Thom Nichols

Thom

Technology is evolution outside the gene pool

Making progress on the new Android App!

Here a shot of the widget on the lockscreen:



And here's a view of Twitter post details (including linked photo previews, and linked @mentions and #hashtags!)

   
Hoping to release v1 soon!

Android Social Widget

Because all of the social homescreen widgets out there suck, and I hate opening the Twitter app.  The default FB and Twitter widgets aren't even scrollable. 

LauncherPro has a good one but it only works if you use the LauncherPro home screen, and it is constantly unresponsive.  (It must be doing DB/ network fetching in the UI thread...  Naughty!) 

So naturally, I write my own.



I will ...

Home automation with Remoht.us

Remoht.us is a demo I created that parallels in many ways the work I do during my day job: push-based device control and telemetry.  Remoht.us a web app and client software that let you monitor environmental sensors (in this case temperature, light and occupancy) and also allows toggling relays.  It also uses technology that is accessible to the average joe: Google AppEngine for the UI, the ...

Changing Calendar Colors on Android

This one is almost silly, but since I haven't posted in a while...

Android doesn't let you change the account color for exchange calendars.  Instead it picks a color at random when the account is first created.  Awesome.  Well, it's not *too* hard to change without a dedicated app.  Let's get started...

First I need to open the android shell (adb shell) and find ...

Smoothing Sensor Data, Part 2

After a query from an older blog entry, I figured I should properly follow-up since there were a couple questions about how to use the low-pass filter I described to smooth sensor data from Android.

So the question was "shouldn't the algorithm be output[i] = output[i-1] + ALPHA * (input[i] - output[i]);"  Well, the answer is no, here's why:

So the wikipedia entry I referenced uses ...