2015 is in the books. Apart from a pretty lazy day in the office, and trying to keep Garrett from freaking out with the inevitable fireworks, you can stick a fork in 2015, it is DONE. Some big changes, we bought a house in the Santa Teresa neighborhood, a modest 1,400 sqft abode for a whopping $695K, and every cent we could get our hands on. For the first time ever, we had a significant amount of...
I am not sure who said it first: “All good things must come to an end…”, but it is a truism. Alas, the holiday shutdown and followup vacation days are now over. Today I go back to the office for the first time in 11 days. In the interim was Christmas, some time with family, reading a few books, finishing the latest edition of The Baffler (if you are a natural born cynic, who...
Some things just piss me off. One of them is assholes who don’t know how to put their shopping carts in the corral area, and just leave them willy-nilly wherever they want to. Lazy fucks. I am sure you have seen this behavior before. It crosses class, and state boundaries. From the bargain grocers like Lucky, or Safeway, to the boutique like Trader Joes, or Nob Hill, and even to the swanky...
Ok, this is getting old. Waking up at 3:00 AM and not going back to sleep. Argh. The reason: Tate, one of our Greyhounds, goes out to relieve himself. He has been doing it at 5-ish, but lately that has become 3:00 AM. Alas, since he has a fecophilia vibe, he generally will turn around after defecating and wolf his own feces right down. Yuck. So, when I hear the swish/swish of the doggie door, I...
This project builds upon the flashing LED of the first project. If you were motivated, you could change the frequency of the flashing, by adjusting a constant in the program, a “delay” value that was used to turn on and off the power to the LED. This circuit instead brings in the concept of analog versus digital circuits, something that is worth explaining. In the digital realm, a signal is “on”...
It is Christmas day in the Beck/Anderson household. The day started well, I slept until almost 5:00 AM, not bad for me lately, some fresh coffee, and about 6:00, I was lobbied hard for a walk by Tate. Today, Garrett didn’t join us, so Tate got a 3.2 mile walk in. That should tire him out! Since the boys aren’t too kind to trees, we don’t do a lot of internal decorating, and we...
The Sparkfun Inventors Kit arrived, and I have to admit that it was better than I expected. Packaged in a nice box, it has plenty of goodies, and projects to play with. There are enough parts that I am sure I can go well beyond the scripted projects. Last night, I did the (really minor) assembly, but didn’t dive in. However, this morning, I dove right in, and did the first project. As one would...
I am sure I disappointed my dad growing up. He tried mightily to get me interested in electronics, even building many Heathkit projects with me. I remember an AM radio, and a few others, but for me it was boring, and as a pre-teen, I just didn’t get into it. He had a Heathkit oscilloscope, and had built our hi-fi system from Heathkits, among many others. We had a B&W TV that often...
My main computer since 2013, has been a rocking MacBook Air. It is the first generation of the system based on the Haswell chipset, and it has been awesome. It came with Mountain Lion (10.8), and has been upgraded thrice now, recently to El Capitan. When I got it, one of the huge benefits was the battery life. The data sheet said 12 hours, and it easily beat that. I often went several days...
A few years ago, I got a wild hair up my hind-side, and bought a Raspberry Pi to mess with. A small, fully functional computer, running a Linux variant, built around an ARM SoC, it was a pretty nifty bit of kit. I connected it to my monitor, wired up a keyboard and mouse, added a wifi USB dongle, and had some fun. Did a lot of learning to program Python on it. But then the move happened, it got...