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Cheddar Bacon Ranch Wreath

I have invented the greatest thing ever: the bacon-cheddar-ranch cheese-wreath. It’s like a cheese-ball, but with more surface area for bacony goodness.

Covid Movie Reviews Part 2

What do you do when your family has Covid and you're are stuck in the basement so you don't get it? Watch more movies obviously.

Watercoolers are an anti-pattern

In the “post”-Covid world, a lot of companies are forcing employees back to the office with the justification that remote work is missing the “important” hallway and watercooler meetings.

Covid Movie Reviews

What do you do when you have Covid and are stuck in the basement for three weeks? Take Paxlovid and watch movies obviously.

Premiere Movie Script Library

While I was looking for a nice reading copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark I
discovered an old series of screenplays called the Premiere Movie Script Library.
The defunct Premiere magazine 
published this series of screenplays of popular and classic movies. I was
disappointed to find no information about the series on the web, so I thought I’d put together
what I found. 
…

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Credits - All Seasons Synced

YouTube commenters have asked, so here are the combined credits for Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine. Like with
 TNG the credits are synced around the logo. 
 
 
 

 Deep Space Nine famously changed its theme song between seasons three and four.
I’ve represented this by putting the early season theme in the left channel and
the later seasons’ theme in the…

Star Trek: The Next Generation Credits - All Seasons Synced

A while back I was watching a lot of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
As the cast changes over the show’s seven seasons, the opening credits also
change and I wondered if I could sync the credits together to visualize how the
changes worked. 
 
 
 

 Finding a point to sync the videos was difficult. After trying a few different
places I ended up…

New Year, New Blog

After seven years of Wordpress, it’s time for a change. Welcome to my new
 Hugo -based blog. It’s static. It’s cool. I probably will
continue to not update it.

Building a better keyboard

I want a better keyboard but my plea to the industry had no effect. Since no one would make one for me I built the keyboard myself. My main goals were: 
 
 Standard split-QWERTY layout mirroring the Microsoft Natural Keyboards 
 No number pad 
 High quality mechanical switches 
 Bluetooth and USB-C connections 
 Plug and play (no-solder) microcontroller replacement 
…

This Old Smart House

Our house is old. City records show it was built in 1910, but that’s just the age the city assigned to all the houses older then that. Our neighbors, who have a house that started life as a mirror image of ours, have found old newspapers in their attic from the 1870s making that our best guess for the age. 
 In some cases having an old house is great: structurally the house is solid. Big…

I Want A Better Keyboard

Over on Hacker News, there is a discussion about Atwood’s new keyboard . It looks nice, but it’s not my ultimate keyboard. So bored rich people out there, build me a better keyboard. 
 




 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 	 
 	
 
 


First, it needs to be…

Adventures in 3D Printing






 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 	 
 	
 First print on the Replicator 2X 
 
 
 


After a long wait, my MakerBot Replicator 2X was finally shipped and came in. I’ve wanted a 3D printer for a long time (going back to the Cupcake days) and only this year was…

ST7565 Success






 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 	 
 	
 
 


After much screwing around, I finally got the ST7565 working with the Arduino Due. The wonderful u8glib recently added support for the Due and had preexisting support for the ST7565.

ST7565 and the Arduino Due

I’ve spent the last several days unsuccessfully trying to get the ST7565 to work with the Arduino Due . I’ve been trying to port ladyada’s ST7565 library to the SAM core without much luck. 
 




 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 	 
 	
 
 


Using the…

Struggles With the Arduino Due

One of the things I knew going into this project was that I wanted the alarm clock to be compatible with Arduino. Ideally I’m going to expose as many of the Arduino’s pins on the final product in an accessible way so people can slap on shields and extend the clock to make it better. 
 This then begs the question: which Arduino? I have both a Uno and a Due . While I like the…

Learning to Solder

One of this things I knew I need to learn to build the world’s best alarm clock was how to solder. And I was right: one of the first things I needed to do was solder wires to the ST7565 display I got from adafruit so I could hook it up to the Arduino at the heart of the clock. 
 Problem 1: I don’t have a soldering iron. Some quick Googling show that there are a lot of cheap…

Alarm Clocks Suck






 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 	 
 	
 Crappy Sony Alarm Clock 
 
 
 


All current alarm clocks suck. Go look at Amazon and see what I mean. The best appear to be the Sony designs, which look unchanged from mid-90s. Piles of buttons, no auto-setting of…