Nothing makes me feel ready to take on the day like my NASA mug full of fresh coffee. 

The last few months have been pretty awesome for my coffee game. Between gifts from our wedding, Christmas presents, and my birthday, I’ve started to build up quite a collection of devices to help feed my caffeine addiction.

• Chemex
• Aeropress
• Variable temp electric gooseneck kettle
• Digital scale with timer

It’s been awesome and fun experimenting with different ways to make coffee and see how it affects some of my favorite types of beans.

One of the things that I’ve recently started doing is creating a crazy Google form to track all the different coffee preparation methods I’ve been using. It looks like this.

What sorts of additional details am I missing that I should be recording here? It’s probably getting a little bit ridiculous, but hey!

This sort of thing appeals to my sense of experimentation and adventure. I should probably put one together for my Aeropress as well. File that one under #weekendprojects.

Santa Cruzin’

Historical fiction and World War II are two subjects that I love reading about. Even better when they’re combined, in my opinion. I just finished City of Thieves by David Benioff and it’s one of my favorite books that I’ve read in awhile.

It follows the antics of two teenage Russian boys during the siege of Leningrad in the early 1940’s. After the boys are caught breaking the law and thrown in prison, they are given reprieve by a local military commander. Find a dozen eggs in 5 days and their lives will be spared.

From then on, both hilarity and catastrophe ensue. It’s full of (mis)adventure, humor, and even has some deep reflections on what it means to be alive. There were parts where I laughed out loud and other parts that nearly brought a tear to my eye.

For anyone who’s a fan of historical fiction, especially when set in World War II, I highly recommend this book. It’s great. And at 260 pages, you can get through it really quick.

I should write more and blog more. It’s been a long time and WordPress has had some fantastic improvements over the last year.

I’m talking robots to a bunch of middle schoolers who visited Engadget HQ for Hour of Code.

You would think that this is literally all he does.

Our office has an empty TV that isn’t being properly utilized at the moment. It’s definitely a #FirstWorldProblem, but it basically boils down to the fact that we have multiple displays that act as dashboards for our various services and properties.

Anyway, we had a spare television available to show whatever we wanted. THE ENTIRE INTERNET WAS OUR OYSTER and what better way to put it to use than to display a random assortment of animated GIFs.

Our troubles arose when we realized we had to manually change out the animated GIFs, as well as zoom in in via the attached machine’s web browser so that it would properly display images.

Annoying, right?

The Solution

Cue superhero music

Some Javascript, CSS, and PHP came the the rescue!

We’re using CSS to set a background image (based on one of our animated GIFs) that fills up the entire display. Depending on the settings of your viewport, the image has the possibility of being severly cropped, but hey, whatever!

We’re using some Javascript calls (thank you so much, Stackoverlow) to display a new animated GIF every 20 seconds or so (or really, whatever time you want, but I’m using 20 seconds), as well as build an array of animated GIFs from our images folder.

Which brings us to PHP. We’re using PHP to scan the contents of the folder and then using some Jquery calls to periodically call our PHP script to rescan and rebuild the image array — this means you can drop new animated gifs into the /images folder (or remove them, but why would you even) and it will automagically add them to the Javascript array for random consideration.

Yes? Yes!

How to use

Upload this script to your favorite web server that supports PHP. Drop images (of the animated GIF variety) into the /images folder. Open up this page in your favorite browser on your favorite device. Cool? Cool!

Demo time

So, what the heck does this thing look like? You can see it in action right here. (Make sure to set your browser to full screen presentation mode so you get the right effect).

GIFtv: http://dave.ly/stuff/giftv/

To-do’s

• Better error handling
• Figure out how to get Dropbox integration working so the whole company can get in on the fun

Soft ‘g’ or hard ‘g’?

Hard G, dudes. It’s JIFF! I’m not wrong. You’re wrong.

Special Thanks

Thanks to a few people who helped me try and figure this out.

• Conrad Muan (@conradmuan)
• Lydia Katsamberis (@llkats)
• Jon Ursenbach (@jonursenbach)

You can download the source code for GIFtv on Github.