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Throwies overtake Kendall/MIT station sculpture
Blinking RGB LED throwies adorn the “Steaming Globe” sculpture near the Kendall/MIT station just after the 4th of July fireworks show. No idea how this could have happened. Kids had a blast pulling them off and throwing them back onto the globe (and each other!). The whole rest of the night as we walked around,
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You are invited to participate in a research study. Afterward, there will be cake.
Heh… I’ve just completed NIH certification to administer human test protocols. I feel like that’s got to be worth a few mad scientist points. So, I’m working on this project at work involving research into new forms of computer interface peripherals. (No, not that one.) As part of the project, we are required to test
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Comcast, she’s at it again…
comcast, corporates, drivebydownload, broken, tos, contracts
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Fun with MIDI, CNC and vector maths (mid2cnc.py)
More playing: Castlevania end credits Tetris Mario Bros. theme Update: I fixed up the script to pull (usually) proper timing from the MIDI, threw together some minimal documentation and released it to the public (see link below). Downloads mid2cnc.py, sparse documentation and samples Basically, it’s possible to compute a combination of (distance, feedrate) along an
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(Also: An experiment…)
In the last post, I made the unspeakable blargger mistake of linking to an article on a news site, which means in 7 days or so, instead of said article this link will return absolute crap and/or a “Buy membership now!” nag screen. Trying to keep up with such link rot (if anyone bothered) is
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Cloud Computing…cirrusly? (same trash, different bag)
So, apparently I’m not the only one to notice the mid-level marketing types in IT having a big collective nut lately about “Cloud Computing”. This week even the Wall Street Journal ragged about this nonsense on the front page. For those who don’t spend their time around mid-level IT marketing types, cloud computing is… well,
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Optical Mouse Hacks: 2D Micropositioning using cheap mouse cameras
Optical mice work by pointing a tiny cheap camera at the surface of your desktop, tracking the motion of ‘interesting’ points in the surface texture (woodgrain, imperfections, highlight/shadow) as the mouse slides around over it, and converting this to an X and Y motion. An LED is used to light the surface beneath the sensor,
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NinBendo (cont’d): Zero-knowledge, realtime music tweaking example
This is a followup to this post. Quick video example of finding and bending the music data that plays during Super Mario Bros. 3’s World 1 map, using the FCEUX emulator’s advanced 6502 debugging features. Full-screen if you’ve got it – the video did not survive compression well, and I don’t feel like investing hours
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NinBendo – circuit bending by corrupting 8-bit game code.
Yeah, back in junior high I had not enough friends and too much time, and discovered that keying in random Game Genie codes would sometimes cause a NES game to (harmlessly) glitch out in interesting ways. :-p Some codes just locked up the game (drat!), while others caused screen glitches, messed with colors, and rearranged
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Better Better DXF Output for Inkscape (layers!)
I started using Inkscape, a sweet open-source vector graphics program, to produce (and/or steal from the internet and convert) designs suitable for carving on the CNC as Inkscape has a plugin to export the file as a .DXF. Converting some files, I discovered the current export script does not correctly handle all types of transforms,
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Protected: A decade of thoughts… // Two’s complement (one’s a crowd)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Steppin’ Razor: Yet Another Cheap DIY, Homebrew CNC
After about an entire year of the parts sitting around, next-week, next-month, ya-I-been-meanin-ta, tonight I managed to get my homebrew CNC router* assembled into a usable (or at least testable) state. The entire design (if you can call it that! – it was really kind of ad-hoc) consists, as much as possible, of parts commonly
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Stupid Excel Trick – amuse your friends & bore your enemies
What’s 1-2? Today, MS Excel tells me it’s +39815. (Tomorrow it will tell me something different.) Some while back a signup sheet went around the office for our annual lamb roast. Since every problem (nail) in an office environment has a preinstalled office-suite hammer, the signup list was an Excel spreadsheet. Once everyone has entered
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Cypherpunk’s Wet Dream meta-entry
I once said that this blog would eventually reach a point where any possible entry could be expressed as a sum of references to previous entries. In this case, it’s this one, this one and this one. I have maintained that a point will be reached where plain old ordinary Web sites will be forced
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Firefox 3, SSL and self-signed certificates
First off, for those who know what I’m talking about and are just as pissed…the fix! (sorta) Open about:config and set the follwing settings: browser.xul.error_pages.expert_bad_cert: true browser.ssl_override_behavior: 2 This brings you down from five clicks to “only” two. :-/ So, a while back I got sick of the nag dialogs, caved and updated to Firefox
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Trance vibe vs. Windows Vista x64
So I have started getting support emails – “Hey, how do I get your hardware to work in Vista?” Seeming invariably to be the 64-bit version. That’s weird, as far as I know there is a 64-bit build of the drivers included… Of course, you may have correctly guessed that as an IT semi-professional, I
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VMWare Player Network driver (and video, SCSI, etc.)
Problem: After installing some operating systems such as Vista* in a virtual machine (i.e. as a ‘guest’ OS) under VMWare Player, they cannot access the internet because they don’t have a driver for VMWare’s virtual network card. Solutions: This driver (and many others such as SVGA, SCSI, sound) are available in the ‘VMWare Tools’ package.
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Tease…
It’s not quite finished yet, but here are some pictures of what I’ve been working on this week, when not making you-know-whats in my basement dildonics facility.
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Creepy government project…
Title: Virtual Dialogue Application for Families of Deployed Service Members Objective: To develop a highly interactive PC or web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with “virtual” renditions of deployed Service Members. This RFP from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD09-H03) floated across my desk the other day. After reading the
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Petty Joule Thief
You might be familiar with the original Joule Thief, a simple, homebrewable step-up converter often used to drive LEDs (with Vf of several volts) from a single 1.5V battery, or extract the last remaining juice from a battery that’s too dead for use in most real-world gadgets. The basic Joule Thief can suck power from
Find stuff…
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- Das Blinkenlichten – wearable lighting
- Goldmine Electronics LCD pinout (mini-teardown)
- Mosquino: an Arduino-based energy harvesting development board
- Pick and Place Project
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