It's been a busy summer. Of course, just when things are the most manic is when Amazon decided to update the API that Booklert uses to get the book information and rank.

Booklert uses a library (of code, rather than rooms full of books) to talk to Amazon, and that was updated to take into account the changes, but upgrading Booklert to use the latest version of the library turned out to not be a trivial operation.

It took a little longer than the expected hour, but Booklert and tedium are both back up and running.

Everything seems to be running just fine, but please let us know if you spot any glitches or things that aren't as they should be. Thanks.

Just a quick note to let you know that both tedium and Booklert will be offline for a period in about two and a half hours.

It's just for some routine maintenance, starting at 8pm GMT and should be fixed within an hour.

On Saturday I took the latest Mazzini prototype, the Light Load Lamp down to London for the Homecamp home-automation and energy-monitoring conference.

During the day I gave a brief talk about what the Mazzini project is exploring and also asking who would be interested in buying one of the bare energy-measurement boards.

What You'd Get

Here's some video footage that the BBC took at the recent Maker Faire. In it you can see me talking about both Bubblino and the Light Load Lamp

Just in time for our trip to Maker Faire I managed to get the second Mazzini prototype up and running. It improves upon the original prototype in a number of ways, but the most interesting is the addition of a triac, which means that the Arduino board can now control the power to the device being monitored.

This is where things start to get really interesting.

At Maker Faire the other week, I was interviewed by Simon Cox from BBC Radio 4's Click On programme. Their coverage of the faire was on the programme broadcast today and two of MCQN Ltd's projects feature on the show.

First off, about 3m30s in, you can hear me talk about Bubblino (whose picture also graces the Click-on programme details page)

When he made his debut at Barcamp Liverpool, Bubblino was a fairly simple being. He was reliant on a computer to search twitter and work out whether there were any new messages, with the code on Bubblino himself just taking care of turning on and timing the bubble blowing.

MCQN Ltd, in the form of Adrian McEwen as organiser, is proud to be involved in helping to promote more hardware tinkering here in the North-West. On Saturday 23rd May, we're holding Howduino a free, hardware and Arduino hackday at FACT in Liverpool.

The first UK Maker Faire was a fantastic weekend, featuring all sorts of great and crazy gadgets and inventions.