mandrake.net

I finally finished off Experiment 15 from the book, and it works pretty well! Of course, I wired one LED backwards (oops), went back and added more slack to a bunch of the wiring so I could test the circuit with the box open diagnosing the problems I was having, and one of the switches (the SPDT) I wired the opposite of how I intended – but hey, it’s a learning process! The alarm now works as anticipated. You can insert any number of magnetic switches to the binding posts on the outside of the box, and if any part of the circuit opens, the alarm throws. There’s a test to the circuit (the left switch, and green LED) and an on/off switch for the alarm itself. I’m pretty pleased that this ended up working.

Of course, I bought the wrong reed switches so I couldn’t actually wire it up if I wanted to (closed window would throw the alarm, oops!)… but it’s still a hair big for my tastes.

So, I bought a Dremel Flex Shaft Attachment off Amazon and it arrived today – Unfortunately I nearly burned out the motor in my dremel 300 because apparently if I screw the attachment all the way onto my dremel it locks in place and it no longer spins. If I loosely attach it it works just fine, however. What a pain – I am debating making the securing of the device a little bit better before using it more…

In other news – my work with experiment 15 continues – it has taken me far longer to build the container for the alarm than it took me to actually make the alarm system work. But a lot of that is because I’m just learning to be handy with tools in order to build containers. See below (or my flickr account, or the area to the right) to take a look at my progress.

I’ve had a lot of crap going on, what with moving offices at work, negotiating contracts, and working my way through learning more electronics. You can probably see more pics to the right. I’ve bought a ton more books, subscribed to Make Magazine, and worked my way through about half of the book I was working through before.

I’ve learned a whole lot, and put together some interesting circuits and made modifications to the ones in the book to diagnose problems that I had with the specs as they were written. The end result has been pretty good so far, and I think that soon I’ll dig back into the arduino fulltime and get to the really cool stuff.

I’ve bought a lot of tools, and keep evolving my work area to suit the way I’m working – it is coming along pretty well, you can see:

… and I like the fact that it’s all nature right out the windows looking up from my workspace. Very soothing.

I know, I haven’t been updating much (read: at all) around here. I should really write more, I enjoy it. Over the last week I’ve spent a lot of my time cleaning the house and reorganizing my office… in order to ramp up for my new hobby, hardware hacking. I’ve been hacking on software for the last 30 years or so, so it’s about time that I learned a little more about the hardware side of things. A couple weeks ago I picked up a fantastic book Make: Electronics – Learning Through Discovery and I’ve been teaching myself basic electronics, picked up a bunch of tools and basic components. Oh, and I’ve also picked up an arduino duemilanove and related accessories and a couple books on hacking with arduino. Very fun so far – you can see some of the pics on the right in my flickr account. Been a hell of a lot of fun so far, and I’ve learned a lot. Only issue is that getting into this stuff requires a lot of up-front costs in terms of tools / hardware / components – especially if you’ve not really been a DIY-er… which I wasn’t.

Hopefully I remember to post more information about the stuff I’ve been working on here, but I’ve got some ideas for some fantastic projects that I plan on starting in the next few weeks.

At work, our warehouse was broken into and they stole ~100k in equipment. Spent my yesterday dealing with the building owner, the security company, the police, and all the various people internal to the company that needed to be kept in the loop. Today looks like it’s going to be more of the same. *sigh*

I’ve been spending some time playing World of Warcraft again lately, which most of you know I spent quite a bit of time playing once upon a time. Doing some light raiding and such, and I decided that this time around I was going to actually write some addons, since I’m a hacker by nature. I bought some books on Lua and writing wow addons… and it turns out to be pretty damn easy. You can see from the gallery I’ve got a few pics of it, and I THINK I’ve just included one here

still a lot of work to go on it, but it is going pretty well so far. It shows some various statistics about the current fight (I’m a tank, so I care about damage being done to me) and various important debuffs on the tanks (used to determine when to taunt, etc).

As my collection now grows to 450+ movies, and 1700+ TV Episodes, I feel compelled to remark on a few of the things I’ve watched recently:

Arrested Development: Somehow I missed this show when it was originally on TV. That’s a shame, because this show was great. Loved it. Highly recommend it to everyone. I’m looking forward to the feature film coming out next year.

Hancock: This movie was doing so well for itself til it took a strange left-turn halfway through. Would have been amusing like the rest of the movie if it didn’t take itself so seriously at that point. Also, the ad thing at the end? WTF.

Miss March: How could I not want to watch a feature film by the people who brought us The Grapist. Unfortunately they left a couple of their cohorts behind and the movie seemed to suffer a little from it. Still pretty amusing, but I can see why this movie didn’t get very good reviews

War, Inc: The sequel-in-essence of Gross Pointe Blank. Very amusing, I enjoyed this quite a bit. It reminded me quite a bit of the book ‘The Futurist’ crossed with GBP.

Equilibrium: Was recommended this by a friend… Had a good start, and an amusing end, but I was relatively checked out during the movie.

I’ve watched a bunch more, but those were ones that were sticking out in my head…

Also, grats to my niece who just got married last weekend, it was a fantastic service and everyone seemed to have a great time I know I did!

Been out of town, went to Pittsburgh, went to Long Island, threw a nice 4th of July party, etc… Also been quite busy building up my media collection, I now have 409 movies ripped, and about 1400 tv shows, with still a big pile of dvds and hddvds to rip sitting on my floor / desk

Also, you can see from the pics on flickr that we started putting shelving up finally. still a lot of work to do on getting these shelves built, as they’re all custom to fit a bizarre corner of the room.

Pretty much done ripping all the blu-rays that I have now, they look pretty good on the appletv, too. Ripping a few more dvds that I found, still building up my collection. Starting to look pretty good, definitely time for me to start acquiring movies en masse again now that I can store them in a more permanent manner without having to leave them out.

Also, I was hoping to get the shelving up in the office this weekend, but I did not. Instead, we mounted a new door to the upstairs bedroom over the garage which goes to a deck that doesn’t exist right now, but will hopefully by summer. We did end up getting all the shelving cut (but not fitted yet) so at least 50% of the work on the shelves is done… I did arrange the office somewhat this weekend however, so it wasn’t a total wash finishing up the office…

Saw my friend Ben last night which was pretty cool – he lives up near New Hampshire so it was quite a trek for him to make it down to the house yesterday. We talked about projects and future projects and various things that have definitely got my brain spinning – I think there may be some free software coming out of some talking we had. Starting to get the itch to do a new project software-wise, so that’s probably good for everybody

In other news – I’m going to be out of town in Pittsburgh next weekend / early next week during YAPC so I will probably not do much on the house for another week or two, since I have to go to Long Island the following weekend.

Welcome to everybody coming to my site from lifehacker and gizmodo! As you can see from the stats I have jumped up a lot in at least my flickr traffic – and my website had quite a boost in traffic, too. Haven’t had this many people paying attention to me since I was releasing software every day. Maybe I should start again to merit this much attention

In other news – I got my first Blu Ray to rip properly, and now I have an HD rip of The Matrix that actually plays on my AppleTV… and looks good! And has 5.1 audio! In case anyone was wondering, the tools I used to get that accomplished: AnyDVD HD, tsMuxer, and Handbrake… it was a 3 stage process, but the end result is nice. I will probably be experimenting with quality to see at what point the appletv flips out, but the size of the rip at 5500 kbps @ 720p was about 6 gigs, which I think is reasonable, though quite a bit larger (50%) than the HD movies I’ve downloaded from the iTunes Music Store… Not that that is a bad thing. Now to repeat this process for the rest of my collection!