These socks are Cherry Tree Hill Supersock.  I’m pretty sure this is my first completed pair out of that yarn.  I’ve purchased other skeins, but I don’t recall actually finishing anything before.  These are pretty nifty.  I actually finished these guys on New Years Eve, shortly before midnight.  That made my total production for 2011 higher than it has been in a long time.

I just finished these socks this evening.

I would have finished these earlier, except I futzed up the second sock.  For some odd reason, while I had no problem increasing the toe to 56st for the first sock, I couldn’t quite manage that on its mate.  Took me to having finished the heel to realize it though.  I ripped it out and started again.  The yarn is Pakokku sock yarn from ITW in Minotaur color way. I picked this up at NYSW this yearn and really liked it.  The base is a fine multi-plied yarn which reminds me of Lorna’s.

Finally, another FO to show off, but not knitting this time.  Most know that I’ve been working on a iOS version of my KnitCounter app.  I submitted it to the Apple App Store on 1/2 and it was approved.  It is available for $.99 (just like the droid version)

It is available here.  I’m quite proud of it and would welcome comments and suggestions!

Now to decide which yarn is next.  Will be important as on Friday we’re off on our annual family vacation on the Explorer of the Seas.  The trip is very similar to this one, but one day longer and with one stop different.  We’re going to St. Martin instead of Dominican Republic this time and the islands are in a different order.  Labadee, Haiti is our first stop.

Craft on!

Work actually continues on Peasy. I haven’t abandoned it yet. Though it does have to share my out of office time with my Air and the learning to code for iOS books. I’m a couple of chapters away from beginning to code an iOS version of my Droid Knit Counter. Yay!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Now is anyone interested in buying a gently used Droid X or an ATT iPhone 3G? I seem to have a few phones too many.

My current project is moving along and still secret. I can say that I have finished the upper back and one half of the upper front.  I need to pick up the held stitches for the second half, and that should progress quickly.  I’ve also broken out of my recent monogamous knitting pattern and started a sock.  Hopefully more on that soon, before I finish it.

My droid app is selling pretty well.  The little deposits in my bank account from Google make me smile.  I’ve since written a second app, this one a spinners toolkit.   I only released it this weekend so we will see how it goes.  I do have some major additions to make to it including a log section where you can record info about the resulting yarn and add a picture of it.  I have to say that I am really enjoying coding again.  Must also admit to the deep love I feel for my Droid X.  Love it as much, or more if that is possible as my old iPhone.  Have the next app figured oh as well.  Came to me as I was trying to sleep the other night:  a knitters toolkit.  This would be a collection of things like a yardage calculator, an increase/decrease calculator, kitchener definition.   Maybe even a pattern generator for simple stuff like socks or top-down raglans.

Train is almost in Hoboken.  Time to upload and put this away. 

Craft on!

This is a recovery day, besides being Columbus Day.  Happy day to those who celebrate.  To me it is a day off, one where the kids are actually in school!  This past weekend was a very busy one.   As I mentioned before, blogiversary is around the time of the twins’ birthday.  Well that was Saturday.  I can’t believe they’re 7 already.

This year we held the party at BounceU on Friday night.  There were 12 kids, including my pair, bouncing, climbing, sliding and otherwise having fun.  This was followed by pizza and ice cream cake.  By the time we got home, opened all presents and finally settled down for bed it was almost 11pm.

Saturday, I treated Kat to her first manicure and hopefully started a new mom/daughter birthday tradition.  Heck, maybe we started a new bi-weekly tradition.  I have to admit, I like having polished nails.  I think the last time I polished them myself was during my staycation a year ago.  Last manicure was for my sister’s wedding in 2006.  I think its time.  We spent a good deal of time chasing Alexander’s new remote airplane, tracking it down from various neighbors yards.  I spent some of the evening hours revising Knit Counter and adding features/functionality that Android board members on Ravelry suggested.  Unfortunately I found there was a problem for those who newly installed the new version rather than upgrading.  I fixed that problem last night, but I’m getting ahead of myself here now.  Anyway, I added features, and flubbed it for the new installs, and uploaded to the marketplace.

Yesterday was a very long day, covering many miles.  It was Jessalu and R’s wedding!  I headed up north at 10am and didn’t get home until 12:30 am.  A long, but beautiful day indeed.  The wedding was sweet.  The reception was lovely and the food was yummy.  I got to hang with a table of other knitter/spinners whom I all know well.

Unfortunately I wasn’t tired after getting home, and had found a complaint from a new purchaser of the app, so I sat down to see if I could find the problem.  Fortunately, before too long, I had narrowed it down and was able to upload a new version to the marketplace.  So whew.  I feel badly that I had released it that way.  I guess I’m used to having a team of QA people at work and not accustomed to doing more than the unit testing that I normally do.  I am my own SQA team here!  This won’t happen again.

I tossed and turned last night after finally going to sleep, having decided that the geek stuff needs its own home, and not here.  You guys kind of fuzz over when that side of me pops out.  So this morning after the kids went off to school, I got busy and set up a new blog for the software dev stuff (might notice it in the navigation at the top), change the page that you hit if you just go to crazyfiberlady.com to be a main screen rather than the default redirect siteground put there.  Sadly, my browsers are caching the page that had been there, but that should expire shortly I hope.

So now, I have two hours before the kids come home.  I’m going to spend the rest of the day relaxing with a spinning wheel.  I’m hoping the down time will help me shake the cough that’s been with me a couple of days now.  Maybe i should nap.. hmmm.

Craft on!

I know I owe you a real knitting related posting, but sadly, there hasn’t been much of that recently, well except for the bits done on the train to Adrift.  I’ve done a minimal amount of spinning, though there was 20z of some lovely pink falkland stuff from Leann that I picked up at WOOL.  No pictures of it yet, but I have a spinning post brewing for later in the week.

What have I been up to you ask?  Well I’m glad you mentioned it.  I’ve been absorbed in writing my first Android app.  While there are tons of knitting related apps for the iPhone, the Android marketplace is lacking in that arena.  I tried to get a decent counter, but the best I could find was a number placed at the center of the screen which incremented if you touched the screen anywhere.  Ugh.  No capabilities to add a second counter for those times (which I was about to hit with Adrift) where you needs to do something every X rows, Y times.  So, I figured that would be a good first project.  I started the puppy (KnitCounter) on Sept16th or so and have the basic functionality working.  There are a number of features I need to implement yet, like a configurable number of counters per project and a way to edit the counter value directly (for say you choose to count down) but its working.  I’m using it with Adrift

Here are some screen shots:

This is the main menu where you can either open an existing project or add a new one.  Yup, I’ve written it so you can associate counters with multiple projects so you can have one for say Socks and another for a Sweater or a Shawl, etc.

This is the current screen to add a new project.  It will change as I implement the functionality to increase (or decrease) the number of counters per project.  But for right now, all projects get two configurable counters which you can set the label for.  The values here are the default ones.

Once you’ve created a project, you can access it via the listing of existing projects.  This too will have some functionality added when I next sit down with the code.  I’ll add a context menu with options to delete or edit.

This is the actual project view with both counters and a space for notes.  It is my actual Adrift project on my Droid.  I hooked it to the computer this morning for the screenshots.. and yet, I have email notifications

Finally we have the context menu if you long press one of the counters (for the non-droid users, the long press is the equivalent of a right click on a PC).  Here you can reset or delete.  Well you can select the delete but you get a charming message that says:  “This feature has not been implemented yet:P”.  It is serving placeholder duty.  Also to be added to this menu is the option to edit a counter – ie change direction, set a value, label update, etc.  I also think I’m going to change the app background from that lovely blue to a picture of knit fabric.

So there you have it, my first app child.  I have to say, I’m really enjoying sitting in front of the computer at home again playing with this.  Unfortunately the side effect has been reduced amount of weekend sleep.  I was hacking around on Saturday until 1am to get both the counter click and long press menu to both work.

So whatcha think?

Craft on!

There’s been another cast change for the portable toys.  HTC Incredible is out.  The battery life was dismal.  With mininal use I still had to recharge at the office by 3pm.  Unacceptable.

So now I have the Motorola Droid with actual tactile keyboard.  We’ll see if this helps my dismal texting

Picture included for camera test.

Craft on!

I know its been a bit since I last posted.  It goes without saying that I’ve been busy.  I’ve been knitting and spinning, as well as reading and working.  Not to mention, hot and sweaty.  Been a very decent summer so far.  This July girl does not complain about heat.. well too often that is.  Summer is my season and I don’t wish it gone, at all.  Even though September brings the end of paid for schooling, I’m in no rush to see it come.

A couple of weeks ago, I started knitting Featherweight Cardigan in 100purewool sock weight in a gorgeous blue.  I’m really enjoying working with this yarn.

This has been the perfect commuter project.  A lightweight cardigan that is stockinette makes for excellent reading work.  It has also been good for playing the Sims (which I’m back at for a change), especially during the 10 day west coast Red Sox swing recently.  10PM starts are way too late for me these days.  I just can’t stay up that late anymore :*(  I’m a bit further along on this than the picture indicates.  I’m about a half inch of finishing the bottom ribbing.  I need to dig out the longer needle to do the sleeves.

What’s that under the Featherweight you ask?  I know it came as no surprise when I bought the iPad, so maybe this might.  I loved the iPad, but unfortunately, it did not meet my needs in for portable computing. I found myself having to also carry my netbook (acer aspire one 10”).  Put the iPad together with the netbook and I had a bag that was a big heavier than I really wanted to carry.  I pulled out the druggy scale and discovered that the pair were actually heavier than my MacBook.   Might as well carry that for an all-in-one tech toy. 

But I really didn’t want to carry that much.  So for a bit, I replaced the iPad in the bag with my Kindle 2.  The solution was lighter, however, I was still not happy with the reading of the PDFs.  The netbook screen is too small to read it well and the Kindle 2 does a half hearted job at the PDF with lots of embedded images (and charts) that make up the majority of my tech books.  Which is why I replaced the Kindle with the iPad to begin with as it does the tech pdf very well.  Solution?  The Kindle DX!  Its a great compromise between the weight of the ebook reader with the PDF ability of the iPad.  No games, but I have my phone for that…

Which brings me to the new phone you see.  That is the HTC Incredible from Verizon.  I did go with the Android phone instead of getting a new iPhone.  I’m loving it!  Been a bit of a learning curve as it is an entirely new OS for me, but it is intuitive enough that it hasn’t been overly problematic.  I’ve kept my iPhone to use as a Touch as for some odd reason I don’t like using my phone as an iPod.  Before I got the Incredible, I carried around a separate iPod to listen to.  Amazing how long the battery is now lasting on the iPhone.  I’m impressed with the specs on this new phone and I can’t complain about having an 8MP camera with FLASH on me at all times.  As for developing apps for it?  I’m working towards that.  I’ve got my netbook set up as a development station for it and picked up a book on the subject, which I’ve been reading on the DX   Now to figure out what to do with the old iPods and the Kindle 2.

Yesterday Kat and I visited a new to us yarn store:  Yarn Diva.  I wanted some Malabrigo to knit Adrift in and didn’t have enough of anything in stash.  I’d never been to this store, but had meant to.  I’m sorry I didn’t make the trip earlier.  I loved it!  I do believe I have a new LYS.  They are so friendly and very helpful.  There’s a great selection of what I would consider basic yarns (lace, sock), as well as some of the more designer yarns that appeal to others.  I’m definitely going back there again.

Time to finish the laundry, balance the checkbook and make the necessary lists before heading off to WOOL this week!

Craft on! 

What am I considering?  The Motorola Droid X.

I read an excellent review of it here.  As a developer, this phone has two advantages for me over the iPhone:

1. Apps are written in Java – which as a C# developer I pretty much already know as opposed to Objective-C which has some similarities but is far more different and is a far bigger learning curve.  While learning yet another language is not a bad thing, I could be up and developing Android apps far faster.
2. The distribution of Droid apps is an open market – not closed like Apple.   I don’t believe I would have to pay $100 to even get the SDK let alone distribute any application I do happen to eventually turn out.
3. Since the language is Java, I could develop apps either on my Macs or a PC, depending on how the mood was flowing and which computer I actually felt like carrying around.  With the iPhone, I was locked into a Mac.  Now this is not necessarily a bad thing as I do heart my Macs, but my netbook is far lighter to schlep carry than my MacBook.

That’s the short list.  I’m sure, given enough time, I can come up with a few more reasons.  On the other hand, I’ve invested a bunch in iPhone apps.  Fortunately, that won’t go to waste as I’m still holding onto the 3G and I’ve got the beloved iPad that can take advantage of all. 

Anyone have an android phone and can offer up advice either way?  I have some time to do further research as my contract ends in early August and the X ships finally in mid-July.  I don’t want to be paying early termination like I did when I made the jump from Sprint to AT&T (though it was worth it for the iPhone).  I wonder if I could get a temporary number from Verizon and then port the old number from AT&T when that contract ends… hmmmm. 

Oh and since the iOS4 update, my battery indicator is flaky.  Unless I reboot the phone, the indicator is pretty much stuck.  Awesome.  Hope that patch fix is soon.

Wait, what is that you’re saying?  This is a crafty blog?  Hmm.  I better show some crafty pictures then post haste!  Would a picture of two different crafts make up for the geektalk above? 

The sock is the Roundabout Socks (rav).  I finished the first one on Saturday and started the second yesterday during my morning commute.  The yarn is mmMalabrigo Sock in Stonechat colorway.

The spinning is ITW Merino-Silk in the Autumn in Burgundy colorway.  I’ve moved to the high speed whorl and bobbins on my Matchless.  I’m going to two ply this stuff and hopefully get enough yardage for a decent lace project.

Okay, that’s all for today.

Craft on!