Finding a lost song

Have you ever had a song or a jingle or something from your youth that you couldn't quite place? And you casually look for it occasionally without any success. I have such a song. It has no lyrics, and I could (at best) sort of hum the tune. Music identity apps were not any help. I was certain it was from an old MacAddict CD, or maybe something I found [...]

Read more

Bash Command Prompt Flair on a Mac

A couple of months ago I was going through Apple's Introduction to Swift, wherein they mentioned that Swift's support of unicode allowed that you could use emoji as variable [...]

Weekend Project – Ghost Message!

Many years ago, I thought it'd be a fun idea to have an RGB panel that would display game sprites on demand, connected to the internet, so people could display a sprite on [...]

How I added a custom commentary track to a movie

A couple of years back, one of my favorite podcaster/writer/tour-de-forces, Andy Ihnatko released a commentary track for the 1954 holiday classic White Christmas. It's a [...]

Programming AVRs using a USBasp on a Mac

I loaned out my trusty USBTinyISP to a friend a while back and it was easier to go find an alternative than to coordinate schedules. So I bought a USBasp - another type of [...]

A way to fix Twitter’s Trolling Problem

Leslie Jones, one of the stars of the 2016's Ghostbusters quit twitter last week. She'd been harassed off the platform by trolls with hateful comments. This is not the first [...]

Early Morning Project: RasPi Zero Roomba

I can't sleep. Instead of sleeping, I'm hacking robots. Last year during my winter holiday I wired up a Raspberry Pi to my Roomba, to drive it around and such. More recently I [...]

Programming an nRF52 on a Mac

  Several months ago, I went to promotional conference for a microcontroller on a whim. I'd heard about it the night before, and after some investigation I found out I [...]

Weekend Project: Wireless outlet control

I mentioned briefly in my post about controlling LEDs with my Amazon Echo that I have some wireless outlet switches that I wanted to control. At the time I didn't have a [...]

Weekend Project: Amazon Echo LED Control

As I mentioned last week, I got an Amazon Echo for Christmas. The first time I heard about it I thought "Meh, I already have a phone that does that". Then I heard people [...]

HTTPS; Get yours today!

You've seen it before, that little lock next to the URL on a website. Typically, we associate it with banking, or online shopping, or something else that needs to be [...]