Hardware On Rails

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With the Open Source world riddled with opportunity for building software solutions for all manner of problems, Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore whether there is a market for hobbyist plug and play hardware projects that don’t require you to string together capacitors and resistors but can do genuinely cool things such as the BaconSinkVision.

Remember, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? Do you have similar needs to Jono? Do you think it would be fun or useful to be able to build these kinds of home-brew projects? Do you think a market exists for this kind of need? Do you know of a company who is already doing this? Do you want to build Jono the BaconSinkVision because he isn’t clever enough? Share your thoughts in the comments below…

Publicity Bingo Win! Include a Shot of Jaq Easter Egg in your Next Application

balpha has created a winning page that outlines his/her success in including a Shot Of Jaq easter egg in an app. From the page:

Unicornify is a little fun project of mine that works very much like Gravatar’s identicons or monsterids. Given an MD5 hash, usually of an email address, it creates a random picture of a unicorn. Although it’s random, it will always be the same one each time the same hash is passed.

So here’s the easter egg: When you pass the hash b29b9f53a6358fae8f59237c182a45fb, which happens to be the MD5 hash of the SOJ feedback email address, you will not, as in any other case, have a picture of one unicorn, but two. And those are the unicorns created from the hashes of Jono’s and Aq’s addresses. Here’s a high-quality version of the picture — which you can’t get through the web service, but I can.

balpha even includes a code snippet as proof. Rocking work balpha, and great to see another shot on the Publicity Bingo Grid!

Inspired? Do you want to show off your kudos to the Shot Of Jaq community and succeed in acheiving one of the Shot Of Jaq Publicity Bingo Stunts? Well, go to the Publicity Bingo Grid, pick something, rock it and let us know!