An old friend, an indoor/outdoor temperature monitoring station, made by Oregon Scientific. I am pretty sure I bought this while I lived in my first Condo in San Jose. An impulse buy on one of my trips to Fry’s Electronics, it has a head unit, and one remote sensor. The remote sensor communicates with the head unit via radio, and it worked quite well.
The last installment I mentioned how I branched out in my tinkering, and bought a basic FPGA board to play with. While the major makers (Alterra (now Intel) and Xilinx both have prototype boards, they are typically focused on the high end, and are quite expensive. I bought the Embedded Micro “Mojo” board, a modestly priced unit with a suitably powerful Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA. I did get the IDE...
If you have been a long time follower, you might remember a flurry of activity in late 2015 and early 2016 when I was diving into tinkering with an Arduino board. At the time, I was building bits and pieces to make a remote weather station. (that was derailed by an unrelated life change, but I have slowly gotten back into it.) The Arduino is interesting as it is a pretty complete SOC, with...
My mother inlaw has been in an assisted living community for a couple of years. As part of the move in, my brother inlaw got her this service called “Grandcare” that provides a touchscreen PC with a very customized user interface. The first PC that was sent to her room was a pretty large HP Envy 20 AIO touchscreen system. First manufactured in 2012, it has a HD resolution, 20″ touch screen...
Doc Martin Netflix had been offering me as a “recommended” show to watch a series called “Doc Martin”. I had successfully ignored it for months, when one evening, as I was scrolling (and scrolling and scrolling) looking for anything decent, I saw it roll up again. What the hell, I fired it up, expecting it to be like many of their recommendations. However, it quickly sucked me in with the story...
I am lucky. I get to ride public transport to the office. Heck, there is a tax break, so my employer even gives me a pass to ride for free. About a mile from my house to the train station, so I even get a little exercise. What’s not to love about it? Well, I will tell you. I seem to share the air in the train with anywhere from 2 to 40 of my peers within the human race. That means that at...
In October 2013, I woke up one day to the news that my hosting provider, MediaTemple, had been bought by GoDaddy. That set off a furious search to find a new home for my web properties. I moved all my hosting away within a few days, but I only moved my domains away after they expired. Except for two, I just kept getting lazy when the renewal time happened, and at $15 per year (versus $8.92 with...
Before Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Keith Emerson was a member of a British band, The Nice. Having started my Progressive Rock trip in the late 1970’s and really by the fascination of the ELP song Karn Evil #9, 1st Impression, Part 2, that got a lot of airplay. If you click the link, I suspect that you will recognize the song. After this initial introduction to the rabbit hole of Prog Rock, I chased...
I was going to write something about politics, but the bizarre keeps happening, and is totally dispiriting. So I will talk about something entirely different. As I am currently working in a role related to education, one of my tasks is to figure out what is out there. You know, competitive investigation. The other day I was poking around the MOOC’s, and their offerings related to my research, and...
Being somewhat ecologically conscious, I take pride in riding the train to work. Stress free commuting, predictable schedules, and for the most part a hassle free experience. Bonus is that my employer sponsors a transit pass for my, a tax break for them. Most of the time it is fine. Sometimes, there are annoyances, like the passengers who reek (either poor personal hygiene, or (far worse) those...