Category Archives: probably boring

Blinkinlabs Rocks

Posted on December 21, 2015 by

I’ve liked Blinkytape ever since it came out. Sure, you can hook up LED strips with an arduino or whatever easily, but sometimes having the controller built into the tape just makes things so much easier no wiring, no mounting, … Continue reading →

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Fat Marvin

Posted on November 5, 2015 by

While I was fiddling with the acceleration settings on my Printrbot JrV2 to get less shaking and perhaps more accuracy, I discovered that reducing the acceleration below 1000 mm/sec^2 pretty reliably caused the machine to stop working  partway through a … Continue reading →

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Sometimes the old ways are best

Posted on October 22, 2015 by

So after HP finally replaced the lemon laptop that I’d gotten this spring with a brand spanking new touchscreen laptop, I waited until I had a few completely open days to do a dual-boot install of ubuntu on it, just … Continue reading →

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You get what you pay for, yet again

Posted on September 17, 2015 by

Dunning and Krueger strike again. I thought I knew the retail PC industry well enough, just because I’ve chatted with so many of the people who invented it. But times have changed. This spring I bought a refurb windows laptop … Continue reading →

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I don’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed

Posted on May 22, 2015 by

I got a refurbished  HP laptop off a discount site a couple months ago, so that I could have a machine for doing hacker/maker stuff away from home (we have a macbook, but it’s flakey with arduinos and only runs … Continue reading →

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Nasty things, adventures

Posted on March 18, 2015 by

When my freshman-year college roommate was in medical school, he told me that surgeons were trained to say “There!” instead of “Oops” when they made a mistake like cutting the wrong organ, so as not to panic everyone around them. … Continue reading →

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What does that button do

Posted on February 26, 2015 by

You know the adage that documentation is to let other people understand how and why you did something, including the other person that is you three months from now? If I had either documented the steps I took to get … Continue reading →

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