I’ve published an Arduino 1.0-compatible WiFly shield library to GitHub that supports SSID names with spaces. Get it [HERE].

This is a modification of theWiFly library by jmr13031 and some hacks by Ron Guest.

The motivation for building this library is a lot more interesting than the library itself. To understand the motivation, one first needs to understand Louies Superette. Louies is dingy convenience store on the very southeast tip of Harvard’s campus, and it is run by the eccentric Dr. Chengsan Chen. It is one of the few places in Harvard Square that sells beer and SOLO cups at late hours.

If you are one of the 600 Harvard undergrads living in Mather House, Dunster House, or Leverett House, you know Dr. Chen. God forbid you run out of beer or SOLO cups on a Friday night, but if you do, Dr. Chen and his superette can save a poorly planned room party. Unfortunately, many a confident sophomore (Dr. Chen proudly displays his confiscated fake ID collection behind the counter) has sprinted down Cowperthwaite St. only to find that Louies has shuttered for the night. Apparently, once you have retired from the military, received a Ph.D in astrophysics, and have been held up at gunpoint a few times, you just don’t give a f!ck about mundane things like keeping regular hours.

Last year, an intrepid junior in Mather House started @isLouiesOpen. Even the most die-hard Louies fan has a hard time maintaining a 24-hour vigil though, and the account is not updated as often one would like. “Is Louies Open?” remains a difficult question to answer, and I imagine Louies exists in some weird Schrödinger-esque state of open and closed until we make some poor freshman go check.

With my Ariel Mitnick and my roommate Punit Shah, I am automating @isLouiesOpen using a laser rangefinder and a wifi enabled Ardunio. The WiFly shield library neither supports Arduino 1.0 nor SSIDs with spaces, and since we are piggybacking on the “Harvard University” network, this was problematic.

Part 2 will describe the technical fixes in the library.

Coming soon: @doesLouiesHave30Racks #butnotreally

I really don’t care who makes my phone. I use my phone to email, text, take pictures, use Facebook and Twitter, and occasionally call. Everything else is just frosting on the cake. When Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) was released, it seemed that Google had made significant strides in usability, and Android was finally a compelling sell against Apple iOS.

I recently sold my Verizon iPhone 4 for a Samsung Galaxy Nexus for a variety of reasons:

• Android supports home screen widgets. There’s no reason that checking my calendar should require the same set of actions as launching something complex such as Photoshop or Spotify, but the everything-is-an-app model of iOS forces that.
• Android has Native Google apps that don’t suck. Having to pay for Reeder on iOS was frustrating, despite it being a great app.
• Nexus phones run vanilla Android rather than the bloatware laden distributions vomited into Motorola and HTC devices. This is more of a slam on Android fragmentation than iOS though.
• Nexus has a big schmexy AMOLED screen.
• Android supports third-party keyboards such as Swype and the very good SwiftKey.
• Ice Cream Sandwich has a bevy of clever features such as the ability to ignore a call with a canned or custom text message.

In the hand

The Nexus is dominated by a 4.7″ curved AMOLED screen. I will admit that the 4.7″ screen is awkward for people with smaller hands,  as it would be awkward to type with one hand. Beautiful colors on the Nexus screen can’t be matched by the iPhone.

The rest of the Nexus is a matte plastic. It doesn’t feel cheap, but it doesn’t feel nearly as svelte as the iPhone. The thin curved body gives the Nexus a cool profile, but it’s more awkward to hold than the iPhone (I’ve never understood Motorola’s obsession with making their phones super-thin. It’s not easy to hold something that thin).

I also paid $30 for an extended battery because the default battery would not last me the day. This is a bit ridiculous, because the extended battery does not add any thickness, and Samsung could have easily made it the default.

Camera

Very responsive camera.

Depth of field lacking compared to iPhone. Exposure and white balance is not as accurate as iPhone’s (subjectively). I was disappointed by the Nexus camera.

Due to the large thin body and the lack of a hardware shutter button, I found it very hard to take pictures one-handed, and I have pretty big hands.

Apps

Native Google apps are awesome. Especially Reader and Gmail with full feature support, and Navigation for Maps.

Spotify crashes, the weather widget sometimes just stops working, the messaging app bugs out and shows me my last opened app instead of my messages.

Verdict

Good alternative to iPhone for those that want a larger screen or don’t want an iPhone.

Despite all the advantages of Android over iOS listed above, I still prefer iPhone because it feels better in the hand, has a better camera, and has more stable apps.

As a user and abuser of Adobe Lightroom’s baked-in filters, I’ve been curious about Instagram’s secret sauce. Now that Instagram is available for my Samsung Galaxy Nexus I processed the following 9×9 square grid through every Instagram filter:

Lo and behold, nothing terribly exciting. A few things that stood out:

• The Sutro filter applies a textured faux-sheen over the image (not visible in these thumbnails)
• Colorcast adjustments are overwhelmingly warm
• Distortion is abused less than I had expected, appearing only in the X-Pro filter
• Vignetting is also abused less than I had expected, although Instagram might do some smart application of vignetting like Lightroom so it’s not as apparent on the white test grid
• 14 filters added some sort of border inside the edge of the photo rather than around – this is confusing because users lose details around the edges (such as the wheels and rims on this car)