Ben gives a presentation about a sounding rocket that he and a group of coworkers designed, built and launched. You can read about more Omaha Maker Group presentations at www.omahamakergroup.org.

A few months back, now, I traded in my Samsung Moment for my first keyboardless smartphone, the Motorola Photon.  The Photon (as with most keyboardless phones) is substantially thinner than my Moment, and a whole heck of a lot faster. I’m not going to bore you with specs, but it’s very comparable to my Viewsonic gTablet, in terms of hardware.

Overall, I’m very happy with the hardware, though battery life could always be better. Motorola’s interpretation of Gingerbread leaves little to be desired, except that screen rotation is limited to 3 of the 4 main directions (It doesn’t work upside down, vertically). The camera is about as you’d expect for a smartphone: Lots of pixels and quite good in bright light, but lacking when left to it’s LED “flash”.  The GPS module gets a lock almost instantly, even indoors.

From a software standpoint, I’m learning a lot about predictive typing (and I’m not sure that I like it). What I do love is SwiftKeyX’s voice transcription capabilities, which I believe use a Google web service. Google Voice Search (which includes some phone automation commands) is also very good.  It’s completely viable to do most phone operations via voice.

I’ve picked up a few accessories, including an extended battery, and an Otterbox Defender (which can’t be used together, sadly), which I’ll discuss later.

So it’s my birthday again;  Becky and I were discussing cakes, so I turned up some photos of cakes (mostly) made by Mom when I was a kid.  The airbrushed (blue) one is obviously store-bought, but the others are assembled from various cake shapes.  I think these cakes are from my 5th, 6th, and 7th birthdays, based on the number of candles.

Nice work, Mom!

 

Over the long weekend, I finally got around to painting our storage cubby.  This space is at the back of one of our closets, about waist high.  The space itself is about 4x4x8 (wxhxd) and uses up the area over a stairwell.  The walls were always getting beat up, as we store “long term storage” (and seasonal) rubbermaid totes of junk, as well as extra chairs in there.  Moreover, it was always tricky to light.

I’d initially wanted to add a can light and a switch, but DaveK talked me into rope light ($4 on clearance) and a spare extension cord for the once per month that I need it.  Add to that some leftover paint from a bathroom project, and the total cost for the project was $4.

Next step (no pun intended) is an easier way to get things in there…

Dave did a demo involving various types of piezoelectric devices, including one that he made from common kitchen ingredients. You can read about more Omaha Maker Group presentations at www.omahamakergroup.org.