bluelinecity.com

I just posted the latest update to the KitcheNET software over at the PivotLabs open source site. You can see a list of all the changes under Change Log.

Over the weekend I started working on a new project I dubbed KitcheNET (named after the browser software) aimed at reusing an old laptop and turning it into a kind of kitchen kiosk or Internet Appliance.

For the longest time I was trying to think of a neat way to at least listen to music while I cooked or did the dishes. The radio was out, however, since all of the music stations in my area are terrible. Wearing an MP3 player seemed cumbersome. Hooking up a whole networked desktop was overkill.

It wasn’t until i read this article on LifeHacker I even considered my laptop as a viable option.

This solved my music issue perfectly since I’ve spent countless hours teaching Pandora what i liked. And this gave me a good reason to develop a minimalistic linux distro and XUL-based internet browser (KitcheNET) to power the whole thing.

So far it’s running pretty well considering it’s a very hacked together prototype. I have it setup so i can see the local weather, local news, recipes tagged in my Delicious account, weekly Google calendar and a Picasa photo album that’s connected to my G1 phone.

I’m hoping to bag a couple more old cheap laptops to see how low processing-wise I can go with these.

After much meticulous code combing and optimization, I think I’ve got a good portion of the redundent code out of Xootools as well as started on some pretty useful libraries and plugins. I also moved it out of my projects section and into my software section.

There’s a new Native in the plugins section named “Unit” when  takes the work out of dealing with standard units of measurement such as time, weight, mass, etc.

Got some nice Fs updates and other interesting ideas for dealing with 2-dimensional arrays and the elusive “Thread” in xul.

Stay tuned!