brian.peiris.name

Gliders of Life: The natural occurrence of gliders in Conway’s Game of Life

2 comments on this article on March 27th, 2013 .

I’ve always been fascinated by Conway’s Game of Life and other cellular automata. It’s amazing how a simple set of rules and primitives can give rise to enormous complexity and even emergent “life”!

TreadScroll: Using a manual treadmill to scroll a web page

0 comments on this article on March 10th, 2013 .

I bought a manual treadmill recently. The purchase coincides nicely with my continued weight-loss and my plans to experiment with virtual reality when I finally receive my Oculus dev kit. It also happens to be a perfect fit for the IKEA standing desk that I’ve been using for several months.

Controlling your computer with a Twine

0 comments on this article on March 2nd, 2013 .

The Twine is a great little device but its inability to communicate directly with machines on your local network is a glaring limitation. In this post, I describe how to bounce Twine events off the cloud, via a real time messaging service, in order to trigger actions on your computer.

Hacking the Mathmos Teardrop (Part 2)

0 comments on this article on September 24th, 2012 , tagged with coding, electronics, hacking.

In the last post I got at the Teardrop’s guts. This post describes the steps I took to connect it to a computer.

Hacking the Mathmos Teardrop (Part 1)

1 comment on this article on September 15th, 2012 , tagged with electronics, hacking.

Mathmos Teardrop giving off a green glow

I’ve been interested in ambient devices ever since I saw the computer controlled Ambient Orb (now discontinued) by the Ambient Devices company several years ago. I check on the field every now and then and I’m always disappointed to find that no one has really been able to popularize these types of products. Of course, there are dozens of DIY articles but no one doing it professionally.

I want an ambient device that is beautiful, simple and controllable and it seems most DIY articles end up hacking together LEDs and Arduinos and any plastic diffuser they find.

Defining JavaScript functions inside a loop

0 comments on this article on March 17th, 2011 , tagged with javascript.

One of the warnings that JSLint (and JSHint) can output is “Don’t make functions within a loop”. JSLint doesn’t provide any further information about the warning and a quick web-search only results in mentions of best-practice and wasting of resources. Read more