sous vide

I built a sous vide cooker, driven by a PWM/PID controller written in Erlang.

Then I gave a talk about it (and some other related temperature control that I've done) at a Raspberry Pi meetup.

Here's the video (login required) and here are the slides.

machine ordering restaurant

I went to a sushi restaurant in Brisbane which used touch screens for ordering. That was pretty nice for ordering a few things at once without having to interact with a human being (something hackers hate to do...).

It reminded me of a place like that I went to near Red Square in Moscow, which was an internet cafe/pub. Unfortunately, that place had a bug: it de-duplicated your order so that you didn't accidentally order the same thing twice. But that meant it was difficult to order pint after pint after pint - it detected all but the first as duplicates; and worse, silently discarded the subsequent orders rather than telling you.