Gareth Halfacree » coding http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk "Work hard, have fun, enjoy." Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:04:22 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= aRSSduino http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk/2010/08/arssduino http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk/2010/08/arssduino#comments Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:48:54 +0000 Gareth http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk/?p=642 The aRSSduino in actionThe aRSSduino is a simple project for the Arduino microcontroller, designed to display RSS feed entries on a 16×2 LCD.  It’s still in the early stages, with the following outstanding:

  • To Do: Support for larger LCDs
  • To Improve: Better UTF-8 character handling
  • To Do: Multiple RSS feed support

For now, however, it’s a pretty neat hack – and an alternative back-end allows it to display Twitter @ replies instead, with the person’s username on the top line of the display and the message below.

The aRSSduino relies on a USB connection between the Arduino and the host PC – it’s not a stand-alone project.  Currently, the Python back-end is written to run on a Linux-based host – although it should be relatively simple to port to Windows, I have no plans to do so at present.

You can download the project source code – both for the Arduino sketch and for the Python-based back-end here.  If you improve upon it, let me know!

]]> http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk/2010/08/arssduino/feed 2 Twitter and XHTML validation http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk/2009/04/twitter-and-xhtml-validation http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk/2009/04/twitter-and-xhtml-validation#comments Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:47:55 +0000 Gareth http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk/?p=269 I’ve been fighting my new WordPress theme this morning in order to get the darn thing to validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional – I didn’t aim for Strict as I use the “target=_new” functionality in a lot of existing links which would need to be updated.  After fixing a bunch of problems around the place, I finally tracked the last few down to the Twitter widget you can see to the right.
It appears that Twitter’s default coding for the HTML-based widget is a trifle skwiffy.  The code offered to me by the site is:

Twitter Updates

follow me on Twitter

which refuses to validate, showing five errors mostly related to things being in the wrong order.  A quick hack-job gave me the following:

Twitter Updates

follow me on Twitter

which validates just fine as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. However, this rather ugly bit of cruft crashes Internet Explorer. So, a neater – but rather stupid – hack is below:


That should suffice for now, but I’m not particularly happy with the solution. Still, it validates – which means it can’t be bad.

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