supporting better public transportation as we…

I've tried to source the components using as few vendors as possible (currently DigiKey, SparkFun, and Arduino, plus ordering the PCB) but it's definitely more work than just buyin…

I haven't had any problems. Only one TSA security person noticed it, and they didn't give me any trouble.

http://fffff.at/social-roulette/

The key point here is the difference between copyright and patents. If someone has a copyright on something, you can create an alternative (free) implementation of it. If they have…

I've heard good things about the Lasersaur, a DIY laser cutter: http://labs.nortd.com/lasersaur/ Also, Ponoko is a decent option for a laser-cutting service: https://www.ponoko.com…

It apparently sounds pretty good, according to the people I've called. The reception seems pretty standard, although I don't actually display signal strength in the interface yet s…

As the person who made the phone, I think this is an interesting question. Do we say that Apple doesn't build computers themselves because they buy the CPU from Intel? Or because t…

BTW, the latest files are here: Hardware: https://github.com/damellis/cellphone2hw Software: https://github.com/damellis/cellphone2

Anyone heard anything about whether the new hardware and software will be open-source? It would be a shame if MakerBot's continued success and growth come at the expense of opennes…

For more details, see "It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up: 3D Printing" by Michael Weinberg: http://www.publicknowledge.org/it-will-be-awesome-if-they-do...

Doesn't Gatekeeper allow you to sign apps that aren't distributed through the Mac app store and avoid the warning mentioned in the article? That makes it a feature that's explicitl…

Designers designed the old look; designers designed the new look. What makes them arrogant now?

I'm happy to see a big player in the open-source world take a design-focused approach to software development. The author may not like Apple's design, but their top-down approach h…

Does anyone else find the strictness of these policies disturbing? It sounds like they found one post that violated their policy and as a result you can't find Chrome on Google for…

The problem (or one of them) is that if the euro splits up into many separate currencies, the values (exchange rates) of those currencies are probably going to fluctuate greatly. T…

It looks like they got rid of the white plastic MacBook, too. Now the product line is even more focused.