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Robot Builder

Robot Builder

Hey, it’s a new book! Robot Builder: The Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots is now available!

Last year after I served as Technical Editor for John Baichtal’s Arduino for Beginners I was fortunate enough to be asked to again fulfill the role for Robot Builder. (Obviously I said “Yes!”)

Books take a long time, and there’s a lot of reading involved, and for my part, a lot of research and checking on technical data. It’s definitely enjoyable though, and there’s a lot to learn along the way.

(I’m not currently working on any books, but if you’re in need of Technical Editor that’s near one of my areas of expertise, I may be available.)

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Arduino for Beginners

Arduino for Beginners

It seems like just a week ago I mentioned a book, and it was, but here’s my confession: being a contributing photographer to a book is pretty simple. At least it has been in my experience. Writing a book is a huge beast, and while I did not take on such a herculean task, John Baichtal did, and somehow he convinced me to serve as the Technical Editor, and the result is Arduino for Beginners: Essential Skills Every Maker Needs.

The project took nearly a year, and my part consisted of getting chapters from John and checking everything for technical accuracy, and then passing them on to Rick at Pearson. Reading a book is one thing, but reading a book and closely examining everything in it for anything that may not be technically correct is another. I was also instructed to ignore any grammatical errors, which was hard for me, as I was only supposed to edit technical information. (Yes, there were a few typos. Just a few. ;)

Arduino for Beginners

My name is in print. I know, we’re in the future now, and dead trees are dead and what not, but I still like the fact that there’s ink on paper in a book and it’s got my name in it. Did I mention the entire process took about a year?

If you think this book would be useful for you or someone you know who is getting into using Arduinos, grab a copy from Amazon.

(Oh, and shortly after the book came out I was contacted about another book project, this one involving me writing the book, which I sadly declined. There’s just no way I’d have the time to do it right, and I didn’t want to give a partial effort to such a large project.)

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Multipurpose equals Slow

I’ve heard that multitasking burns more brain cycles due to switching between things, and even though you may think you are getting more done by multitasking, you really aren’t.

You know how your computer seems really fast when you get it, and then after a while it seems like it’s not quite so fast? It’s because of all that crap you add along the way. Those widget, and music scrobbling clients, and Twitter clients, and calendar agents, and notifiers, and on and on…

Video editing is resource intensive, and what I’ve found is that if I’m going to do just editing, I will log out any other users on my Mac (damn you fast user switching!) and then reboot, and then launch Activity Monitor, and quit (or force quit if necessary) any process not directly related to my task. So with a fresh reboot, and no silly little processing doing silly little things, I can go about my work. Alternately, I suppose I could create an account dedicated just to editing, and boot into that, but that’s more of a pain to me…

The reboot and quitting of processes is probably a five minute process, but saves me well over five minutes of time within an hour of editing.