Category Archives: probably boring

In praise of cattle

Posted on September 12, 2021 by paulwallich

The 16-year-old, who wants a career somewhere in IT, introduced me a while back to the distinction between pets and cattle. When something goes wrong with your pet, you nurse it back to health. When something goes wrong with one … Continue reading →

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Osmotic Bubbles

Posted on March 24, 2021 by paulwallich

Who knew? Our fancy toilet has been leaking for a while, and at long last I decided to do something about it. Which involved disassembling a bunch of toilet-body parts (remember, fancy), turning off the water and extracting the flush … Continue reading →

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Thank you, Electronics Goldmine

Posted on February 9, 2021 by paulwallich

I admit it, I have an addiction to things that call themselves bargains. Down in the basement are multiple cubic feet of random electronic and mechanical components that looked like a good idea or might be useful someday or just … Continue reading →

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Failing to fail

Posted on February 6, 2020 by paulwallich

I’ve been working on and off with Blinkinlabs’ BlinkyTape and pixels, which means also with their nice little app PatternPaint, which lets you create little light shows to download to their LED strands without all the annoying number-fiddling that is … Continue reading →

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In praise of useless information

Posted on December 13, 2019 by paulwallich

About a year ago, back when we were still doing laser night at Local64, C did a nice backlit laser-cut sign for me to put in the door downstairs, using a font that wasn’t properly speaking a stencil but still … Continue reading →

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Vindicated

Posted on June 12, 2018 by paulwallich

About two years ago, for no really good reason, I designed a 3D-printable setup for coupling those standard gearmotors to Lego bricks and axles, and posted it at Youmagine. Hardly anyone liked it or downloaded it. Then, last week, Adafruit, … Continue reading →

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Burning down the house by remote control

Posted on March 9, 2018 by paulwallich

A few weeks ago I blew up my Octoprint installation by adding and deleting too many extensions at the same time. Before reinstalling, I thought it might be a good time to upgrade a bit.  So now there’s a cute … Continue reading →

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Arduino on Windows: not ready for prime time

Posted on July 10, 2017 by paulwallich

I’ve been teaching a little middle-school mobile robot workshop at the 12-year-old’s school, and it’s been a mess. The kids did pretty well assembling the bots and wiring them up, but clearly I needed to spend much more than the … Continue reading →

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A really stupid feature set

Posted on November 14, 2016 by paulwallich

In the process of getting solar panels, we talked ourselves into a heat pump with a couple of split heating/cooling units (gotta find something for all those nice renewable kilowatts to do). But it turns out that Mitsubishi designers are … Continue reading →

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What time is it?

Posted on February 25, 2016 by paulwallich

My next kit build is an Ice Tube clock from Adafruit. Which brings back lots of memories, because one of the first kits I built and wrote about was a nixie clock from Jeff Thomas, who was pretty much the … Continue reading →

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