Tag: projects
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"Don't follow me, I don't know where I'm going either."
--Unknown
Since I got my last big project finished up I've been trying to figure out what to do with myself. A certain amount of debugging was involved (as one might reasonably expect), culminating with the microSD card in my weather station tanking with terminal corruption (such that the card's on-board controller permanently locked it read-only). I'm fairly sure this was due to the card being used outside; enclosure aside the thermal cycling of the natural day/night cycle probably wrecked the silicon. I've since replaced it with an industrial-grade …
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This might be a record. Two posts in a month.
Things seem to have calmed down a little so I've had more compute cycles free to do stuff. The last week at work was uncommonly... I don't want to say "uneventful," but "less eventful." This left me a little time to work on some projects that have been hanging fire for the last month or two.
Mom's estate is still in a holding pattern, more or less. I'm still trying to get through to her tax preparer, with no success. I've also reached out to the estate attorney I'm working …
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Here we go again, this time 943 years.
This time, I got nothin'.
Many of the horrors of the last four years are over and not a few of us are sleeping much better, mostly because we have to spend less time keeping our eyes and sensor networks open to catch the latest way that we or people we care about might have the worth of our lives decreased even more. That's not to say that things are perfect, just a couple of points better for more people. The covid-19 plague is still on, unfortunately. Vaccinations are still extremely difficult …
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The archival community has a saying: LOCKSS. Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.
Ultimately, if you trust someone else to hold your data for you there is always a chance that the service can disappear, taking your stuff with it. A notorious case in point is Google - the Big G has terminated so many useful services that there is an online graveyard dedicated to them. Some years ago a company called Code Spaces, which was in pretty much the same business as Github was utterly destroyed in an attack. Whoever cracked them got into their Amazon EC2 control panel left …
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Disclaimer: This post has lots of links to the Adafruit website. There are no referral links, I received no consideration, I just buy parts from there and do cool things with them.
A couple of weeks months ago I did a writeup of a prototype environment monitoring device for my office built out of a Raspberry Pi Zero W and some off the shelf components. In the time since I've found time here and there to work on the embedded version, which doesn't use a full computer system but a microcontroller with just enough functionality to drive a couple of …
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All of March and most of February were spent in lockdown in the Bay Area. I've no idea what's still open or not because the last time I was able to go anywhere outside of the house was two weeks ago. The walk I'd planned for last weekend was cancelled on account of rain, and all things considered I'd rather not risk lowering my immune system a couple of points with cold and damp if I can help it. Plans for the next 12 to 18 months have been unilaterally cancelled. I've already sold my Thotcon 0x0b badge even though …
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You've probably noticed from the datestamps of my last couple of weeks worth of posts that they were autoposted by an agent. This is because work has taken a turn for the extremely busy and I haven't had the time or the energy to write anything in particular; certainly nothing really useful. Rather than wasting everybody's time I decided to relax a bit by picking up an older project, namely a new war-walking rig, and making it work. Since I wrote that original post a few more security updates have come out for my phone and broke not only the …
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Earlier this year I got back into urban hiking by taking up war walking again around home. Not too long after that, I started picking up buzz that upcoming versions of Android are specifically not going to make it easy (or probably possible) to wardrive or war walk by changing how the wifi drivers work. By this, I mean they're making it possible to trigger a wireless scan once every two minutes instead of whenver you ask it to. Unsurprisingly, if you read through that ticket's comments this is going to break a lot of other applications out there, but …
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If you've never been to Makerfaire, it's a rite of passage for geeks of all kinds. In fact, I'd recommend that everyone attend their nearest Mini-Makerfaire at least once because you'll see all manner of weird, wonderful, and inspiring things on display. I ran a table at the one in Silver Spring, Maryland back in 2013 with HacDC and had a ball. Anyway.
I had a chance to attend the original Makerfaire in the Bay Area a few weekends ago and, though it was a significant journey on BART and on a shuttle bus it was well worth it. There …
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3D printers are great for making things, including more of themselves. The first really accessible 3D printer, the RepRap was designed to be buildable from locally sourceable components - metal rods, bolds, screws, and wires, and the rest can be run off on another 3D printer. There is even a variant called the JunkStrap which, as the name implies, involves repurposing electromechanical junk for basic components. There are other useful shop tools which don't necessarily have open source equivalents, though, like laser cutters for precisely cutting, carving, and etching solid materials. Lasers are finicky beasts - they require lots of power, they …
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