I’ve picked up a new 4×4. The wife’s prius just won’t quite cut it on major snow days. This will be our spare. It might be a little fun too! The new land rover has already been an adventure. It’s got its own section on the site.
This site was murdering my web server every so often. After looking around a bit, I found that I had 2GB worth of comment/comment meta data. The comment system was just murdering the server. I’ve decided to turn off comments for now. I just don’t have the time to sift through them (this site makes [...]
I used to spend a lot of time playing with various home theater toys. It was one of my main hobbies before I owned a house. Once I bought a house, my priorities changed a bit out of necessity. When we got the house, I did replace my diy video screen with an electric drop [...]
So it begins. I’ve acquired a Bradley Smoker. This particular unit is an interesting beast. It’s essentially a mini-fridge chassis (built for heat rather than cold). Up top is a standard grill smoke release hole, in the bottom is a undersized 500 watt heating element. Mounted on the side is the ‘Bradley smoke generator’. The [...]
It was bound to happen. My Mac Mini started to crash, and hard. When I’d login, it was a crap shoot until it would lock up. Eventually it started happening immediately after login! It’s about 1 year old and I could have sent it off to apple. Being me, I decided to do a fresh [...]
I’m working on a new car controller. It’s based on aftermarket remote start, a jailbroken iphone and some open source hardware. This post covers setting up the iPhone for that use. It’s really just a nice, cheap (if you have it) script-able serial telemetry platform. iPhone jailbreak notes: I used an iPhone 3g, downloaded 4.2.1 [...]
I want to launch a new hardware/software platform for energy monitoring and usage. Check it out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/willobrien/microhome-smarter-houses-save-energy The project site is http://microhome.org
Check out this sweet test rig that “Old Man Mike” built for evaluating motors for copters. It uses a PIC microcontroller to measure thrust, current, voltage and throttle to measure efficiency and wobble factors to find the best motors. Test Fixture Evaluates Motors/Props/ESC for Quadcopter Performance from Old Man Mike on Vimeo.
Yesterday, Hack-A-Day had a nice write up listing the various development boards available these days for projects. If you’re looking for a brain for your next creation, you should definitely check it out. It includes boards that start at $4 and up.
I upgraded my desk at home a bit with a new monitor – A Samsung P2770H – a pretty decent 27″ 1080P display. I was wondering how I might calibrate it and the pair of 24″ displays next to it to have reasonable color matching and ran across this article on doing the job with [...]