Category: Technology
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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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Catch-22
Bought a new printer today, to replace the Canon Pixma MP-500 that has been our main family printer for a few years. It started being all squeaky last week, and then it started completely missing horizontal bands. Tried all the head cleaning options, and finally tried removing the cartridges and the printhead and cleaning it […]
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Unfortunately, this CharlieCard isn’t valid for usage with in the system
The MBTA has for years now had available a “stored value” type of card for subway, buses, commuter rail, etc. All very neat. You can go to a vending machine at subway stations and refill the card with cash or use a debit or credit card. It’s even possible to refill them on the bus, […]
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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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Virtually Impossible
I received a new laptop at work, which is always a treat, but also always a pain trying to get the necessary programs and data migrated from the old one to the new one. My usual crutch is to create a “virtual” copy of the old laptop to run on the new one for the […]
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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, […]
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iPad, therefore iAm
I ordered an iPad the first day that Apple was taking orders. I thought (still think…) it will make a great internet appliance for my elderly mom, who has no real experience with computers. Some of those characteristics that are perceived as negatives for techies I think will be positives for her. It has a […]
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It’s been a while
I’m not much of a blogger. Having the summer trip provided me with an endless supply of material to write about. But (my) ordinary life hardly seems worth writing about. Another roadblock for me was that I wanted to “preserve” the trip blog as a sort of whole. And in fits and starts, I have, […]
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Feature Creep
I’ve added a couple of new pages (see the “tabs” along the top) for a photo gallery and a map showing pictures along our route. Enjoy!