Preface: feeding your pets is an important bonding ritual. You should avoid employing machines as a full substitute for feeding. But my tigers and I have reached a stalemate RE: Breakfast time

Tigers sleep all day long

Of course they have no problem waking us up whenever they desire breakfast.

Automated feeders are expensive and lack flexibility.

I got sticker shock when looking in to options for buying automated feeders.

This is a post about how to build a hackable cat feeder for $20.

The basic goal is to spread small bits of cat food randomly across the kitchen floor during early time windows of the morning. This of course dominates tigers’ attention thus letting you sleep in.

The design

The most basic form is an upside-down bottle with a servo which controls the opening at the bottom. We control the speed and frequency of the openings with code.

I hang the bottle up high...

when I have two very active git branches that are out of date and i type:

git merge theotherbranch

I prepare myself for a bad day at the office because git merge strategies are pretty naive and if any file was touched in both branches it will automatically deemed a conflict requiring manual review. Playing it safe is fine except when youre deailing with hundreds of files 95% of which have no significant conflict.

BeyondCompare has a command line tool with an “automerge” option which, true to its name, will automatically merge non-conflicting files which is a HUGE time-saver in large merges. The catch is if you follow beyondcompare’s documentation you wont get the automerge functionality.

Which brings me to the .gitconfig settings below :)

[diff]
        tool = bc3
[difftool]
        prompt = false
[difftool "bc3"]
        path = /c/Program Files (x86)/Beyond Compare 3/BComp.exe

I spend a significant amount of my time working within IDE windows (especially intellij and visual studio) so why not make the windows prettier to look at? Microsoft released a wonderful color theme editor extension for visual studio but the number of themes available is limited and I couldnt find any galleries for sharing themes online. The good news is that themes can be imported and exported. I have set up a git repo containing a collection of vstheme files you can download and share. Check it out! Help me add more themes to the repo!

Recommend before you start download an environment variable editor such as rapidEE.

1. Install NodeJS
2. Install Winant
3. Install android SDK for windows Make sure the following is in your PATH env var:
4. android bin. Eg: C:\Tools\adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20130917\adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20130917\sdk\tools
5. android platform tools. Eg: C:\Tools\adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20130917\adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20130917\sdk\platform-tools
6. ant bin. Eg: C:\Program Files (x86)\WinAnt\bin
7. nodejs bin. Eg: C:\Program Files\nodejs
8. nodejs NPM bin. Eg: C:\Users\pw\AppData\Roaming\npm
9. jdk bin. Eg: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_25\bin
10. Make sure your JAVA_HOME env var is set:
11. JAVA_HOME Eg: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_25 install the phonegap node package node npm install -g phonegap
12. Install android virtual device (AVD) using the android program
13. 1. you should be able to build locally by changing in to the root...