Category: Hobby
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Objet d’art
Not everyone is likely to agree with my assessment of this particular artifact, but in my opinion it is a paragon of industrial design. Perhaps nobody loved the Bell System at the time, but the gear they made (which they owned, and you rented) was made to last for decades, which this example certainly has.…
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Hey! Watch This!
I’ve always enjoyed watches, from the time I was perhaps 10 or so. I remember the first watch I had, which was a men’s watch, was too big for my wrist, and we had to put another hole in the strap. It was an analog watch with day and date display. I think I had…
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The Bug Hunt
A few years ago, someone’s project came up on my Twitter Feed (or elsewhere — it’s been a while, and I don’t remember with certainty) that caught my interest. This happens with an alarming frequency, but most of the time I can stifle the interest sufficiently to avoid ordering all the parts. Our house is…
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EDC
If you weren’t aware EDC stands for Every Day Carry — the things you keep with you all the time so they will be handy. Here’s what I tend to carry on my person (thankfully, my pants have good pockets): Top row includes: Leatherman pocket multi-tool Cash Monogrammed brass money clip (I don’t think it’s…
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Hello, World!
When you start programming, or pick up a new programming language, often the first program you write is referred to as a “Hello, World!” program, because for the most part all you want to do is be able to produce a working program, so printing something like “Hello, World!” to the screen often feels like…
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Whither Weather?
A long, long time ago, we had an amateur weather station (Oregon Scientific WMR-968) at our house. It had a wind vane/anemometer; a rain gauge; an outdoor thermometer/hygrometer; and an indoor thermometer/hygrometer/barometer. It came with a nice LCD display, and all the instruments communicated their data to the display wirelessly. The instruments also had a…
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Glory Days
I never had a Blue Box; never really did any phone hacking (just occasionally helped connect phone lines to different people’s dorm rooms so they could share), but I’ve always loved phone tech. Wired has an article up that reaches back to tell a story of intrigue from the early days of phone hacking.
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Winter Hobbies
During the good weather, I enjoy riding my bike a bit with my free time, but in the winter I am often de-motivated. That makes it a good time to focus on one of my other hobbies: electronics. I had a pretty fruitful weekend (so far!) on the electronics front. For Christmas, I had bought…
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Sign Switcher
For our church pageant, we retold the Christmas story in the guise of a Christmas Trivia game show. There was going to be a person responsible for holding up signs like “Applause!” etc. but I thought to myself, “I have some scrolling LED signs. I bet with a little effort, I can build/program a device…
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Useful
On Thursday (2 days ago) I ordered an electronics prototyping kit based around an Atmel ATmega8U2 microcontroller. The kit is called an Arduino, and I ordered it from Adafruit Industries (funny name, I know), and paid for UPS ground shipping. I’m glad I didn’t pay for 2-day or 3-day “Priority” shipping, because it arrived Friday,…