If you’re looking to run the hell away from Vista as fast as possible and adopt Windows 7, it’s worth taking advantage of the 50%+ off pre-order window Microsoft is offering on upgrades to its Home Premium and Professional versions of 7.

After July 11th—or after a predetermined, yet unknown number of licenses are sold—the price will double back up to retail. Check out what’s available here.

Version 1.0 of Alphabrite LED Display Control Center—or, simply enough, Alphabrite v1.0—is ready for download. This application allows remote or local administration of your Alpha or Betabrite LED Display using PHP4 and 5 with the cURL extension. The application supports every sign that adheres to the Alpha 1.0 Protocol. (See README for more details.)

Available Modules:

• Public Interaction: Interface your LED sign to the Internet through your website. By only embedding two lines of code, you’ll have everything you need on the front-end to accept feedback—without interrupting the flow of your other active modules. Includes optional notification of messages by email and/or to its own Twitter feed.
• Stock Quotes: Define the stocks you want to watch and keep tabs on them through the ticker. (Stock quotes are on a 20-minute delay, so DON’T use it for determining whether to execute a trade.)
• Weather: Get Current Conditions for your ZIP code, as well as Local Forecasts for two days out.
• RSS Feeds: Define your feed and scan whatever headlines you feel like staying abreast of.
• Twitter Recapping: Create an account for your sign on Twitter and, in combination with the Public Interaction module, display both current and archived messages sent to your sign. Or, if you prefer, display your personal feed instead.
• Time/Date Display & Synchronization: For those, like me, without proper serial clock chips inside their Alpha or Betabrite unit, these functions will both display and regularly synchronize your time and date (on supported models).
• Basecamp Integration*: If you’re a user of Basecamp by 37signals, keep track of the latest activity through this module. Especially useful for Project Managers.
• IMAP Inbox Check*: Check how many unread messages you have, and how many messages you have total. This is pre-set to Gmail for your convenience.

Hardware Functions Provided:

• Set Date/Time, Set Day of the Week, Set Time Format, Schedule Messages, Speaker On/Off, Generate Tone, Clear Priority Message (A0), Clear Non-Priority Memory (page or entirely), Soft Reset, Set Sequence (Data Reset), Update Sequence (Data Refresh)
• Includes the PHP RS-232 method (alphawrite.php), which requires the fantastic and included ‘php_serial.class.php’ by Rémy Sanchez (http://hyperthese.net/).
• Furthermore, unit resets and refreshes can be automated via a simple crontab (or its Windows equivalent) using the provided utilities.

This was tested on an Alpha PPD220—a two-line, red LED display by Adaptive Displays. Should you run into any problems, please submit them here.

* See the README for important details and security caveats involved with the utilization of these modules.

Download: Alphabrite v1.0 (97kb, zip)

With my other LED reverse-engineering project waiting on a cable, I picked up an Alpha PPD220 (Personal Priority Display) LED Sign—probably the most basic model there is in their product line—off eBay at about 15% of the MSRP. (I’d prefer a Alpha 4160C, but I’m pretty sure the WAF (wife acceptance factor) wouldn’t permit it.)

Telling by the message that was still in its memory when I powered it on, this particular LED sign used to serve as a display at a lottery terminal somewhere in South Carolina. Within an hour or so of hacking away on some code from these guys, however, I was able to interface it using PHP and Perl—the latter posing as the messenger with the RS-232 serial interface—to accept messages from the public at large.

So, with that done, it was time to improve upon it. In between moments of helping my wife recover from all four of her wisdom teeth being pulled, I decided to build a library (from scratch) for the sign. Because of the shared protocol, the library I have in development should work with most, if not all Alpha and Betabrite models from Adaptive Displays, but I really can’t test that to verify beyond this basic little unit.

Here’s a bit of what it does in its current state:

• Supports the Alpha 1.0 protocol mostly, with a little (untested) 2.0 and 3.0
• Accommodates both paged sequences (AA-AZ) and PRIORITY Text (A0)
• Synchronizes the system clock on the unit with the server automatically
• Pulls in RSS feeds using Simplepie
• Pulls in Current Weather and the Local Forecast via Yahoo’s API
• Allows people visiting my site to enter messages without interrupting the flow of information (news, weather, time, etc.)
• Added basic administrative functions (soft reset, speaker on/off, clear memory, etc.)
• Added the ability to update a Twitter account with the last submitted message from the web. Sad.
• Added the ability to notify me by email when someone submits a message. Doubly sad.
• Updates every hour on the hour via a crontab which refreshes all the data

There’s still a lot of work to be done to maximize its utility (and for me to be comfortable enough to release it), but I’ll get to it as time permits. As it is, it’s become something far more useful than displaying lottery numbers and jackpot totals.

Want to give it a whirl? Feel free to check the sign out over here and drop a note while you’re at it.

I really wasn’t aware that yesterday’s cult attire became this winter’s statement of practicality and comfort. Nothing says “comfort” to me quite as much as sitting in a room with a bunch of folks wearing these Slankets:

These also go under the brand name “Snuggies”, which just seems even more disquieting of a name than the horrifying “Slanket” portmanteau when placed in a certain context:

Join the Cult of Comfort while supplies last!

You know times are getting tough when a league that has growing appeal decides to shut down for an entire season to completely restructure the league’s business fundamentals. How they’re managing to keep the afl2—which is expected to play in ’09—up and running at the same time I have no idea.

Leagues have come and gone over the years, from the USFL to NFL Europe and countless others in between, but it’s surprising to see the AFL take a bow, albeit temporarily.

While researching the rash of credit line decreases (CLD) hitting consumers holding credit cards tonight—something I’ve been thankful to avoid so far—I came across a thread discussing something a little more interesting: collection agencies seem to be hitting their own skids in this economy. Well, at least some of the smaller ones:

[…] Elite Recovery suddenly shut down, 70 people were told to leave the premises. No warning, no notice. Collections have been thin, but this was unexpected.

Earlier this week, CSGA in Columbus folded, Bronson & Migliaccio are ready to file for bankruptcy. Redline Recovery and LHR are laying off large numbers.

The reason seems to be an (ironic) inability to finance new paper from which to collect:

[…] six months ago I was hitting bonus and walking the floor part time instead of having to spend 8 hours on the phone – it was great. The paper got awful thin around October and management started “suggesting” stronger tactics on the phone. I wouldn’t have given some of these accounts to my worst enemy […]

I think our situation at RLC had to do with inability to finance new paper, but who knows for sure.

You’d think that, with more accounts finding themselves in collections, the industry would be booming right now. But perhaps with the economy slumping as far as it has lately, the old adage “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip” is taking on unprecdented meaning. Of course, users at Creditboards.com have their theories…

Thanks to an invite from Tom Sella of Boxee and Boxee’s recent support of Tiger (which I shouldn’t need for too much longer, as I’ll be coming up to speed with Leopard soon), I was able to conduct some tests using the stream pack and the alpha version of Boxee.

Some of the feeds—such as RTR Planeta, displayed above—tended to bomb out and crash the application from time to time. I need to submit a bug report for when I get a chance, and it’s something that didn’t seem to happen with the Atlantis beta of XBMC for OSX. Overall, though, the pack seemed to work quite well.

One slight annoyance I discovered between all OSX variants of XBMC (and XBMC itself) was the extremely slow buffering of each stream before finally displaying. Granted, XBMC on the Xbox did take its time, but not nearly as much as it seems to on the OSX varieties.