At this year's Blockly Developer's Summit I gave a talk on programming the Apollo Guidance Computer using Blockly. But the real focus of the talk is actually something quite different. "Goto statement considered necessary". Sadly, the microphone didn't pick up the frequent audience laughter and engagement. You can try programming the AGC using Blockly . The system continues to…
These days nearly all computers feature the familiar 'Inverted-T' pattern of cursor keys. It's so simple and ubiquitous that we forget that it took a long time to settle on this pattern. The most obvious pattern is to arrange the cursor keys all four in cardinal directions, like IBM did. Each button is simply in the direction of the arrow. However, this takes up three rows on the…
This is the new lamp at the entrance to my workshop. This lamp has been seven years in the making. It started with Lego's amazing Saturn V model. Sierra and I assembled it back in 2017, with a little help from a tiny Beverly. Despite many requests, Lego does not have a matching launch tower for their Saturn V. My first attempt to make a tower was to use Beverly's large Duplo collection.…
Programming teachers are constantly pushing students to write comments. And then they are inevitably irritated when the students write comments like this: for (var i = 0; i This inevitably leads to a lecture about how comments should be written at a higher level, they serve no purpose if they are just describing the line. Eventually, with experience, programmers start writing useful comments. So…
Poisson distributions appear when events occur randomly, with a uniform probability over time, without a connection to each other. An example is meteors hitting the Earth. They may average four per century, but if one hits this morning, that doesn't affect the chances of another one hitting this afternoon. In such a scenario any given century might have 0 hits, rising in likelihood to 4 hits,…
Recently I needed to ship a robot glockenspiel from the Zurich office to myself at the Boston office for a conference, then back again. When I joined the company eighteen years ago, it would be a simple process: bring the package to the shipping department, fill in a form, done. However, doing so today is a bit different: four separate tickets needed to be filed, ten people were involved in the…
The cheap woodworking lathe I had in California only ran on 120v, so we couldn't bring it with us to Switzerland. Time to buy a new cheap lathe -- but this time for metalworking. The one I chose cost $150, is made by Xendoll, and can be obtained from AliExpress. It's got ... character. Despite its flaws, it did the job and I'm happy.
Switzerland has an awful lot of trains. From the world's longest rail tunnel, [?] to the world's longest passenger train, [?] trains are everywhere. It's almost as bad as the infestation on the Island of Sodor. A steam train periodically runs from Zurich up the Sihl valley and back. It runs on the last Sunday of the month from April to October, with a special train on the first…
The La Salle Causeway lift bridge was a 100 year old bridge in Kingston, Ontario. When I was 11 or 12 I spent many hours at the bridge, drawing it, hanging out with the bridgemaster, and learning how this giant machine worked. This bridge helped inspire a lifetime of engineering. A couple of years ago on a visit to Kingston I took this video of it opening. At the time nobody knew that its days…
Every year I create a video of Beverly's day. Previous days were recorded at approximately 1 year , 2 years , 3 years , 4 years , 5 years , 6 years , and 7 years . We traveled to Mexico to watch the total solar eclipse. It was a little cloudy, but still got a great view.
At this year's Blockly Developer's Summit I gave a talk on some of the browser bugs I've had to deal with. Browsers are by-and-large pretty stable these days, but things can get interesting when they go wrong. You may have noticed the giant jump-cut when the topic turned to Internet Explorer. Predictably, the things I said about MSIE were not suitable for Google's YouTube…
Recent events have made it abundantly clear that the United States is not a good place to raise a young girl. To that end, I started researching alternatives, compiling a detailed speadsheet of virtually every country. After a month of research I determined that Switzerland was the best country in the world for people who like to make spreadsheets. The move was challenging. Google transfered my…
Enjoy this glockenspiel which may be programmed by anyone on the Internet. I've been working this project on and off over the past three years. The hardware and the software are all open source. To try it for yourself, go to glockenspiel.appspot.com . For the next week the glockenspiel will be live-streaming from our home. Feel free to play music! Try not to annoy our cat too much. Update: We…
I picked up a great pair of TELEMAX 5 binoculars at a neighbourhood garage sale for about $20. The image quality is really impressive. The only problem is that there aren't any caps to protect the optics. So I designed some. For the past 15 years I've been using SketchUp for 3D design. While it is great at building an object from scratch, it is nearly impossible to go back and revise an…
We have a number of plugs that stick out of the wall inconveniently. One of them is a power cord plugged into a socket behind the kitchen sink. Ideally I'd replace them with a 90° plug. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, nobody sells J-type 90° plugs (other than this monstrosity ). There are however lots of straight plugs available that can serve as organ donors. [Edit: An astute reader…
Every year I create a video of Beverly's day. Previous days were recorded at approximately 1 year , 2 years , 3 years , 4 years , 5 years , and 6 years . We recorded a nice hike from Felsenegg to Uetliberg.
While exploring our rather disorganized collection of family photos I found eight boxes of old slides. To make them accessible they needed to be transferred into digital photos. My setup uses two phones (one as a backlight, one as a camera), a bunch of Beverly's Lego, and some basic photo editing software (Google Photos). The lower light box section is made of white Lego bricks to maximize…
This blog has routinely featured wood working, metal working, and laser cutting, yet for some reason 3D printing has been absent. It's not deliberate. I 3D print a lot of things, but they tend to be smaller projects. So here's a roundup of some recent original prints: I picked up a used christmas tree stand for $1. It was cheap because the pressure pads that clamp onto the tree were…
There is a roll of tape. The tape is 100 meters long when unrolled. When rolled up, the outer diameter is 10 cm, and the inner diameter is 5 cm. How thick is the tape? If this sounds like fun, stop reading here and work it out yourself. Otherwise, here's my sample solution, followed by ChatGPT's "solution" and some of Google Bard's opinions. First let's calculate the side…
We used to store kitchen knives using magnets under the counter top. This worked great most of the time, but occasionally when removing one it would hook its neighbour, resulting in a cascading shower of knives. So let's try a knife block instead. Here's a short video of building ours. Here's the SketchUp CAD file . Now that you've watched the video, let's address the…