От полето за съвети: iPhone сън монитори, тестване на IR Remotes с камера и светещи Великден яйца Redux

While Sleepyti.me is pretty neat, what’s really awesome is using your iPhone as a sleep sensor. I’ve been using Sleep Cycle for a few years now. It’s an app that uses the motion sensors in your iPhone to detect when you rise in and out of deep sleep based on your movements. You tell it what time (round about) you want to wake up and it wakes you up at the best possible moment in your sleep cycle. So if I tell it I want to get up at 8AM and 7:15 is actually a perfect time for me to wake up feeling refreshed, the alarm will go off then to wake me when I’m out of deep sleep. It’s sweet! Best buck-for-an-app purchase I ever made.

The other day I was trouble shooting my universal TV remote. Something fishy was going on and I needed to start from the basics and move up. I replaced the batteries but there seemed to be no signal being sent to the television (this particular remote doesn’t have any sort of indicator on it). To test and see if the remote was actually beaming anything out, I pointed it at my smartphone’s camera (I think this should work with just about any digital camera) and I was able to see the infrared output of the IR LED on the front of the remote! Score!

Loved the LED Easter Egg post from earlier today, but not everyone has a cache of LEDs laying around. I followed a tutorial I found on the web that kept things simpler… instead of batteries and LEDs, you just stuff the eggs with slender glow sticks from the Dollar Store.