The slogan is all over the St. Louis metropolitan area: on T-shirts worn by soccer moms, on rubber bracelets worn by police officers, on signs held by their wives. “I am Darren Wilson,” they proclaim, in a show of affinity with the white police officer who shot black teenager Michael Brown to death in the street in Ferguson, Missouri on Aug. 9. “I am Darren Wilson,” they affirm, as St. Louis waits for a grand jury to rule whether the most infamous police officer in America will be indicted.
Everyone in St. Louis is afraid. The discrepancy in what they fear is tearing the region apart. Ferguson protesters—and much of black St. Louis—fear the police. They fear officers like Wilson, whom they believe view black men as inherently threatening and deserving of lethal force. Since Aug. 9, protesters have proclaimed “I am Michael Brown” and mimicked the “hands up” gesture he allegedly made before he died. “I am Michael Brown” is the grim corollary to their other rallying cry: “Black lives matter.”
Protester car with slogan “I am Mike Brown.” Ferguson, Missouri, Sept. 30.(Sarah Kendzior)
Those who claim “I am Darren Wilson” say they stand in solidarity not just Wilson, but also with law enforcement. To support Darren Wilson, the refrain goes, is to support law, order and due process. But underlying the phrase “I am Darren Wilson” is a different kind of fear. It is fear of disenfranchisement, chaos, and criminality. It is a fear of black youth and black self-determination. This fear structures not only the geography of St. Louis, but also the regions beyond.
Today the base of Wilson support comes not from St. Louis, but rather neighboring St. Charles County, where white St. Louisans began to migrate en masse at the turn of the 21st century following the arrival of blacks in suburban St. Louis. The Wilson case is the culmination of decades of the racial politics of fear, which dictate everything from where people live and how they treat each other to whom they view as the antagonist in the Ferguson events. While the grand jury has until mid-November to rule on an indictment, rumor is that it will happen soon. St. Louis is a region on edge, united only in anticipation that the worst is still to come.
Social media and segregation
On Oct. 10-13, St. Louis hosted a “Weekend of Resistance,” during which thousands of activists descended upon the city in support of Michael Brown and his family. That same weekend in St. Charles, supporters of Darren Wilson held a bowling night to support Wilson’s defense fund. They announced the event on a Darren Wilson Facebook support group with over 80,000 members. It is one of many Wilson support groups with membership in the tens of thousands.
Social media is one of the few spaces in St. Louis not subject to segregation. This raucous online debate often stands in contrast to what area residents are unwilling to say to each other in public.
Die-hard Wilson supporters share a specific terminology. The protesters are called “terrorists,” sometimes “treasonous terrorists.” Groups of black protesters are described as a “lynch mob” targeting whites. Looting, which has been rare during the months of protest, is emphasized. The characterization of the protesters by Wilson supporters reflects both whites’ rationale for fleeing St. Louis and Wilson’s for killing Michael Brown: fear of black crime.
Graphic found on a “Support Darren Wilson” Facebook page
One Wilson supporter, a lifelong North County resident who is white and asked to remain anonymous, explained his perspective in an email:
“Demanding Wilson’s arrest before that process is completed is akin to a lynch mob and would circumvent our sacred process of actual justice. All the racist chants, death threats, harassment, interruption of travel and commerce and general terror have become an insurrection and must be stopped… Interrupting commerce and disrupting normal working citizen’s lives is not what the founders had in mind when our right to protest was protected. They also didn’t envision mobs of people screaming racist vile [sic] and chanting death threats against our police.”
Geography of fear
The geography of St. Louis is carved by racial politics. Many of the residents of St. Charles County—where Wilson claims his base of support—grew up in St. Louis’s North County, the series of suburbs north of the city, which includes Ferguson. Once a white, blue-collar hub, North County underwent a dramatic demographic shift in the 1980s and 1990s as black St. Louis families fled the decay of the inner city.
As St. Louis County became more black and saw its population stagnate, the white population of St. Charles County surged, from 144,107 in 1980 to 360,485 in 2013. The population of O’Fallon, Missouri rose from 8,677 in 1980 to 82,209 in 2010. Nearby Wentzville rose from 3,193 in 1980 to 29,070 in 2013. Wentzville is now home to a General Motors plant that created hundreds of jobs in 2014, in contrast to the closed-down factories whose rusting skeletons loom over St. Louis’s majority black neighborhoods.
As St. Louis endures a seemingly eternal recession, St. Charles County is booming. Drive down its main roads and you see open farmland on one side and construction sites on the other, with far fewer of the payday loan stores and pawn shops that line St. Louis’s streets. To many, St. Charles County, located across the Missouri River, looks like the promised land.
A subdivision under construction in booming St. Charles County.(Sarah Kendzior)
“I felt I made the right decision as soon as I came out here,” says Carmen Mannino, owner of Mannino’s Market in Cottleville, MO. “People came in the store and welcomed me with open arms. I came here in 1998. When I moved, people said, ‘Why do you want to move to Cottleville? There’s nothing out there.’ There were no businesses out here. And now look at it.”
In 1939, Mannino’s grandfather made the journey from Palermo, Italy, to Ferguson, Missouri. He remembers fondly the store’s North County heyday and says the family had good relationships with black employees and customers.
“We had old-timers who respected my dad so much,” Mannino recalls. “They had respect for people. The people were just amazing back then. But I saw a lot of the change when I was there. I started being afraid to leave my mom or my wife outside the door. There were drug deals and fights and we looked at each other and said, ‘We have to get out of here.’”
Mannino’s is one of many North County businesses that fled to St. Charles County following the demographic shift in the 1980s. Others include Faraci Pizza—whose owners at the remaining Ferguson branch have clashed with protesters—Old Town Donuts, Pironnes Pizza, and Fritz’s Frozen Custard. Families who grew up in a white North County are reliving their childhood memories in a white St. Charles.
Darren Wilson, the victim
Fear of black crime goes hand in hand with assertions of white victimhood, and there is no greater victim, in the view of Darren Wilson supporters, than the police.
“We support Darren, a law enforcement officer,” explains Tiffany (who asked to be identified by her first name only out of fear for her personal safety), the organizer of the Facebook page “I Support Darren Wilson,” which has over 76,000 followers. “We support the men and women, of all ethnic backgrounds, that have worked countless hours to keep the peace as much as possible in and around Ferguson and St. Louis.
“I would argue that calling me racist because I support law enforcement is a racial slur itself,” she continues. “How do you lump me and our supporters on this page into one giant ‘racial pool’ yet be mad that you think people are calling you a thug because your skin color is darker than mine? Yes, we have had struggles in the past with racism. But it is 2014. Why are people so hell-bent on staying in the past? Let’s move forward. Let’s educate each other.”
Tiffany, like many Wilson supporters, lives not in St. Louis but “a couple hours out.” She says the Facebook group consists of “all races” and believes that the media, led astray by Reverend Al Sharpton, has unfairly characterized Wilson supporters: “[The media made] this a racial issue of a ‘white officer shooting an unarmed black teenager.’ This all could have gone a completely different direction had the media portrayed it as a ‘police officer involved shooting of a robbery suspect.’”
Some Wilson supporters believe there is a hidden narrative of events. Tiffany believes the media “refuse to show the videos of the protesters/domestic terrorists pointing guns at police officers and threatening them.” (No such videos are known to exist.) Other Wilson supporters cite the protesters’ own materials—the livestream of demonstrations or signs calling to end police brutality—as evidence of wrong-doing.
St. Charles County residents frequently name crime as the reason for their flight from North County and other majority black areas of St. Louis. But according to many residents, crime in St. Charles County is significant. Only the suspects look different.
“We moved out here to get away from crime, but crime out here is just as bad,” says Dave Patek, an office worker who grew up in North County but now works in St. Charles County. “There are still break-ins, domestic violence, robberies. We have a meth problem. Everything is the same, our Walmarts look the same.”
Many middle-aged St. Charles residents grew up in integrated North County towns, like Ferguson, that also experienced rapid economic decline. Avoiding the fate of North County is the goal—but the past travels with them.
The side of the law
Many local whites prefer not to identify themselves as Wilson supporters, but as supporters of law and order. But supporting the rule of law, in a region like St. Louis, is racially loaded. Ferguson protesters’ central complaint is that rule of law is selectively applied and ruthlessly abused.
Faith in law enforcement has migrated to St. Charles County along with the people it protects.
Unsurprisingly, law enforcement officials are among the most loyal Wilson supporters. As with other supporters, there is a wide range in their rationales. Many echo the sentiment of the Wilson fan pages, that framing this as a race issue is itself racist. One officer who grew up in St. Louis County but now lives in St. Charles County, and asked to remain anonymous says: “Police officers have a very difficult time no matter what city. This case would never be an issue if Darren Wilson were a black male. The African-Americans in Ferguson chose to make this a racial issue.”
But Mark Whitson, a former police officer recently retired from 35 years in the St. Louis County Police Department, believes officer education on racial politics is itself a problem. He recalls a class he taught on law enforcement: “I pointed out the socio-historical environment where all contacts with the public take place. A major on the department pointed out the advancements and changes that have occurred since slavery ended, through the 1950s and ’60s. I agreed with him, but believe that is no reason to stop.”
When asked whether Wilson should be indicted, this officer replied he should not be and will not be. Legal analysts share the view that a non-indictment is likely, particularly given that the prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, failed to bring about an indictment in prior officer-involved shootings.
Region on the run
Every Tuesday night since Sept. 23, dozens of protesters, nearly all black, have shared their concerns with the St. Louis County Council, most of whom are white. They speak, tearfully, of the death of Brown and police violence against the citizens who protest it. Older black St. Louisans note the racism their families have experienced for generations, while younger St. Louisans decry their lack of opportunity. Few see a future in a city where the past is always present.
A packed Sept. 23 meeting of the St. Louis County Council. Speaker had asked everyone who had been tear-gassed to stand. This is a fraction of the standing crowd.(Sarah Kendzior)
Police officer stands outside Faraci Pizza in Ferguson, Missouri, as white residents feud with black protesters. Sept. 30, 2014.(Sarah Kendzior)
Halfway through the Oct. 7 meeting, a white St. Louis resident shouted “We support Darren Wilson!” At previous meetings, this resident had called protesters “crazies” and Captain Ron Johnson, the officer overseeing Ferguson policing until recently, “Mr. Hug-a-Thug.” The protesters in the audience shouted back, clapping and stomping: “If we don’t get it, shut it down!”—a common refrain indicating protesters’ refusal to accept a non-indictment in the Wilson case and police brutality toward blacks in general.
Police guarding the meeting asked the predominantly black protesters to leave, then followed them down the escalator and locked them out of the building. The white Wilson supporter was allowed to stay.
One of the protesters escorted out of the building was Molly Greider. She is one of few white protesters who regularly attend Ferguson demonstrations. She has tried to explain to other white people in her office, some of whom support Wilson, why they should join the protests.
Protesters ask an officer why they were locked out of the St. Louis County Council meeting. Oct. 7, 2014.(Sarah Kendzior)
“They told me ‘You might get killed or looted.’ I was like, can you loot a person?” she recalls. “It was almost like they never met a black person, even though they had. They might know black people but they’ve never discussed these issues with them. One person listed the cleaning people in the building as their black friends. But they were nice, there was not a lot of angry pushback. It was good that they wanted to talk about it.”
When asked why they support Darren Wilson, each supporter gives an answer rooted in fear. Police officers discuss the fear they feel with a potentially dangerous suspect. White citizens are afraid of protesters, whom they view as an unruly, angry mob ready to strike. St. Charles residents describe their fear of Ferguson and the surrounding North County area, which they had left due to fear of crime.
Asked why more white people do not support the protests, Greider gives the same answer: fear.
“It stems from the fear that they will become oppressed,” she says. “Most people think they have to give something up for somebody else to have something. I think that white people have a problem with the idea of black people demanding anything.”
St. Louis is a city long on the run from itself. White flight has spread from suburbia to exurbia, while decades of black demands—for better jobs, better schools, better treatment—go unheeded. This is a region deprived of resources, forcing residents to scrounge for more fertile terrain.
Fear keeps people on the run. But they can only keep moving for so long.
2 African countries free of Ebola; monitoring period over for 43 Texans CNN (CNN) -- Forty-three people who came into contact with Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan are now officially cleared after not demonstrating any symptoms during a 21-day monitoring period, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said Monday. One more will be ...
This summer, Richard Gonzalez, the CEO of US pharmaceutical maker AbbVie, said of his company’s plan to merge with UK-based Shire: “We wouldn’t be doing it just for the tax impact.”
Today, after scuttling the deal, the CEO blamed the US Treasury Department, which “re-interpreted longstanding tax principles in a uniquely selective manner designed specifically to destroy the financial benefits of these types of transactions.”
So perhaps Gonzalez wasn’t exactly telling the truth before about the reasoning behind its merger, but that’s alright: Most of us can follow the money. The deal was a tax inversion, a merger that would bring the new company’s headquarters out of the US—and out of reach of many US taxes. Thanks to the comparatively high US tax rate and a corporate tax code that privileges overseas cash and profit shifting, lots of companies—especially pharmaceutical firms, which have lots of intellectual property that can be that can be steered to low-tax jurisdictions—have been trying to take advantage of the structure.
But many US politicians are unhappy about the development, which erodes the American tax base. Last month, after Burger King found a tax-inversion opportunity that would move the fast-food chain’s headquarters to Canada, the Obama administration tightened the rules for companies seeking to complete these transactions. It wasn’t clear whether this would mean merely tinkering around the edges or having enough impact to prevent the deals from going through. AbbVie’s decision to cancel its merger shows that the provisions do have some teeth; it remains to be seen if the Burger King deal or other high-profile inversions, like those planned by Medtronic and Chiquita, will be affected.
Gonzalez, who thought the tax impact of his merger was of secondary importance just months ago, is now agitating for full-scale corporate tax reform. With the Republican party expecting to control the US legislature after next month’s election, it’s likely that reform proposals intended to ease companies’ efforts to shift earnings overseas will gain traction, but they will find it hard to pass them while Barack Obama is still president. A long-awaited tax reform plan will likely keep waiting, at least until the results of the 2016 elections are in, barring an unexpected willingness to compromise by either party.
Jason Koebler writes: More than two dozen cities in 19 states announced today that they're sick of big telecom skipping them over for internet infrastructure upgrades and would like to build gigabit fiber networks themselves and help other cities follow their lead. The Next Century Cities coalition, which includes a couple cities that already have gigabit fiber internet for their residents, was devised to help communities who want to build their own broadband networks navigate logistical and legal challenges to doing so.
There's saying players need "edge" to help them sign endorsement deals, then there's Skip Bayless suggesting that Kobe Bryant being accused of rape in 2003 allowed him to become more marketable.
Sexual assault isn't a marketing technique and the suggestion that people were running out to buy shoes because Bryant was an alleged rapist is unconscionable.
The Southern fried chicken chain Zaxby's has purchased title rights to the Heart of Dallas Bowl, a young college football bowl game slated to pair Conference USA and the Big Ten. It joins the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, Buffalo Wild Wings Citrus Bowl, and Popeyes Bahamas Bowl as chicken-powered bowl games.
That bowl has the word "Heart" in its name. "Zaxby's Heart" is a pair of words that will be used on television and in marketing without irony or pause.
Here is the nutritional content of one popular Zaxby's meal, via the company's website:
DOCTORS ARE CROOKS. TURN UP.
***
"To reinforce our brand as the Official Chicken of Sports Fanz and extend our reach as an emerging national concept, Zaxbys offers an Indescribably Good experience in our restaurants and on the field during the Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl," said Zach McLeroy, CEO and co-founder of Zaxby's, in a mind-blowing statement that exists in the world, against all odds.
Lead poisoning is a major threat at America’s shooting ranges, perpetuated by owners who’ve repeatedly violated laws even after workers have fallen painfully ill.
WASHINGTON—Struggling to find an appropriate response to a delicate situation, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they remained stumped on how exactly to handle the case of missing mixed-race woman Alison Johnston.
James Conway, retired Superintendent of Attica Correctional Facility in New York, visited four Nordic prisons and facilities and was stunned when he saw inmates had access to metal silverware, power tools, and various other (potentially dangerous) luxuries.
Amid genocidal slaughter carried out by the Islamic State and extra-judicial killings perpetrated by Shia death squads, the United Nations says the Iraqi government is also torturing its citizens and unjustly sending hundreds of people to the gallows.
“Brain Lapse” is an animated short by Boston-based animator Jake Fried (see previously) that features an ever-evolving canvas of complex hand-drawn images created with ink and Wite-Out.
It was clear to me many years ago that I was not going to be a top ten recording engineer. That it was not in my DNA to record top ten records, but it was certainly in my DNA to be surrounded by great musicians and to help them live up to their potential.
These are seven newish drink books that have arrived at Alcademics HQ for your consideration. Most of the below descriptions come from the book blurbs and are not reviews, as I'm about 30 books behind on my reading list.
Note: This is primarily a food book, though there are just a few drink recipes and Jeffrey Morgenthaler's recipe for tonic water syrup. There are also food recipes with bitter cocktail ingredients, including Fernet-Branca Chicken Livers.
In this deep and fascinating exploration of bitter through science, culture, history, and 100 deliciously idiosyncratic recipes—like Cardoon Beef Tagine, White Asparagus with Blood Orange Sauce, and Campari Granita—award-winning author Jennifer McLagan makes a case for this misunderstood flavor and explains how adding a touch of bitter to a dish creates an exciting taste dimension that will bring your cooking to life.
Sake Confidential: A Beyond-the-Basics Guide to Understanding, Tasting, Selection, and Enjoyment by John Gauntner
Sake Confidential is the perfect FAQ for beginners, experts, and sommeliers. Indexed for easy reference with suggested brands and label photos. Includes:
Sake Secrets: junmai vs. non-junmai, namazake, aging, dry vs. sweet, ginjo, warm vs. chilled, nigori, water, yeast, rice, regionality
How the Industry Really Works: pricing, contests, distribution, glassware, milling, food pairing
The Brewer’s Art Revealed: koji-making, brewers’ guilds, grading
Alchemy in a Glass: The Essential Guide to Handcrafted Cocktails by Greg Seider
Drawing on his experience developing cocktail programs for chefs such as Eric Ripert, Seider goes beyond recipes to show readers how flavors work, giving them blueprints for constructing a balanced drink. Seider shares inspired recipes for more than fifty original cocktails as well as classics with a twist and recipes for bitters, garnishes, infusions, and elixirs.
This new edition of the essential consumer guide to wine features all the most current information for today’s wine landscape. The authors, longtime wine educators at The Culinary Institute of America, have added all the latest and most relevant information to their award-winning book, including new picks for the best regional producers, off-the-beaten-path finds, and bargain bottles. With a practical, anti-snob attitude, the emphasis is always on enjoying wine to the fullest in real-world scenarios and getting the best value for your dollar, whether splurging on a special-occasion bottle or deciding on your own “house” wine. All the basics are covered, including the major wine grapes, flavor profiles, and decoding labels, plus up-to-date information on established and up-and-coming regions, advice on pairing wine.
Shrubs: An Old Fashioned Drink for Modern Times by Michael Dietsch
The history of shrubs, as revealed here, is as fascinating as the drinks are refreshing. These sharp and tangy infusions are simple to make and use, as you’ll discover with these recipes. Mix up some Red Currant Shrub for a Vermouth Cassis, or Apple Cinnamon Shrub to mix with seltzer, or develop your own with Michael Dietsch’s directions and step-by-step photographs.
The anticipated follow-up to GQ Eats, this ultimate drinks book features creations from bar legends such as Salvatore Calabrese as well as innovative mixes from new talent from the UK's best bars. As well as over 120 recipes for classic and cutting-edge cocktails, you will also find inside tips such as which are the best brands to use for the perfect G+T. A special section on hardware covers the glasses to use and the shakers that are worth spending money on.
As far as I can tell, nothing. There are barely any online consequences, even if the content is reported.
But there should be.
The problem is that Twitter and Facebook aim to be discussion platforms for "everyone", where every person, no matter how hateful and crazy they may be, gets a turn on the microphone. They get to be heard.
The hover text for this one is so good it deserves escalation:
I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.
If the discussion platform you're using aims to be a public platform for the whole world, there are some pretty terrible things people can do and say to other people there with no real consequences, under the noble banner of free speech.
It can be challenging.
How do we show people like this the door? You can block, you can hide, you can mute. But what you can't do is show them the door, because it's not your house. It's Facebook's house. It's their door, and the rules say the whole world has to be accommodated within the Facebook community. So mute and block and so forth are the only options available. But they are anemic, barely workable options.
As we build Discourse, I've discovered that I am deeply opposed to mute and block functions. I think that's because the whole concept of Discourse is that it is your house. And mute and ignore, while arguably unavoidable for large worldwide communities, are actively dangerous for smaller communities. Here's why.
It allows you to ignore bad behavior. If someone is hateful or harassing, why complain? Just mute. No more problem. Except everyone else still gets to see a person being hateful or harassing to another human being in public. Which means you are now sending a message to all other readers that this is behavior that is OK and accepted in your house.
It puts the burden on the user. A kind of victim blaming — if someone is rude to you, then "why didn't you just mute / block them?" The solution is right there in front of you, why didn't you learn to use the software right? Why don't you take some responsibility and take action to stop the person abusing you? Every single time it happens, over and over again?
It does not address the problematic behavior. A mute is invisible to everyone. So the person who is getting muted by 10 other users is getting zero feedback that their behavior is causing problems. It's also giving zero feedback to moderators that this person should probably get an intervention at the very least, if not outright suspended. It's so bad that people are building their own crowdsourced block lists for Twitter.
It causes discussions to break down. Fine, you mute someone, so you "never" see that person's posts. But then another user you like quotes the muted user in their post, or references their @name, or replies to their post. Do you then suppress just the quoted section? Suppress the @name? Suppress all replies to their posts, too? This leaves big holes in the conversation and presents many hairy technical challenges. Given enough personal mutes and blocks and ignores, all conversation becomes a weird patchwork of partially visible statements.
This is your house and your rules. This isn't Twitter or Facebook or some other giant public website with an expectation that "everyone" will be welcome. This is your house, with your rules, and your community. If someone can't behave themselves to the point that they are consistently rude and obnoxious and unkind to others, you don't ask the other people in the house to please ignore it – you ask them to leave your house. Engendering some weird expectation of "everyone is allowed here" sends the wrong message. Otherwise your house no longer belongs to you, and that's a very bad place to be.
I worry that people are learning the wrong lessons from the way Twitter and Facebook poorly handle these situations. Their hands are tied because they aspire to be these global communities where free speech trumps basic human decency and empathy.
The greatest power of online discussion communities, in my experience, is that they don't aspire to be global. You set up a clubhouse with reasonable rules your community agrees upon, and anyone who can't abide by those rules needs to be gently shown the door.
Don't pull this wishy washy non-committal stuff that Twitter and Facebook do. Community rules are only meaningful if they are actively enforced. You need to be willing to say this to people, at times:
No, your behavior is not acceptable in our community; "free speech" doesn't mean we are obliged to host your content, or listen to you being a jerk to people. This is our house, and our rules.
If they don't like it, fortunately there's a whole Internet of other communities out there. They can go try a different house. Or build their own.
The goal isn't to slam the door in people's faces – visitors should always be greeted in good faith, with a hearty smile – but simply to acknowledge that in those rare but inevitable cases where good faith breaks down, a well-oiled front door will save your community.
[advertisement] How are you showing off your awesome? Create a Stack Overflow Careers profile and show off all of your hard work from Stack Overflow, Github, and virtually every other coding site. Who knows, you might even get recruited for a great new position!
Check out this great Halloween project from Javier Hernandez in the Element 14 community.
The skull was working great connected usb to the PC. But I wanted it to be wireless. Since I have an Adafruit CC3000 breakout board available, decided to stick it in. Also a few years ago I made my own Arduino compatible board, based on the usbasp project and got the inspiration from the metaboard. My board end up beein a 5cm x 5cm board with Atmega328p which can run Arduino code…
With this architecture the laptop is just another trigger mechanism similar to a phone. On my last post the laptops was used to send information directly to the Arduino board but now the skull is free to play around. The Skull is completely wireless and receives power via a usb. It is connected to the closest usb plug I could find at the desired location. We got wifi in the entire office so it can be moved around without problem.
At home the Skull worked really good, every now and then the mqtt libraries got disconnected from the server but I was able to reconnect via the code and everything was good. But when got into the office the skull got disconnected and failed to connect again. I didn’t had much time during work hours to debug and fix the situation, so I went for a quick and dirty trick. Whenever the device got disconnected I just soft reset the Atmega, that makes the board to reset and re-connect to the wifi and mqtt service. After the soft reset all starts working again. This solution is far from pretty, mostly because the skull stop working for a while until the reset completes. Wifi connection and DHCP takes some time to complete and that is horrible for the user that wants to see the skull respond to its commands. But is better than unplug and plug back. Also it didn’t took much time to “fix”.
The software reset is a simple hack I found on Instructables. There are two ways, I went with the all software way.
Seems that if you define a pointer to a function in address 0 and issue a call to it it restarts the program, how would have thought?
Adafruit CC3000 WiFi Breakout with Onboard Ceramic Antenna: For years we’ve seen all sorts of microcontroller-friendly WiFi modules but none of them were really Adafruit-worthy. Either they were too slow, or too difficult to use, or required signing an NDA, or had limited functionality, or too expensive, or too large. So we shied away from carrying any general purpose microcontroller-friendly WiFi boards.
NO LONGER!
The CC3000 hits that sweet spot of usability, price and capability. It uses SPI for communication (not UART!) so you can push data as fast as you want or as slow as you want. It has a proper interrupt system with IRQ pin so you can have asynchronous connections. It supports 802.11b/g, open/WEP/WPA/WPA2 security, TKIP & AES. A built in TCP/IP stack with a “BSD socket” interface. TCP and UDP in both client and server mode, up to 4 concurrent sockets. It does not support “AP” mode, it can connect to an access point but it cannot be an access point. Read more.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each weekday this month we’ll be bringing you ideas and projects for an Electronic Halloween! Expect wearables, hacks & mods, costumes and more here on the Adafruit blog! Working on a project for Halloween this year? Share it with us on Google+, in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, or Twitter– we’d love to see what you’re up to and share it with the world (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). Tune in to our live shows, Wearable Electronics with Becky Stern, 3D hangouts with Matt, Pedro, and Noe, and Ask an Engineer, featuring store discount codes, ideas for projects, costumes, and decorations, and more!
This ancient stamp dates to the 22nd century BC, and is from the holy city of Nippur, located southeastern Iraq. Nippur was the religious centre of Mesopotamia for thousands of years, and was believed to have been where Enlil created mankind.
Translated, the inscription on the stamp reads: Narâm-Sîn built the house/temple of the god Enlil. As the British Museum state: “Such stamps were used to impress or mark the bricks of important religious and public buildings. They are therefore an important source for the identification of architecture and a valuable criterion for the date of a building.” The impression in front of the stamp is modern.
Reactions in the Mary Sue office to what Jada Pinkett Smith revealed at the Gotham Paleyfest panel over the weekend: “fUCK YES,” “god bless,” “woah,” “BOW DOWN,” and “DAMN.” That’s really all that can be said about it. So here, read for yourself. Via Vulture:
…Jada Pinkett Smith, who plays the devilish Fish Mooney, served up the juiciest detail of the night. The first time she met [executive producer Danny] Cannon for an audition, Pinkett Smith said she showed up dressed in a long, flowing gown, with her short, black Mooney wig and a young man on a leash in tow. He was shirtless and had LIAR scrawled across his forehead in lipstick. “I said, ‘Forget it, instead of talking about who Fish Mooney is, let me just show you,’” said Pinkett Smith. “I went Method.” Thus, a monster was born.
I’ll share with you some adventures in the TMS chat:
I might need to give Gotham a shot now, just for Fish*. I’ll risk the uncomfortable attraction I know I’m going to feel for young!Penguin. I will not be judged.
*Still and always the best-named character. I don’t care what you say.
Nowadays, it seems like everyone is on Facebook, including your mom, your grandma, some girl you used to go to middle school with... it goes on and on. So with that many people on there (who, let's be honest, are probably pretty cringey in real life), Facebook is bound to get a little bit stupid.
Sometimes I really think there should be a skill testing question required before you can post something. Need convincing? Here are 21 people who should probably have their Facebook accounts taken away:
With all the cases of Ebola popping up in the US lately, doctors took extra precaution and quarantined Spelling from other patients while treating her.
Fortunately, she was not carrying Ebola, but instead admitted for a severe case of bronchitis and a sinus infection.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each weekday this month we’ll be bringing you ideas and projects for an Electronic Halloween! Expect wearables, hacks & mods, costumes and more here on the Adafruit blog! Working on a project for Halloween this year? Share it with us on Google+, in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, or Twitter– we’d love to see what you’re up to and share it with the world (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). Tune in to our live shows, Wearable Electronics with Becky Stern, 3D hangouts with Matt, Pedro, and Noe, and Ask an Engineer, featuring store discount codes, ideas for projects, costumes, and decorations, and more!
