I wanted to mount the Pi vertically to show off the intricately beautiful circuit board (and possibly to take up less space, but this thing is tiny!) and I’ve used window bricks that line up with the Pi logo. For my first attempts I tried designing a case using the lego designer – but beware, many of the bricks aren’t available from the pick-a-brick store. I’ve had to use 1×1 tiles stacked in groups of 3 to make the corners, and 2×1 tiles for the top.

It’s a bit bigger (4 bricks wide on the inside) than my original design – the GPIO pins stick out slightly too far to fit with 2 bricks wide. Windows and arch bricks form the holes for the various plugs, with the USB and Ethernet cables emerging from the top. I’ve used the mini USB power supply from Amazon Kindle combined with a remote controlled socket for power.

The latest version has the coloured bricks at the bottom, and more clear bricks at the top to refract the light from the various power / activity indicators. It also stands a little bit taller to allow for the USB mini power plug and a grip to hold the Pi motherboard in place.

Total cost is about £30, but I do have plenty of bricks left over for other lego projects…

I’ve been on the lookout for a cheap as chips digital camera for a while now, with the purpose of using it for things like underwater photography / space program / CHDK hacking. I was able to buy a nice PowerShot A480 for about £30 on ebay (they’re about £100 new on Amazon). It’s small, light, and works off AA batteries – although is a bit fussy about what type of AA battery it takes (prefers NiMh). Imagine a box brownie type camera for the noughties – cheap and super simple to use.

The A480 has a ten megapixel sensor and was launched in 2009 – although newer cameras are now in the 14 megapixel+ range a lot of this is besides the point since lens quality starts to become a limiting factor. It even has a 3.3 zoom, although with a camera like this it’s generally easier to take a few steps forward. It’s still infinitely better than the camera in my mobile phone.

CHDK is a download that sits on the SD card in the camera – the software loads off the SD card when you switch the camera on. It sits fairly neatly alongside the existing camera firmware (you can still access all your normal menus), and if you switch to an SD card without CHDK your camera reverts to it’s default state.

There’s a really easy to follow guide on the CHDK website – the only hitch I encountered was having to use a loader script since I’m using a mac – other than that everything worked smoothly.

The difference it’s made to the camera is incredible – it can shoot in RAW format, and you have complete control over aperture, exposure, ISO and a whole load of more advanced things like colour balance and flash power. There’s a huge array of settings to discover and play around with, but for me the real killer feature is the scripts.

Accessed through  CHDK you load a script from the Scripting parameters -> load script from file menus, and then run the script by hitting the shutter button whilst the <alt> text is displayed. I did a bit of experimenting with the time lapse script and created the animation below.

This is the sort of movie camera functionality that I always dreamed of when I was little – back then the only option was cine film / video, and even with that it wasn’t really in the budget of a 10 year old. It’s a blurry first attempt, but I’m quite into creating doodles.

CHDK alone is a really good reason to invest in a simple Canon compact, and although the site comes with lots of disclaimers, as I’m sure it voids warranties / Canon will come and hunt you down etc etc it’s a fairly easy way to dip your toe into the world of hardware hacking. Long may it continue!

All change here

One of the interesting features is the ability to import feeds directly – so perhaps digg will become what it intended to be – a democratic way of voting for news that’s interesting. Or it might just remain “top 10 hot pictures of Christina Hendricks / 10 Star Wars characters you’d forgotten about/ top 100 1990′s video games”.

There’s a lovely infographic with a potted history of Digg available from Online Schools.

If you’d like an invite to New Digg I have a few spare – give me a shout on twitter @kimondo

My validation code is below, it activates this blog feed in Digg (although I’m not expecting the Digg effect any time soon)

<!–1f7e876ed8f9445d9c92e3a69c06179a–>

Bzzzzz

So everyone’s buzzing (sometimes quite angrily) about google’s new attempt to make gmail a bit more social. I noticed that in the list of sites I could connect kimondo.co.uk didn’t appear, yet a few older websites I worked on did show up in the list.

A quick google later and I found this workaround based on editing the page headers:

You can manually associate your site with your account by adding this piece of code to your html code’s header part. Just replace profilename with your Google profile name. Usually takes a few days for Google to pick-up the information.

<link rel=”me” type=”text/html” href=”http://www.google.com/profiles/profilename”/>

However there’s an even quicker way which works almost instantly – just go to the superbly retro-titled google’s webmaster tools and add your site or blog to the list. You can do this with a html file upload or by adding a meta tag to the top of the page to verify the site. Once verified it appears on the list of sites you can add in to buzz.

Not sure if it’s working out cities using IP addresses, geotagging or the user’s self declared location (in which instance we’d all be tweeting from Tehran).

Now including Brixton

http://charity.further.co.uk/

By tweeting:

Tweeting this message gets 10p donated to The Children’s Society charity http://bit.ly/4PcaKP #furthercharity

your profile picture then appears on the page and the Christmas tree totalizer counts up the donations. There’s the option to top up your donation as well – although I’d be interested to find out how many tweeps actually do this. It’s always good to see twitter being used for things other than talking about Tiger Woods.

Give a tweet this Christmas

Stephen Fry was there in a warm-up capacity presumably because of his oft-voiced love of the iPhone which he uses to disseminate musings that range from being trapped in lifts, to jogging in New York. However, perhaps rather embarrasingly for Apple, Mr Fry decided to use his spot at the iTunes festival to have a go at the practices of the big music companies in aggressively pursuing illegal downloaders and filesharers.

my business – the film business, the television business, the music business – is doing the wrong thing

He spoke out against the ludicrous advert that compares downloading to pinching a handbag or stealing a car. He even fessed up to having bit-torrented a TV show – although covered himself by stating that he had already bought it on iTunes, and for some slightly unusual bandwidth reasons was unable to download it in the normal way.

Now this was all very interesting – and wildly popular with the crowd, however it seemed a little at odds to me. At the bottom of the pdf ticket I’d printed off to turn up at the gig was stated:

*You are not permitted to make audio or audiovisual recordings of the event

So when asked for a bit of feedback I tweeted the following:

listening to @stephenfry slagging off drm at itunes – where i’d get thrown out if caught filming him !

Which got slightly paraphrased when he read it on stage. Stephen Fry’s response was that everyone there was filming and photographing and tweeting – and that his speech would probably turn up on YouTube before the evening was out.

Sadly my fifteen minutes of twitter fame (quoted by the great Mr Fry – crikey!) went unnoticed to everyone but me. It even managed to get a blog on the bbc.

Maybe one day my shameless-self-publicity engine won’t let me down!

For more twitter excitement you can follow me at @kimondo

And yes, Stephen Fry did turn up on YouTube:

Stephen Fry talking at iTunes Live