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I just compiled the flite text-to-speech engine and copied it to the OLPC. To get it working I had to: modprobe snd-pcm-oss After that, it worked like a champ. Highly recommended.

The winners for the Instructables competition have been posted. Free robot for me!

Albert suggested I call this project Fido. LGTM. I made a lot of progress on Fido this weekend. It now has an Arduino on board to control all sorts of fun things. Most importantly, it controls a working headlight (a fancy 100 lumen LED flashlight) and a relay to cut power between the OLPC and the Create. I made a custom end cap for the flashlight out of a PVC cap and some flexible black tubing that fits snuggly over the light so that I could hook it up to a transistor switch. I also committed many enhancements to PyRobot to support logging on the web UI, soft resets, and some bug fixes and error handling that improve robustness. For pictures, have a look at my Picasa Web album .

I spent a little time today playing with OpenDHT and put together a little Python module for using it. I think it will make a great bootstrapping service for a darknet application. import sha import xmlrpclib # Other gateways listed at http://opendht.org/servers.txt. This gateway uses # OASIS (http://oasis.coralcdn.org/) to find the nearest node. GATEWAY = 'http://opendht.nyuld.net:5851/' # Application ID. APP_ID = 'PyOpenDHT'# Response code to human-readable code mapping. RESPONSES = {0: 'Success', 1: 'Capacity', 2: 'Again'} # Time to live for puts and removes. TTL = 3600 class OpenDht(object): def __init__(self, gateway=GATEWAY): self.server = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(gateway) def _EncodeHash(self, value): return xmlrpclib.Binary(sha.new(value).digest()) def Put(self, key, value, ttl=TTL, secret=''): key = self._EncodeHash(key) value = xmlrpclib.Binary(value) if secret: secret = self._EncodeHash(secret) ...

See Engadget All I can think of is Jeremy talking about the 'E' sucking on one ball and the 'A' sucking on the other. Seek to 3:20.

I added night vision (aka flashlights) to my robot. I used an inverted Gorillapod to mount the lights. The next step is to get some relays so I can turn them on and off with the Arduino . From Fido

I just got my Arduino today and set up was pretty easy. My box is running Ubuntu Feisty. Download arudino-0009.tgz and extract it. Install avrdude, avr-libc, binutils-avr, gcc-avr, and uisp. Execute arduino-0009/arduino. Java was already set up in my case and I'm pretty sure not all of those avr related packages are necessary. But, it worked for me :) Update: I just discovered the Arduino Playground which has some nice articles on how to set up your Arduino on different platforms.

FPS Doug: "Somtimes I think, maybe I want to join the army. It's basically like FPS but better graphics. But what happens if I get lag out there?? I'm dead! I mean, I even heard there's no respawn points in RL!"

I've published my code for controlling the Pertelian X2040 USB LCD display on Google Code Hosting as a new project PyPert . I've also included a script that uses PyPert to display your online Xbox Live friends.

The ingredients in this BeautifulSoup are mechanize and ClientForm . You'll need to link your gamer tag to your Windows Passport at xbox.com before this will work. from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup from mechanize import Browser WINDOWS_PASSPORT_LOGIN = 'youremail@yourdomain.com' WINDOWS_PASSPORT_PASSWD = 'yourpasswd' FRIEND_TABLE_CLASS = 'XbcProfileTable XbcFriendsListTable' GAMER_TAG_CLASS = 'XbcGamerTag' GAMER_PRESENCE_CLASS = 'XbcGamerPresence' br = Browser() br.open('http://live.xbox.com/en-US/profile/Friends.aspx') br.select_form(name='f1') br['login'] = WINDOWS_PASSPORT_LOGIN br['passwd'] = WINDOWS_PASSPORT_PASSWD br.submit() # Submit login form. br.select_form(name='fmHF') response = br.submit() # Submit redirect form. friend_list = response.read() soup = BeautifulSoup(friend_list) friend_table = soup.find('table', {'class': FRIEND_TABLE_CLASS}) for row in friend_table....

"""Record and display shout outs for the life of the server.""" import gsd TEMPLATE = """ <html> <head> <title>Shout Outs!</title> </head> <body> <form action="/" method="get"> <input name="shout"> <input type="submit" value="Shout!"> </form> <? for shout in self.shout_outs: print shout, '<br>' ?> </body> </html> """ class ShoutOuts(gsd.App): """A simple GSD app that records shout outs for the life of the server.""" def __init__(self): self.shout_outs = [] def GET_(self, shout=None): """Display shout outs and form to add new ones.""" if shout is not None: self.shout_outs.append(shout[0]) self.Render(TEMPLATE, locals()) def GET_reset(self): """Reset the list of shoutouts."...

I present to you getshitdone , or GSD for the prudish. GSD is a web framework for those of us that just don't have time for those other frameworks. GSD Goals: An implementation in about 50 lines of code. Minimal work, maximum flexibility. No dependencies outside the Python standard library. GSD Non-Goals: Performance. Standards compliance. Working with Apache, Lighttpd, whatever. Here's a simple GSD Hello World app. import gsd class HelloWorld(gsd.App): def GET_(self): self.wfile.write('Hello World!') app = HelloWorld() app.Serve('localhost', 8080) GSD also has its own templating language. It's called Python. # Template helloworld.html <? self.wfile.write('Hello World!') ?> # GSD App class HelloWorld(gsd.App): def GET_(self): self.Render('helloworld.html', locals()) More documentation and examples to come on the project page.