You should also checkout a few new robots or robot videos.

The reason is that I wanted to do too many things with the site and was forced to look for so many so-so plug-ins. So rather than do that I just coded what I needed and so far so good, it actually give’s me some practice with my PHP skills, which I enjoy.

The whole multi-tasking concept is dead for now. My thinking today is that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well with focus. I use to think that doing more was being more productive, but as I look back, I did more things, but was not more productive, I was just busier, and more stressed.

Currently I am going to do some market research in a Robot Building DVD. The initial concept is to have a how-to DVD and manual that would allow for someone to with a short supply list acquired from the local hobby shop or online robotics shop, to build a robot that does something cool. It’s just an introduction, but I find in all of my robot meetings, there’s a lot of people interested in robotics, but very few have robots to bring in and most just have a desire to learn about robotics.

Basically it requires an X11 environment/framebuffer to work. To get things to work I installed the following:

sudo apt-get install xvfb
Xvfb :1 -screen 0 800x600x24&
export DISPLAY=localhost:1.0

run your java program.

So if you want to run this headless, you need to do this, then you should have no problems capturing frames, etc.

I also have a new shop. Now I have a place where I can build my robots, have meetings for the Columbus Robotics Society, and run my business.

public static void pause(long ms) {
        try {
            Thread.sleep(ms);
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

require "win32/sapi5"
include Win32
v = SpVoice.new
v.Speak("this is the easiest thing to do since I have started working with ruby..")

Now this one in PHP:

<?php
$tts = new COM("SAPI.SpVoice");
$tts->speak("this is a test");
?>