I think I just found the perfect device to be the graphical user interface of my home automation project: the Insignia Infocast.

It came to my attention via one of the people who worked on it: Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, the creator of the Chumby. According to a relatively recent blog post by Bunnie, the device was designed to be very hackerDIY-friendly. Enabling SSH on the device is a snap, and as an added bonus it will even automatically install GCC for you. For $169, this is a great deal.

Check out Bunnie's blog post for more details on the device.

Chill of February
Our life in boxes
The cats are suspicious

Sophia and I went to the Bridge School Benefit Concert at Shoreline Amphitheater today, and it rocked. The lineup (in no particular order) included Neil Young, No Doubt, Sheryl Crow, Wolfmother, Fleet Foxes, Jimmy Buffett, Gavin Rossdale, Monsters of Folk, Chris Martin, and Adam Sandler. Seven fraking hours, but totally worth it.

After we settled down on the lawn, I noticed something plastic in the grass. I picked it up and noticed it was a bluetooth headset. Upon further inspection I noticed that it wasn't just any bluetooth headset, it was a Jawbone Prime.

The Jawbone Prime is one of the best bluetooth headsets in the world, and with a retail price of $129.99 it darn well should be. I feel really sorry for whoever lost this thing. There wasn't anyone nearby who could have dropped it where it was, so it must have fallen out of someone's pocket as they were traversing the lawn. Damn shame.

This is where I list some of the cool and interesting projects I've been actively involved in. My current professional projects may or may not be listed. I also have many smaller projects/hacks that I haven't listed yet.

Sophia and I arrived back from Taiwan safely last night at around 8pm local time. Overall, the trip was a blast!

But... I unfortunately brought home something extra—some sort of gastrointestinal illness that I contracted about 12 hours before I left Taiwan. I'm feeling a little better now, but I was absolutely miserable the 12 hours before the flight and the 12 hours during the flight. It was the worst possible time to get sick. I'll spare you the gruesome details and just say that it wasn't pretty.

Anyway, we are both at home and comfortable now. I'll post up some more details over the next week or so.

I'm flying out to Taiwan in a few hours. I'll be back next week.

Sophia and I went out to an isolated place tonight to watch the Perseids. We planned to drive down to Santa Cruz and then head north on highway 1 for a bit until we found somewhere nice to hang out for an hour or two. We ended up passing about a dozen fire trucks as we went thru the mountains, but didn't think too much of it.

Heading north on highway 1, I kept an eye out looking for places to stop. One road we went down we notice all of this crap flying in the air. It looked kinda like bugs... or snow.

We kept driving north on 1 and eventually we found a nice cozy beach to watch the meteors. We also found out where all of those firetrucks were headed. Let's just say that meteors weren't the only thing we saw burning up in the atmosphere...

This has to be the most creepy squirrel I have ever seen:

Sophia took these pictures while we were hiking in Steven's Creek County Park this past weekend. We had just got a Nikon D40 DSLR camera and wanted to see what kind of cool pictures we could take—and we ended up finding this zombie squirrel.

Sophia gets the credit of finding the critter and snapping a few pictures of it before it hobbled off looking for more brains.