Woodside Labs

I have a child using a communication notebook to help me keep track of progress, homework, and so on from school and therapy sessions, and to help the providers see what else is going on and update each other. This is a physical composition notebook, so teachers and providers only have it for the duration of a session, which limits how much documentation they can do in a 30-minute session. I’d like to move the notebook online so it doesn’t get lost and everyone can use it more without having to take time out of a session. An online version would be easier to link to a calendar for schedule and reminders and also to correlate with other electronic records. I set up a project page here and hope to have packaged mockups leading to a live demo soon. Check out the project page.

We are building a seemingly simple and free to play game we call “Memory Match Cube”. Its like the card game Memory, where you turn over pairs of cards to find matches, but here we’ve put the cards on the sides of a cube! You can rotate the cube, click to reveal the symbol, then try to find the match! We hope to add more options and help soon, but you can try it now at https://www.woodsidelabs.com/games/mmcube/ (note, requires WebGL support in your browser. Should work in Chrome on desktop OS but not tested on other browsers or mobile yet!)

Match the cubes at https://www.woodsidelabs.com/games/mmcube/

I posted a new project on GitHub to fetch and render NWS weather conditions and forecasts. It uses XSL to render XML data from the National Weather Service.  The project also has a PHP array to convert ZIP code to latitude/longitude, which might be useful in itself for other projects. The code and PHP zipcode lookup array are posted at https://github.com/bryanherger/phpwx

We’re publishing a GitHub project to help manage services on AWS on-demand and spot instances. Our demo goals include spot instance launch on request or on schedule and managing uptime of on-demand instances using hibernate behavior to minimize compute costs. Instances would be launched or revived on demand, for example when a client tries to connect to the server’s inbound TCP port, or on schedule to avoid any latency.

There will be a Cloud Savings project page here linked at right, but most of the good stuff will be on GitHub.  Check out our progress at https://github.com/bryanherger/aws-ec2-service-proxy

I have a Masterkey USB MIDI keyboard, computer speakers, a Raspberry Pi 3, so I put them together to make a music machine for my toddler. Hardware is straightforward – keyboard to USB, speakers to round jack – and the following post is very helpful to configure ALSA and FluidSynth: http://andrewdotni.ch/blog/2015/02/28/midi-synth-with-raspberry-p/

I updated the “Pi on a roll” project page and added a GitHub repo for logging data read from OBD-II sensors in my car to JSON logs:

https://github.com/bryanherger/obd-json-logger

If you are looking for a clever gift for a DIY’er like those of us here, order early and beat the rush: https://www.etsy.com/listing/687412636/warning-stickers-mk-ii

I moved the antenna to a higher vantage point and updated the software a bit, so now you can see over 50M messages a day, and over 100 aircraft on the live map at peak times. Check it out at http://www.woodsidelabs.com/whatsup/

This article from Taboola shows how they use “perf” tools to analyze CPU spikes and identify inefficient database operations: https://engineering.taboola.com/leveraging-vertica-performance-by-reducing-cpu-system-calls/