Category: Projects
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The Best iMac Cat Bed
If you have an old G3 iMac, the original version with the CRT, and you start looking for ways to reuse it, you’ll soon come across the idea of turning it into a cat bed. Because this is the internet. Having found myself in exactly that position recently, I realized I could create not only…
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A Saturday Morning Fox Hunt
One Friday night in early December, Larry Krainson, W1AST, forwarded an email to the WMAFoxHunters email reflector, announcing that a hidden amateur radio transmitter, or “fox box,” was now active somewhere in the area, waiting for people to find it. The game was afoot. Having put together a tape-measure beam antenna and offset attenuator for…
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New Game: The Mission
I’ve added a new subsection to my main site. If you click the “Adventure” tab at the top of that site, or just follow this direct link, you’ll find yourself drifting through an immense void in a tiny escape pod. Figure out your mission, and your true identity, as you play through this short narrative…
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Building a Custom Keyboard for my AlphaSmart
Continuing my AlphaSmart keyboard infatuation, I decided to fix the one major drawback of the AlphaSmart 3000: the keyboard. While the stock keyboard is usable, it’s not very pleasant, especially if, like me, you’ve been spoiled by using a custom-built mechanical keyboard on a daily basis. In typical internet fashion, others have already gone down…
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Updating an AlphaSmart 3000 on Linux
I recently acquired an AlphaSmart 3000, a brutally simple word processor from the early 2000s. These have surged in popularity in recent years as a distraction-free writing platform, and now that I’ve tried one I’m completely sold on the concept. I won’t repeat all the praise that’s been lavished on these odd little devices (here…
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Restoring My Apple IIc
Sorting through boxes of old technology my dad had cleared out of his basement, I find a half-remembered piece of my childhood. After hauling the grimy components out, arranging them on my workbench, and hooking up the cables, I flip the switch. There’s a beep, then the chugging of an ancient disk drive, and a…
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Amiibo Coasters
We have a Nintendo household, and over the years have accumulated a small collection of the company’s amiibo figurines. If you’re not familiar with them, these are sculpted miniature figures of game characters from various Nintendo franchises, each with a little NFC chip in the base. By holding the figure over the right spot on…
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Releasing a New Game: Less is Morse
A couple of days ago, I released a project I’ve been tinkering with for awhile: a game for teaching and practicing Morse code reception. You can check it out here. It’s certainly different from the previous games I’ve worked on, but it stems from one of my other major hobbies. If you’ve ever wanted to…
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Learning Celestial Navigation
In my continuing effort to acquire miscellaneous skills, I took up celestial navigation a little while ago. Yes, I mean using a sextant, some printed tables, and a rudimentary grasp of the principles of spherical trigonometry to find my position on Earth. It’s unlikely anyone really needs to do this here in the 21st century,…
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A Sturdy Blanket Booth
I’ve been getting into voiceover projects lately, and it’s time I documented my recording setup. For those new to this subject, the key challenge in making high-quality voice recordings is setting up a “treated space.” There’s a whole literature on sound treatment, but the essence of it for this purpose is to kill all echoes…