It can be hard to find good local businesses to frequent among the thousands of generic strip malls in Greater Phoenix. Here is a list of cool places I visit in Tempe and Downtown Phoenix. If you know of other good places leave a comment and I will update the list.
Cornish Pasty: Gourmet dinner pastries filled with tasty goodness. Very European selection of beers on tap. $3 Car bombs all the time. My favorites are the spicy asiago chicken and the pilgrim. Order ahead of time if you are in a rush. They play a lot of Iron Maiden.
Cartel Coffee: Best coffee in the southwest! Coffee brewed one cup at a time in $11,000 Clover machine for only $1.25-1.50!
Pita Jungle: Good pitas
Green vegetarian restaurant: all vegetarian comfort food. Really good even if you eat meat. Try the soynami soft-serve!
Papago Brewery: the bar food kind of stinks but there is a great selection of rotating beers from the west coast and around the world.
Three Roots Coffee: Coffee and vegetarian/vegan food
Slices Pizza: Closest thing to NY pizza I could find around here.
Charlie’s Cafe at ASU: only decent food in Tempe Campus. I recommend the chicken schwarma and chicken tikka.
Timeout Lounge: unassuming bar with booths, cheap drinks
Places in Phoenix:
Lux Coffeebar: very pretty coffeebar. a bike ride every thursday night at 10:30
Lost Leaf: Great selection of beers in bottles at great prices, served from a converted kitchen. Nice little house with art/music.
Roosevelt Tavern: Nice place for wine and cheese and fancy bar food in Downtown Phoenix
Carly’s Bistro: sandwiches and salads
Filed under: phoenix/tempe | 2 Comments
Tags: Beverage & Food, Phoenix, Tempe
There are many lists of great Mac apps, but here are three apps I find indispensable for my Macbook:
Caffeine: Prevents the Mac Laptop screen from dimming. Great for presentations or reading articles
InsomniaX: Keeps a Mac Laptop running even when screen is closed, without plugging in an external monitor. Great for using Mac Laptops as an embedded computer, or running in the background as a server, or using your laptop as an mp3 player. (but be careful of the Laptop overheating with the lid closed)
Quicksilver: app/script-launcher/image-manipulator/file-manager/do-everything-you-can-imagine-without-taking-your-hands-from-your-keyboard. You have to use this app for a few days and explore some features to really understand how great it is. The more you use it, the more it adapts to how you use it.
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Tags: apple
The IR camera on the Wii remote can be easily accessed using the Bluetooth connection. However, this can be a pain for embedded applications where you don’t want to rely on a “permanent” Bluetooth connection or resort to using a computer with Bluetooth.
The alternative is to connect directly to the camera using I2C. This is not trivial since the protocol to communicate to the camera to the I2C hasn’t been been thoroughly explored. Kako from Japan(why is all the awesome physical computing stuff always from Japan??) had initially demonstrated that it you can connect to the IR camera using a I2C and a microcontroller. Now, he has released schematics and code for doing so with an Arduino!
With this information you can now use the IR camera as a cheap motion capture camera without having to use a computer with Bluetooth connection.
Edit: Someone has posted a translation and guide to using the code here:
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Tags: physical computing, wii remote
Nodebox
Today, I started experimenting with Nodebox–an easy way to generate visuals using Python scripts (for free!). It is pretty friendly, but without optimizing your code, visuals can take some time to generate on my Macbook.
Here is a flower I generated using the MathSculpture.py and OrganicBall.py examples included with the app.
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Tags: graphics, visual computing
Serial I/O in Cocoa
For those of you who are interested in building Cocoa apps that use Serial I/O (for example, to log data from an Arduino) here is the relevant reference from Apple:
and here is an implementation under BSD license that could easily be adapted to your own projects from Harmless Cocoa:
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Tags: apple, physical computing
