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 [...]

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Project of the Week: Mini robot

I got my new 3D printer up and running recently. After some tuning, some improving, and some printing of backup parts (an ongoing process, I decided I was confident to move [...]

The three magazines of my life

Print is dead. That's the first thing I think of when I think of magazines. But on reflection, I realize that I've had some special magazines in my life. Special to me, I [...]

Plex, Synology, and the dreaded “Video Unavailable”

Going to skip the usual stuff at the top here and get straight to it1: Plex is a super-cool, easy-to-use, everywhere media server. Lots of people use it, and lots of people [...]

The 2013 Portland Mini MakerFaire

Last year (you may have read), I participated in the Portland Mini MakerFaire. It was great. I absolutely loved sharing and teaching people. This year, I definitely wanted to [...]

10 minutes with Cory Doctorow

This past Wednesday, I had the opportunity to go see Cory Doctorow (arguably my favorite author) on the local stop of his tour for his new book Homeland. He had been generous [...]

Thoughts on Libraries

My wife works at our local public Library. We started visiting there more recently and I was once again struck at the accessibility and amount of information there. For a [...]

It’s a Trap!

For the past few years, my brother and I have been pranking each other a bit when it comes to gifts. It took on a rather peculiar theme a couple of years ago when my brother [...]

Bread

Sometime before Thanksgiving we (Hykel and I) agreed to bring bread to Thanksgiving Dinner. Rolls, specifically. I figured when we'd agreed to it that we would probably just [...]

Star Trek!

I was going to say that this is the nerdiest thing I've done in public in a while. But I was presenting at MakerFaire just a couple of months ago, so I guess not. I [...]

My Perfect Phone

I got my first cell phone in 2005. It was a Nokia candybar identified by some 4 digit number. At the time I carried it along with a Handspring Edge Palm handheld and an iPod [...]