When you shine a laser on a wall, the laser light seems to sparkle. A weird, shifting pattern of random dots appears in the illuminated spot. When you move your head, the pattern shifts around, seeming to follow you. The random dots seem to get larger as you move further away from them. This weird …
I’m not a big fan of using technology just for the sake of it. We used to have a wireless battery-powered door bell, but it was unreliable: once, a heavy-handed delivery driver pushed in the rubber button so far that it got stuck under the case. Then every caller for a week after that just …
My wife Angela wanted a clock for her birthday where its one and only hand would go around once per year. Sure, I can do that, I said. Angela chose a wall clock to modify, and chose artwork for the dial. I designed and built the circuit, and wrote the microcontroller code. In-circuit programming made …
I just bought a NAS, specifically a Thecus N2200EVO, to do LAN music streaming and some other miscellaneous storage tasks at home. I was just on the verge of disappointment at a few minor niggles, when I discovered the SSH interface. It lets you log in as root. It’s Linux on ARM. All the partitions are …