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This PICBASIC complex LED matrix solution was developed by [Olivier de Broqueville] to drive a matrix of LEDs. Using some cheap transistors, common red LEDs, and a PIC16F628, he is able to drive a 6×6 LED matrix. This project is very well documented and has everything available including: circuit board layouts, schematics, PICBASIC source, VB [...]

If you weren?t looking forward to trying to find a NES Four Score just to rip connectors out of it or were reluctant to cut the ends off your NES controllers and use different connectors for your NES hack, you’re in luck. Parallax has released an NES controller connector (7-pin, male) that is compatible with [...]

Have you read this? It's heartbreaking, and the most lovely small great moment. ETA: Oh, you cynics! Darlings, this wasn't written as some sophomore attempt to make it around the world in one million emails. It was written by Kent...

I received a bunch of requests yesterday to address Jason Calacanis' "startup depression" email that was sent out over the weekend. Alley Insider had the full text of it online but they took it down yesterday, apparently at Jason's request....

My partner Brad has a good post up on the Union Square Ventures blog this morning. He's been thinking about why a lot of the innovation in information technology is happening in consumer facing web services. He notes that: In...

I got caught up last night and this morning on the splurge legislation. My favorite summary was from Henry on Clusterstock. In that post, Henry wrote: The Treasury has complete discretion over the prices it pays for crap assets (the...

This may come off as a shameless plug for one of our portfolio companies but I hope not because it isn't intended as such. With the tough economic times we find ourselves in, many people will be tightening the hatches...

I use Facebook a bit, but I use Twitter more. It's surely because of our investment in Twitter. But it was like that before our investment in Twitter. It could be because the people I connect to most often are...

I watched the debate last night like many other americans. Although the nationwide numbers aren't available until monday, it appears that about 40% of americans watched last night. That's bigger than any of the Bush debates and possibly even bigger...

I spent forty-five minutes this morning staring at the screen. I typed two words, and then forty-five minutes later I erased them. It was the right thing to do: what I was trying to write about needed to be in...

Without getting religious (let's leave that to Palin, why don't we?), I have to say that if I were God (always a good route to go in one's thoughts) I'd love creating salt. I'd add it to everything, even the...

I went to bed with the news that McCain wasn't sure if he would support the splurge. Not that anyone needs my vote on this thing, but I woke up trying to figure out if I am in favor of...

The banking system we have today is financial infrastructure similar to the old phone networks in preInternet days - it's way too centralized and too many tolls are paid as the flow goes through the money centers. Interestingly the $100,000...

Something has turned up. What have crops got to do with it?

Image by rcarver via FlickrSince it's inception, Twitter has been known as the place people talk about what they are doing. But when you have millions of people around the world talking about what they are doing, thinking, seeing, etc,...

I went for a six-mile run today. Well, it started out being five, but at a crucial decision point I felt pretty good, so Clara and I kept going, committing to a longer loop, rather than an out-and-back. That was...

I don't blog frequently about local news and events, but I do occasionally. When I do, outside.in captures the post and geo-tags it and puts it into their radar service. Radar is a facebook style news feed for neighborhood and...

I've been evangelizing a free streamed all you can eat music service supported by advertising for as long as this blog has been around. And last night MySpace launched just that in partnership with the four major music lables and...

1. that I will never stop being frightened when I see a tow truck in front of our house. Our tags are current, and we're parked legally, but old habits die hard. 2. that The Hives are my favorite pop-punk...

Last summer, I got an email from Paul Graham saying that one of the Y Combinator teams wanted to launch something on this blog. It was a third party comment system called Disqus. I love getting my hands on new...

I'm knee-deep in revisions of Love Spun, and I'll soon be hip-deep, I think. If you hear blurblings from over here, the water is too high -- send help. My Agent is awesome. She's really thought about this book, thought...

Technorati says in their annual State Of The Blogosphere that: The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it?s paying off. The...

The last paragraph of the New York Times story on our firm today was about places we are looking for new investments: The partners said they planned to look at how Web services might transform sectors not yet touched in...

The NY Times business section has a short profile of our firm, Union Square Ventures, calling us "A New Kind Of Venture Capital Firm." I thought you all might be interested in how this came about. A couple weeks ago,...

A day off today. I managed to get some writing done, but it was like pushing mud. It's now after four o'clock, and I'm finally coming out of my fog. I thought I'd pop my head out of the ground...

Tom Brokaw asked Hank Paulson on Meet The Press (I microblogged it here) what rules should be put in place for the splurge (that's my new favorite term for the wall street bailout). Hank was good at making the point...

Starting with semantic HTML, and layering enhancements using JavaScript and CSS, is supposed to create good experiences for all. Alas, enhancements still find their way to aging browsers and under-featured mobile devices that don't parse them properly. What's a developer to do? Scott Jehl makes the case for capabilities testing.

Q. Why did the semantic web cross the road?
A. @#$% you.

Standards promised to keep the web from fragmenting. But as the web standards movement advances in several directions at once, and as communication between those seeking to advance the web grows fractious, are our standards losing their relevance, and their ability to foster an accessible, interoperable web for all?

That's going to have to last until we get new stocks. So what's tide got to do with it?

We have a line of cookbooks over on the microwave shelf (the microwave the cats eat on top of. It protects their food from Clara -- I know, I know, but we don't prepare food there). Often, when we get...

After the overwhelming response to the Hackit we posted about automated hard drive destruction last fall, we finally decided to test out some thermite hard drive destruction ourselves. This has been done on The Screen Savers but they did not show up close results of the platters. So, aluminum and black iron oxide were procured [...]

[Cal Henderson] delivered a keynote titled Why I Hate Django at the first annual DjangoCon. Django is an open source BSD licensed web framework written in Python. Google has posted the keynote in its entirety to YouTube, which you can find embedded above. While the talk is humorous (and takes many jabs at Rails developers) [...]

Maybe you saw the previous post and thought, “Well, that’s all well and good, but why is such a stylish case being used to ventilate cat feces?” Antec has heard your cries and has created a computer case with all the lovely curves of a litter box and just as much airflow. The Skeleton case [...]

Cat poo stinks.  We all know it. Those of us who have cats, though frequently amazed at the sheer magnitude of stench our cuddly friends are capable of, do little to remedy the situation.  Sure, sometimes we buy the fancier kitty litter or the special food.  [agraham999] decided to be a little more proactive.  He [...]

VideoLAN just released VLC media player 0.9.2. VLC is probably the best known open source media player, and supports most audio/video formats without additional codecs. Before VLC, we usually installed buggy codec packs to watch videos in Winamp or Windows Media Player. We’ve found the nightly builds to be pretty stable for the past month, [...]

Ok, maybe we’re exaggerating a little bit. It may not play every game in the universe, but the CMACC gets pretty close. CMACC stands for “Complete - Multi Arcade Console Computer System” and is comprised of a giant pile of gaming goodness.  [Mayhem] packed a PC, Xbox, Xbox360, Dreamcast, Wii, PSP, and a DS into [...]

Man, yesterday's 3-mile run SUCKED. I ran after work, so I wasn't on the Bay -- I was inland in the heat. I HATE the heat. I felt like a gazelle for approximately three steps, then I turned into a...

Our good friends at First Round Capital are always thinking. A couple years ago, they hacked the web 2.0 conference. Now they are cleverly taking advantage of the misery on wall street to find talent for their startup companies in...

[morcheeba], who you should remember from CVS camera hacking, picked up a Peek and took some pictures while tearing it down. The Peek is a $100 QWERTY device with a simple OS designed only to check email. The device is being sold by T-Mobile with a $19.95/mo data plan. There’s nothing too spectacular to see [...]

The video above shows a new Wii backup loader that’s in development. It works via the easy to use Homebrew Channel we covered previously. From the news post it seems you have to rip the original game disc and then patch it before burning the copy. No release date has been set. As Nintendo Wii [...]

Lifehacker’s [Gina Trapani] has one of Flickr’s photo bikes and wrote up how it works. As you ride, the bike automatically takes photographs, geotags them, and uploads them to Flickr. The handlebar unit contains a Nokia N95 cellphone. The rear is a solar powered charging unit. It has a custom python script that starts the [...]

With today’s release of Security Update 2008-006 Apple has finally addressed this summer’s DNS bug. In their previous update they fixed BIND, but that only affects people running servers. Now, they’ve updated mDNSResponder. Clients are no longer susceptible to DNS cache poisoning attacks thanks to the inclusion of source port randomization. The Security Update addresses some [...]

PC Magazine has published their top 10 greatest hacks of all time.  Seriously, just ten *eyeroll. It is fairly cute though and there are a few interesting tidbits.  Most notably, [Ben Heckendorn] made the list with one of his portable units. We’re a bit surprised that they didn’t choose the fantastic work he did on [...]

Electronics parts can be a pain to choose. It’s often hard to tell from manufacturers’ datasheets if a part will fit your design. We auditioned six different tactile switches to find a cheap button to use in upcoming projects. A tactile switch, also called a momentary button or push-to-make switch, is commonly used for input [...]

What is it about pseudo random flashing LEDs that make us go gaga?  We don’t know, but there’s definitely something there. [seligtobiason] has this obsession too.  After seeing several more complicated projects, he created this elegant, simple, and cheap piece of art. The entire thing is pretty much just some flashing LEDs, some resistors, and [...]

Good night, moon. Thank you, my friends, for such a response. Damn! We've already raised $1310 for the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. In just a few days! That came about from a bunch of $10 and $20 donations and a...

I wrote this post for the Union Square Ventures blog and it will go up there today, but in the meantime I'll post the news here. Union Square Ventures has invested in a number of blogging related applications and services;...

The final day for entries in our Hack a Day T-Shirt Design Contest is today. Get your entries in by midnight Pacific time and you could win a Dash Express (or non-US prize).

The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) is planning a new annual gathering for lockpickers. October 9-12th they will hold the first ever LockCon in Sneek, Netherlands. The event was spawned from the Dutch Open lockpicking championships, but they’ve decided to expand beyond just competition into a full conference. This year the conference is limited to [...]

The New York Times has a story today about American Airlines' new in-flight internet service and the fact that they are blocking VOIP services like Skype. I was an early investor in VOIP in the late 90s and am a...

1 -Start Originally uploaded by Gyroxide. I've been working on the presentation with a young man named Jeremy Bogdan. Jeremy read my post seeking a graphic designer to help me with my presentation. Although he did not meet the test...

....... Normally I do not go to this level on blogs like this. Blogs that are supposed to be about business, finance, technology, etc. You really should have posted this thread on a political blog. You lost cred Fred and...

Well, now. Remember two days ago when I thought I ran six miles? I'd used gmaps pedometer to map it out before I left, but I ended up getting a little lost (don't ask -- lost on a straight line),...

I decided to try Yammer yesterday, but never got the confirmation email (I am sure it got stuck in one of my spam filters), so at this point, I haven't yet tried it. I am sure it's very good because...

Feeling happy chappie? You aren't the only one.

I am leaving the political conversation for now. If people want to continue to talk about my post this morning, they can have a go at it in the comments, but I've spent all my energy I can today on...

I spent the afternoon and early evening at Meetup yesterday. I wish I could do that more often. Meetup is a small company with a big mission - they are empowering the creation of the community organizations of the 21st...

Me and my book waiting for my pulled pork sandwich to be called at the Seabreeze Cafe. I have blisters. Ow. But I feel good and I have orange'n'cream Stewart's soda so life is good.

Ahhh. A day off. A lurvely day off, and I have nothing planned. I absolutely adore when my Google calendar daily email says in the subject line: You have no events scheduled today. There. I just went and looked at...

I know that AVC is risking turning into a job board for Etsy. Just a few weeks ago, I posted about the VP Product job. Thanks to everyone who responded to that posting. We now have a bunch of great...

Google was down big yesterday and is now retesting its lows from earlier this year. I've been trading Google a bit this year and bought it around $500 and sold it around $560. Now with the stock approaching $400, I...

Burglar victims wake to spice rub, sausage attack. Really, my favorite news story in forEVer.

Doug Perlson, CEO of our portfolio company Targetspot, which offers a monetization service (like adwords for audio) for internet radio has penned an interesting and thought provoking column in Alley Insider today. Anyone can go to Targetspot, record a 15...

I suppose many of you know this. And I'd like to thank those of you who have reached out to me to tell me about these problems. Since I don't read this blog in a feed reader and I don't...

Back in March 2006 I wrote a post about the "feedization of the web UI" where I observed that I was seeing more and more web UIs that reminded me of the news feeds that are common in the financial...

As designers or marketers, we share a desire that our tables and forms be easy to scan, read, and use. Does the widely practiced shading of alternate rows help, hurt, or have no effect? A previous study proving inconclusive, designer and researcher Jessica Enders has tackled the conundrum again, coming up with statistically relevant data and a set of recommendations.

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Before you can solve a user's problems, you must see them as that user sees them. Once you understand what drives people?s behavior, not only do new ideas flow freely, but the ideas that flow are appropriate and useful. Indi Young tells how to get out of your own way and hear what your users are telling you.

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

That was awesome. Really. Even better than I thought it would be. 1. No stress at all. We didn't even really tell anyone about it until Monday and only invited my sisters and La's brother and sister-in-law to the ceremony....

I've been watching an apartment building go up at 19th Street and the West Side Highway for the past year. It's along my regular bike ride path and also across the street from my gym at Chelsea Piers. According to...

If you've been paying attention, the Fed likes to release bad news after the markets close on friday afternoon. The past couple weeks, they've announced the failures of small regional banks. Well today, they announced something just a little bit...

Feeling chippy chappie? What's that on your shoulder, and how did it get there?

Driving home tonight after getting Lala her super-cheap bass (yay, bass!) off Craigslist in San Jose, we passed a truck with a bumper sticker on it that said, "Marriage = one man, one woman." I don't normally react to bumper...

Do you know what I'm happy about? Well, many things. But namely: 1. Gettin' married again tomorrow. Yep. Third time's the charm, right? We're just doing a little justice-of-the-peace thing tomorrow afternoon with family followed by dinner out and then...

Hank Williams points out that the front page of the Angelsoft website is really great. For those that don't know Angelsoft is a free web service that many angel investors use to manage their deal flow. We've looked into using...

druce; from twitter and Fred Wilson (at my humble suggestion): @polisigh - the political humorbot - the future of the free world depends on us Druce came up with the idea, a twitter follower picked the name, and whitney turned...

Image via Wikipedia I've been a huge fan of the streaming model vs the file based model for as long as I've been thinking about digital media. I wrote this about streaming vs files in the digital music business last...

The amazing thing is how people thought there needed to be an antitrust case against Microsoft for something as obviously necessary as integrating an html rendering engine into an operating system. Happily Google came along and showed once again a...

I'd love to show you pictures of my weekend, but apart from a couple of really, really bad pictures taken of me while I was napping at the lake (Lala managed to get the camera out of my backpack which...

A journalist friend of mine once said about Google "they are a freak of a company, the best advertising business ever built is funding the largest collection of mad scientists ever assembled". I love that description of Google and have...