AaronEiche.com

If you don’t know already, I am a huge fan of the Arduino. Arduino is the name of Microcontroller kit. It’s open source, easy to learn, and a great way to get into electronics/physical computing. This week, one of my favorite Electronics companies, SparkFun Electronics released an “Arduino Starter Kit”. Another one of my favorite Electronics companies, Adafruit Industries, released their own “Arduino Starter Pack” quite a while back. I thought I’d take a look a little more closely at what you get…

Continue reading ‘Arduino Starter Rundown’ »

“MacBook Mini” is a name that has been attached to making a hackintosh out of a Dell Mini 9 (or a Vostro A90… same machine really). When Hykel decided to fly out to Utah to help with some family stuff, and she needed a method of scanning, we decided to splurge (at $300 it wasn’t too much) and pick up this sucker. Ironically, Hykel didn’t need it after all, because she didn’t end up taking the scanner. Never-the-less, the best laid plans of Aaron are coming to fruition. If you’re wondering, I’d put the total cost around $400 and 2 hours of time to get the thing up and running.

Continue reading ‘My Macbook Mini’ »

Back in February I decided to make a change to this website. It had gone from being a professional showcase to a blog. Part of the change was inspired by my seeing blogs out there where people made money. The formula is a common one:
“Hey! I can write stuff, and people will visit my site and I’ll get advertisers, and they’ll pay me!”

I don’t know if we’re still in the golden age of the paid blogger, but over the past 4 months I think I’ve realized something: Continue reading ‘Finding my Footing’ »

First off: No, I was not actually present at the keynote this morning. I was watching updates flow in through the news feed while at work. I wish I had been because it was a busy day.

Continue reading ‘WWDC Keynote reflections’ »

A few years back I started to get more nerdy than I had ever been. By more nerdy, I mean that I began to take an interest in a wide variety of things that leaned on the technical and electronic side. I became interested in making, modeling, and very much the “DIY” (Do-It-Yourself) mentality about things. If you haven’t heard of this phenomenon, it’s more of less born out of the desire to be creative and productive. The availability of materials and the lowering of costs has enabled individuals to create things that weren’t practically possible ever before. It’s gained the name “Making”.

Continue reading ‘The garage you’ve always wanted: TechShop Portland’ »

A month from tomorrow is my Birthday. Whenever it comes to a holiday or event that involves some gift receiving on my part, the question inevitably comes “What do you want for _________ ?” And my answer is inevitably “I don’t know…”.

The reality is that I do know, but the things that I want are so far outside of the normal range of affordability that I generally don’t want to bring it up. I don’t want to ask people for an electric car (if such a thing exists in the US – c’mon automakers, get with the program), or a $3000 projector, or a 42″ flat LCD TV, or whatever. Up until 9 months ago, one of the answers was “A new computer”, but having struck a deal with Hykel, my wife I bought a new iMac back in July, and it’s been great. So thankfully I don’t need a new computer. I’m very happy with it.

Continue reading ‘(My) 2009 Birthday Wishlist’ »

As the title says, this is a shameless plug. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a common expression that means “I have no excuse for this except my own self-interests. I’m not ashamed of that, but what I’m saying here doesn’t serve a higher cause.” At least that’s what I think it means. Anyway, I need your help… Continue reading ‘Shameless plug for a contest entry’ »

What can possibly more be said about the Newton, that hasn’t been said already? I’m not really sure, but something drove me to own one… actually, I owned a MessagePad 2100, and 5 eMate 300s.

Continue reading ‘Gadget FlashBack: The Apple Newton MessagePad’ »

I’ve been looking forward to posting this for weeks, nay months. I would have to say that this project started out as an entirely different project early on. I stumbled across the idea on Paul Stamatiou’s blog. He built a little computer out of a Mini-ITX board and a couple of pieces of plexi-glass. I was pretty amazed at it, and I thought “I would like to do that. That would be cool.” I think as much as I loved the idea of having a NAS,I also wanted a project to do. I enjoy the DIY approach to thing and I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes with it.

Continue reading ‘My DIY NAS’ »

I’ve never been really into ebooks. The primary trouble has always been a matter of how to read them. Computers are inconvenient because they’re only in one place. Though I do spend a lot of time at my desk, I don’t approach the Internet the same way I do recreational reading. Even a laptop would present to me an awkward situation. It just doesn’t feel right. I’ve had a few handheld devices in my day. A Palm, a Visor, even a Newton MessagePad, and that doesn’t include the phones I’ve had. In all of those, I’ve never given significant effort to trying to read a book on them. I don’t know if it was accessibility to books, ease of use, whatever, but the option has never really intrigued me.

Continue reading ‘Kindle iPhone App’ »