The embroiderable Arduino

To continue the theme inherent in my annoyance about the word "babydoll" as it refers to t-shirts that I wear...

What is this nonsense? Well yes, it's a boingboing article.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/04/lilypad-microcontrol.html

It appears to be a similar-to-Arduino microcontroller that can be used in... embroidery projects!

I would like to have us take a minute to think about this. Do you know any women who embroider? (Your answer does not count if you don't know any women.)

I think that this chip is cool. I think that it has lots of uses. Personally, I'd mount it on the back of a black leather motorcycle jacket and hook LEDs to it that will turn into a giant arrow signaling which way I want to turn. Well, I would if I weren't lazy and likely to cut off my finger with a needle.

I think that this chip has many uses, some yet to be discovered. but why is it being presented as connected to embroidery? Is that the only thing that someone could think of to appeal to women? Is this how an appeal to women- even a genuine and heartfelt one- should be phrased?

I wonder what the thought processes behind this were, and I hope that they were well-informed, intelligent, and possibly even sardonic.

Geeky female t-shirts

I was surfing ThinkGeek and Jinx for some more geeky babydoll tshirts (and what kind of crap is "babydoll" as a tshirt style name?) and I didn't find anything that I liked that I didn't already own. Whereas a lot of the guy-style tshirts were pretty cool. Also, there are over 200 designs for guy-cut tshirts, while there are only 115 "babydoll" stylings on ThinkGeek.

Also, there are female geek underpants. Which I think is a little strange, frankly. But to each their own. I didn't check whether there were guy geek boxers, because I know that you can get Star Wars boxers in any Target and frankly I also don't care that much about equality of the sexes at the moment.

So I stood up and did some thinking about t-shirt designs. Here are a few ideas.

1. "RTFM, n00b" caption with some graphic suggesting that all romantic applicants for my attention should first Read The Fucking Manual (hint: NOT the man pages)

2. (white Courier text on black background) "The man pages can't help you here."

3. Hello World scripts in Ruby, Python, and Haskell (Stacked, with small stylized Rosie the Riveter graphic)

4. (white Courier text on black background) "Your private key is insecure"

5. (white Courier text on black background) "I do not want your public key"

6. These two lines of Perl (bonus points if you can tell me what they are)
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0
In short, I do not want a female geek tshirt that has flowers, unicorns or other equines, sexual innuendo, or "geek inside" on it.

As I do have some graphic design experience (not much, but perhaps enough) I'm considering trying to make and sell some of these. However, CafePress, despite being popular, is too goddamn expensive. I'm looking for alternatives. Any suggestions?