I got a new mic: The Snowball. It’s pretty slick.
There I Fixed It: pop filter
Link - Audio hosted on archive.org
LED Latte version 2.0 (pronounced ][) is complete! This new version uses brighter colored LEDs and plugs into the wall to provide 15 volts of coffee-flavored lighting. Forged in the fires of the CCCKC labs. Instructions are below the pictures.
Instructions
Supplies
- 12 4watt LEDs
- 4 1kOhm resistors (brown black red)
- 1 small coffee cup and lid
- A 15-16 volt DC power supply
Steps
- Test the voltage of your power supply using a multimeter. The power supply I found said it was 12volts, but really put out 15 volts.
- Connect four LEDs and one resistor in series (daisy-chained).
- Make two more sets of the four LED and resistor circuit.
- Connect the three sets together in parallel. That is, connect all three positive ends and all three negative ends. The result should be one positive and one negative connection.
- Test everything by connecting the positive and negative ends to your power supply.
- Configure inside the coffee cup and seal the lid.
- Done
Photos from the perilous voyage, in a cave 20 floors below sea level; hundreds of miles below the Earth’s crust.
Are you:
- A pedestrian looking for a stylish, easy to carry safety device?
- A motorist wanting to turn heads with the contents of your cup holder?
- A raver barista?
Then you need LED Latte! LED latte fits in your hand, your cup holder or your mouth* to provide countless hours of multi-colored enjoyment. Thanks to the CCCKC cave for providing the parts (I beg forgiveness).
*Warning: Do not consume LED Latte.
“Careful, the LEDs you’re about to enjoy are extremely awesome.”
The Red Ring of Death
My XBox suffered the Red Ring of Death last week and is now a brick. Microsoft fixes the RRoD for free by sending the customer a pre-paid UPS label to ship in the defective unit for a replacement. Being somewhat disappointing with the less than two year lifespan of my 360 (my SNES from 1991 still works), I decided to send Microsoft a subtle “eff you” for rushing their product to market without first QA-ing it back to the stone-age:
At this point I have lost track of all the projects of people document long tours across the US, Asia, Europe, etc…which is great! The fact that so many people are embarking on remarkable journeys by bike makes me a happy person. Nick Hand is the latest rider that has caught my attention: www.slowcoast.co.uk/. His ride, which benefits Parkinson’s Disease research, tours the coast of England visiting local artisans to document their trade. His “soundslides” section of the site are quite enjoyable. Hope you enjoy them as well.
Now that the first week has passed I can feel myself settling into a routine, which makes this all seem more real. At the begginning no propane meant no hot water and no stove to cook on. 2in x 4in x 2in blocks of reuse lumber make for reasonable cooking coals and an iron pan ideal for grilling veg. An unidentified leak in the water line meant little water use, though without the propane there would only be cold shower in a box barely tall enough to fit my 6′2″ frame. Of course the refrigerator also runs on propane, so I found myself walking aimlessly across the ranch in the dark for those midnight munchies to another cooler where I temporarily kept my rations. And yes, in these conditions food becomes rations.
Waiting for the coals to build
Now, the propane is full and with it I can now cook food instead of rations on a stove instead of coals. And munchies now only require slipping out of my sleeping bag and across the room instead of across the ranch. The water is to be fixed in the next couple days and at last I will be able to take a warm shower, as cramped as it may be.
Mornings before work I sit by the window in a coffee shoppe on Main St. in Half Moon Bay, a block from the feed store. Here, I enjoy my Sumatra Blend at McCoffee as I slowly acquaint myself with the locals as they begin to recognize my face and my unhealthy consumption of caffine, at least two refills of the Sumatra.
With each visit I see a woman talking to the owner, who nods to her ramblings with a forced smile. Later she rumages through the recycled newspapers with loose sense of intent. Occasionally while at work or waiting for the bus I see her wondering around with recycled newsprint overfilling her large purse.
Yesterday, I completed my traing by demonstrating that I can manage to operate the forklift without toppling pallets of feed and hay. There is not much to the training at the feed store other than learning the various feeds and their appropriate uses. I must say, though, it seems with each rancher I discuss feed with I am given a differing opinion from the last. Nan told me from the start that every horseman has an opinion on every equine topic…and everyone of them is right. So, I’ve simply settled on spouting off alfalfa, oat, mollasses, etc portions to each question related to feed. This feed comes in the form of pellets and is only intended to be a supplement to the traditional feed. At the ranch most of the horses are content with grass hay in the morning and oat hay in the evening. For the horses that need a little extra protein we toss in a half to full flake of alfalfa.
For the first week my feet were constantly damp and I found myself changing socks throughout the day. My hiking shoes are not exactly ideal for this line of work and yesterday I purchased a pair of boots and my feet are now dry. It feels a bit strange to walk around with boots on my feet, especially with the extra 2″ it adds to my height, while at the same time it is comforting. When I put on my boots this morning it became part of my routine, and with each crunching step on the gravel I feel more at home on the ranch.
I had a hard time finding a Pitchfork schedule that was either visual or in chronological order, so I entered all of the acts into a new google calendar for all to see. The embedded list is below and a more graphical screenshot is here (the gcal API doesn’t have a provision for embedding a single day’s calendar). I’m not sure how long each act will go so I just entered the start time and left about an hour for each.
This is the first in a series of posts on, you guessed it, Open Source Geography.
My occupation in the GIS (geographic information systems) world, and especially my esposure to high-end, very expensive proprietary software, has really piqued my interest in free, open source and online resources for putting information in a geographic context. There’s much headway to be made by the small group of innovative programmers and geographers in this area, but there’s already a ton of great stuff to play with and add content to.
The first site in this series is Wikimapia. Combining google maps with a neat little wiki system, Wikimapia allows users to map any common feature and add a short description and some metadata. Just like Wikipedia, registered users can edit existing entries and add comments. Exploring the map is fast and intuitive and it seems like new features are added and tweaked fairly regularly.
Wikimapia screenshot - Millennium Park, Chicago
Wikimapia does a nice job of turning making the act of “mapping” a place an unintimidating and pretty intuitive job - something traditional GIS applications have absolutely failed at. Given, Wikimapia’s user-generated data isn’t going to be used for citing a dam or conducting complex resource analysis, but it wasn’t really intended to. At its most optimistic, Wikimapia organizes all kinds of diffuse location-based knowledge floating around in the population and displays it in a familiar and accessible way. If nothing else, it’s a great way for uninitiated geographers to get a feel for how geographic information is created and displayed. Hopefully Google is watching and incorporating the high-quality user-generated data into its own products. Following the success of its social approach to populating Google Earth with 3D buildings using SketchUp, I can’t see why that wouldn’t happen.
I’d recommend giving Wikimapia a spin. Add a couple of features around your home or register and edit something.
I gave this presentation at work to train some engineers on using SVN for version control. SVN is one of my all-time favorite tools to use: A great example of free, open software that does its job well yet leaves ample room for different workflows. Props to my company for letting me release it under Creative Commons!