flipmeacoin.com
A (very long) while ago a bought the flipmeacoin.com domain. For a bit it allowed you to flip a virtual coin (using Threejs & Physijs). […]
Hackaday podcast shout-out
Do you know what I love to do on Saturday mornings? I like to go out on my lonesome and listen to the weekly hackaday.io […]
Slow WordPress (admin) fix
This blog uses WordPress (hosted with GoDaddy on economy Linux something-or-other). At some point, the admin dashboard became intolerably slow. I had been living with […]
Active Ball Joint. Too hard box, for now
I went all gung-ho (from Chinese 工合 …who knew!) into modelling the cross spherical gear (CSG) and monopole gears (MPG) on the ABENICS system. I […]
Euler angles
I’d never come across Euler angles (or noticed them if I had), but they are an(other) way of describing the rotation of a rigid object […]
Active Ball Mechanism Joint – Monopole gear
In this previous post I modelled the cross spherical gear part of a cool joint I found online – you can see a video of […]
Active ball mechanism joint
Came across the video below. Thought it was cool. Cooler to make one though right?! I found the original paper here, which has some great […]
OctoPi plugin to control relays
I started developing a plugin for Octoprint (more specifically Octoprint-on-RPi aka Octopi). It allows you to control relays on a Pi-Plates RELAYplate hat. See here […]
Octopi: If it ain’t broke…
In my last Reprap-Revival related post I went on about upgrading to RPi4 & wifi (from RPi3B & LAN) for Octopi. Subsequently, I have found […]
ESPmDNS: An ESP32 secret (to me anyway)
ESPmDNS enables (Zeroconf/ Bonjour/) Multicast DNS on your ESP32 (and maybe ESP8266? don’t know) microcontroller. Previously I’d been assigning a static address to ESP32 devices […]
Hello Reprap. My old friend.
I watched the video below on DriveTribe and was inspired. The presenter found his first car and has taken it upon himself to revive it […]
Tsunami: Est time of arrival
I live in New Zealand. A while back (March 2021) there were earthquakes in the Pacific which spurred tsunami warnings in NZ. I had vague […]
ESP32 meet Science Journal. Science Journal, meet ESP32
I’ve put together PlatformIO library for connecting ESP32 boards to the Arduino* Science Journal App via BLE (Android / iOS). In my case, the boards […]
I bought 10 ESP32 dev boards off AliExpress.
And now I need to work out what to do with them. Aliexpress link here. Why? I have been playing around with a board I […]
Plot.ly Dash and MQTT
Plot.ly Dash is an opensource Python framework for building web-apps. Pretty good. Check it out. One gotcha to the way Dash is structured is that […]
RobotDyn UNO+WiFi: SoftwareSerial
The RobotDyn board has some DIP switches on, which allow you to UART to either the ESP8266 or ATmega328p, so you can upload code to […]
RobotDyn UNO + ESP8266: AT Mode
This post should probably have a sub-title: The penny drops After a short-lived feeling of victory in this previous post, I set upon trying to […]
RobotDyn UNO + ESP8266
… oh, and USB-TTL CH340G which does the USB communicating with ESP8266. I think you otherwise need to wire something up using one of these […]
Roof survey and Topaz Sharpen AI
When the wind blows in a certain direction our house’s roof groans. Quite unsettling. I thought it was something loose on the roof, which is […]
Corona Bottle Top
My brother used some COVID-time to superpower his garage, finding his DIY inner-zen in the process. To celebrate its completion, I thought I’d make him […]
New life to an old amp
Hopefully, this post will save a few old amps from landfill. There is life in them yet. I bought a Kenwood 3020SE amp when I […]
Drafting Table
I draw (drew) quite a lot at work – facade details and wotnot. My office continually strives for a paperless state so working with pen-and-paper […]
DIY CNC COVID-Recommission
A COVID-project: putting together the out-of-scrap CNC which has sat dismantled in the garage since we moved house. No real hardware upgrades, just making do […]
Why I like open-source
I bit ago I posted about 3d viewer I had written from Plotly Dash. Github user three3 added support for colours on vertices. Legend.
Adobe Premiere Pro: Final Cut
(And a bit of After Effects) See here for the first-cut post. That video was a little rough around the edges so tidied it up […]
Adobe Premiere Pro: First Cut
First-cut of my learning to use Premiere Pro below. I have dabbled with Premiere before, but always kind of danced around getting into it because […]
Autonomous Mapping with Quadcopter: HiveMapper
I have played around with Autodesk’s photogrammetry tool, Recap Photo, in the past (here, here & here). These have been object scans with me walking […]
New Quadcopter
I have dropped my case for renaming to Tessacopter. Quadcopter will do. Zoe got me a DIY race quad, aka THE UNTETHERED a couple of […]
Hard and Slow: Drilling Stainless Steel
I’ve been to Pick-a-Part, to scavenge some replacement wing mirrors for my Subaru Legacy. 100% success on that front. Also grabbed some more VW seat […]
Amazing Spaces Special: An Aircraft Carrier
I started a previous post saying I was not buying a warship. I used a warship (the ill-fated USS Indianapolis) as a head-shot and got […]
Pressure transducer: nervous
I bought a pressure transducer which measures up to 6000psi. The plan is (was?) to fit this to my bottle jack which I reckoned produced […]
The pressure transducer I bought
I bought one of these off AliExpress (the thing in the photo below, not the warship). I thought it would be fun to have a […]
Autodesk Recap
I think I have gone on about Recap before, when making busts of my dog’s head and working out much concrete I needed for a […]
Rayleigh-Plateau Instability: Revisiting my A-Level Physics
To those of you unfamiliar with the UK education system (pre-1998! I think a little different now), A-levels were what you did between the ages […]
Look away, squeamish
Feeling festive pre-Christmas, I decided some olive branches and some pohutukawa logs could become a Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer head Christmas decoration. All was going […]
Website of the week: Dubaifont.com
Website of the day…week…year…or this case Monday evening. Doesn’t matter. Its dubaifont.com My Back story (less interesting) At work, I use Bluebeam Revu a fair […]
G4D: RPi4 and python
I hinted at it before – Python has been somewhat forced upon me. It’s grown on me a little – probably more due to familiarity. […]
Wavefront OBJ importer for plot.ly Dash
To cut a long story short*… for those of you that use (1) Python and (2) plot.ly Dash and I’ve written a package to help […]
Kind of back
So, my last post back in June was me checking out of the ‘give’ experiment. This is me, now, I suppose, checking back in. I […]
Shutdown. The cloud sunk.
I have decided to stop posting to this blog indefinitely. I thought I was doing a good thing but am now unconvinced. I’ll keep it […]
Black body irradiance spectrum
This is WELL beyond my small sphere of understanding but while reading around on solar spectra, I came across the Planck’s law for the theoretical […]
Solar & visible light transmission? PART 1
See this post for why I have developed an interest in this. To start with I got tied up with what radiation the sun was […]
My eyes are burning
As the sun went down last Friday, nerdiness-fuelled distraction at work came in the form of blinding intensity of the reflection coming off Auckland’s newest […]
What was under the magic post?
Not a lot. There was a concrete block (an NZ ‘pile’) which magic-post hovered an inch or so over. So, I thought the job was […]
G4D: Water flow
My gardening for dumdums project has got sidetracked, mostly because it’s coming on to winter in NZ and it rains so much here in winter […]
House foundations: The Magic Post
We bought a new house, a while back now. It has some foundation issues; which we knew about when we bought it. Fixing it all, […]
New Project: Gardening for Dum-Dums, or G4D
New house with a garden. Great, you might think. No. Wrong. Now, this is going to sound a little moany, but looking after a garden, […]
Olive Oil: The Trees
Our new house has two olives trees. I heard a StuffYouShouldKnow podcast about olive oil and got excited. “Right”, I thought, “I am going to […]
Cosmetic changes
I came across Wallpaper’s 2019 design awards. Found myself more enamoured the design and styling of website layout, rather than the various awardees. Its a-less-is-more […]
Website of the Week: predictwind
I bought a sailing dinghy. For wind forecasts, I used to go on: walking down to the beach and seeing if it was windy. Rather […]
“Biggest vs largest vs greatest achievement”
In this post, I wrote “biggest achievement”, then double-took myself and wondered whether it ought to be greatest, or largest. Answer, by popular opinion is…greatest […]
The Big Stack Overflow 1000
I hit 1000+ reputation on stack overflow. I feel this is quite an achievement, one of my biggest (or greatest, or largest? Not sure.). I […]
Conductivity of HOT Bathroom Tiles
In “Casting Day Fuzzy Feeling” part 1 I found very hot bathroom tiles conduct electricity, so the ceramic shield that I built for my aluminium […]
Website of the Week: &what;
&what; Or amp-what.com in your browser, if you ever need a character that isn’t on your keyboard. Three things I like about it: No ads, real […]
Casting Day Fuzzy Feeling
So I posted about my ceramic shield. I thought this was a wonderful thing – addressing a flaw in other ‘amateur’. electric furnace designs. I may […]
Casting Day Brown Gas
“What’s that pink gas”, my wife can be heard on video in my last post. I muttered something – to allay fears- but I did […]
Dog’s Head: Casting Day
The time has come – Casting Day. My last post took me to step (9) of the Wikipedia page process for lost wax casting. Now […]
Dog’s Head: Plaster Mould
Making the plaster cast of the to-be-lost wax copy of the dog’s head: This whole process is a bit tedious, to be honest. I am […]
Dog’s Head: Wax Cast. Take 2
So I am using the lost-wax casting to make my aluminium dog’s head. My first crack at making the wax cast was ‘okay’ but there […]
Aluminium Furnace: Some Pics
I have furnace up-and-running, well up-and-heating at least. I have taken it to 800C so far…aluminium melts at c650C. No problems (well one problem, see […]
Graveyard Spiral REDUX
I have access to Adobe Premiere Pro and have always felt a little overwhelmed by it (the software) and, creative-wise, the additional dimensions of time and sound. […]
Quadcopter Crash Landing
For a while, I’ve had my quadcopter up-and-running. I am not the best pilot in the world, but getting better. We are staying at a place […]
Dog’s Head: Furnace Ceramic Shield
To reduce the risk of electrocuting myself, I made a ceramic box to separate the bare-metal and electrically-live heating coil from the inside of my […]
Dog’s Head: Aluminium Furnace Electronics
Quick one – the electronics for my aluminium foundry. AliExpress shopping list was in my last post. A Couple of Progress Photos I got all the […]
Dog’s Head: Aluminium Furnace
The missing bit in my attempts to cast an aluminium dog’s head – melting aluminium. First Plan Make a gas or charcoal powered furnace: youtube […]
Google+ Dried Banana Making Machine
Do you remember when g+ first came out? It was invite only, the next big thing. the Facebook crusher. It still exists, and its still […]
Dog’s Head: Wax Cast. Take 1
I have made the wax cast (which will be ‘lost’ with my lost-waxing). It was pretty successful except it was missing an ear. I just […]
Dog’s Head: Metal Casting – Lost Wax
Another post as part of an ongoing mission to go from a photogrammetric (with Autodesk’s Recap) scan of my dog’s head to an aluminium cast of it, […]
Dog’s Head: Metal Casting Mould by Dissolving ABS Print
A while back I modelled my retard dog’s head with an aim to casting it in metal, somehow. The first attempt was a big fail and […]
Getting Chartered
So, I have put in my application form to be a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and Member of CIBSE. The main meat of the application is the […]
The One Percent: Success
I started this blog/ website (does one still say blog?) with the aim to be part of the One Percent: To give (to the internet) […]
Reversing Camera: The New One (Part 2)
Bit of a pause on the reversing camera for the DIY in-car screen. I managed to crack the touchscreen and had to get a replacement, which […]
DIY In-Car Screen: Extending Raspberry Pi Wifi Antenna.
Just a bit of an update on the in-car entertainment system. I have got it out of the car again – to install the reversing […]
Reprap: Idea to Thing
For all the disdain I throw at my little Reprap (see here, and here), the little machine never ceases to amaze me (when it’s working). The idea […]
Quadcopter vs Drone. A case for the Tessacopter.
An observation (from trying to work out how to build my ‘copter’): They are referred to as Quadcopter or Quads, not drones ( I had ‘drone’ […]
Drone: Flight Controller (Revolt v3)
So my wife got me a drone – it came as a ton of bits. I Googled around but did not really find an all-in […]
Drone: Intro
It was my 38th birthday last week…which I thought meant I’m pretty much I’m halfway there. Not quite. According to this, my estimated expectancy is 99, […]
Oreo Wifi HotSpot App – Using with Trigger
Oreo Wifi HotSpot App – Using with Trigger Pretty easy getting it going on Trigger – just two stages to it (assuming you have installed […]
Carving with CNC
The CNC machine has had a few upgrades since my last post. I will list them at some point. Things now at a pretty good […]
Reversing Camera: The New One (Part 1)
Having pulled the old (analog) camera off my Legacy, its time to install the new one. I bought (what claims to be) a night-vision Rasbpi […]
Reversing Camera: Removing the old one
So today I decided to pull out the old camera from my car, and hopefully use the mount and whatever else, for the new system. My […]
App: Wifi Hot-Spot on Oreo
I rooted my Pixel XL to try and fix the Trigger app’s refusal to turn on wifi hot-spotting automagically when I turn my car on. […]
Unlocking and Rooting Stock Pixel XL
I have done a DIY job on my in-car screen. It has no mobile internet (i.e. it has no SIM card) so the intention was […]
Android and Arduino Code for In-Car Screen
As part of my project trying to do a DIY (Android-based) in-car screen system I’ve decided to use Arduino as the halfway house between hard […]
Subaru Legacy in-Car Screen: What Software?
Continuation of the previous post, which was the equivalent, but for hardware. The finale of this post and the last one is that I ended up […]
Subaru In Car Screen: Kenwood FGZ204F2 Wire Ports
The old screen unit in my car was a Kenwood FGZ204F2 system. It has 4 jacks/harnesses into the back. This post is just the outcome of […]
Subaru Legacy in-Car Screen: What Hardware?
In my last car-related post I skimmed over my DIY touchscreen replacement to the all-in-Japanese AEM/stock system that I’d ripped out. As with all things […]
AliExpress Spinal Surgery
I have just been shopping around on AliExpress for some bits-and-bobs for my DIY in-car screen. The image below flashed into the adverts banner. Ya, I […]
Subaru: New in-car display
Our 2006 Subaru Legacy, when new, must have been the bee’s knee’s for all the electronic gizmos it has. It is crammed with entertainment tech […]
Dog’s Head: Part 2
The end goal of this exercise is to cast, from metal, a bust of my dog’s head in metal: perhaps to use as a coat […]
Dog’s Head
We bought a giraffe head coat hook a while back – not sure why. Its made of cast aluminium. I have since seen the same […]
Nice Words (I liked)
For a while now, whenever I’ve seen a word I liked and not known the meaning of, I’ve looked it up and stuck it on […]
Typo Detection Part VI: End of the comparisons, for now
So, I’ve spent a bit of time comparing my writing’s transition matrix with three classic authors – Hemingway, Baum and Darwin. This, really, was a […]
Typo Detection Part V: Comparing Matrices
In the last couple of posts, I considered whether the Frobenius distance/norm or Pearson correlation coefficient were appropriate ways to compare my 4 POS transition matrices. Also, […]
Typo Detection Part IV: Comparing Matrices with The Pearson coefficient.
I cut the last post, where I was looking at ways to quantify the similarity between two matrices, I cut things short – the post […]
Typo Detection Part III Comparing Matrices with the Vector Distance
In the last typos-detection-posts I worked out the POS transition matrices for 3 classic books, to serve as comparisons of “exemplary writing” to compare to […]
Typo Detection Part II Other Writers
I have been playing with something to try and detect annoying typos. It uses a natural language processor (at the moment I’m using Stanford Parser) to […]
Typo Detection
Typos There is nothing worse than when you spend hours, days (weeks?) writing something and then you revisit it and find it peppered with dumb, […]
(Grrrrr!)eprap Pololu Driver Upgrade
The (Driver) Issues My Prusa i3 really is now becoming a labour of love, rather than something that will ever be useful. Despite my last bout […]
Subaru: Front Grille GT
Who Needs a Front Grille Badge? We do! So in my effort to spruce up my car I came across the S402 Legacy. One of […]
DIY CNC Router – Post 7: (Hot and Melting) Wires
CNC Wiring: What I Thought Was a Good Idea I had neatly done all my wiring using old-style computer serial leads and plugs (technically called […]
Irritating RepRap
The Irritation that is My 3D Printer If I had to write a list of things that I am finding irritating right now, it would […]
Subaru: Sound system upgrade
The OEM speakers and such in my Legacy were not up to much. I took a look at them in the doors and found they […]
Subaru: Decatted Downpipe and ECU ReMap
DeCatted DownPipe So, to try and get a little more oomph from my car, I took my car to SubTech and got the OEM down-pipe […]
Subaru Legacy (to) STi
A while ago we bought a new car – a Subaru Legacy GT-B. It was pretty much right-on-the-money of what we were after, except the sunroof. In […]
DIY CNC Router – Post 6: Stepper motor and driver upgrades
Building a CNC router with absolutely no idea what I am doing (or design plans) from scrap continues to be a crap idea. But I […]
DIY CNC Router – Post 5: Electronics and Software
Just a brief one on what I am used to control my embryonic CNC mill (at this dev stage anyway). It’ll put some context later […]
DIY CNC Router – Post 4: Spindle Power Wiring
The CNC spindle I ordered off AliExpress arrived. It is a little heavier and more industrial than I imagined. As seems to be my modus operandi, I […]
DIY CNC Router – Post 3
My CNC spindle arrived from AliExpress, and I have had it going – but I’ll stick that in a future post (there have been some […]
(Makeup) Table
We’ve had the table in the photo below for a while, so I’m just posting this to preserve, I suppose, the back-stories of a couple of […]
DIY CNC Router – Post 2. Hello AliExpress
I am building my own CNC router – post 1 is here I am at the stage where I am about to get into building […]
Old Trunk to Shelf Unit
So, I found an old trunk in a skip and sawed it in half. With the top half, I made a shoe cupboard – I described […]
DIY CNC Router – Post 1
I thought I might make a CNC machine (about 3 years ago), but got side-tracked. I have recently had a renewed interest: I decided I […]
Health and Safety: Wobbly Skip Conundrum
Intro and Context – a bit on Health and Safety I felt I ought to record this, just for posterity and get it off my […]
Flip-Flops and my Dzhanibekov problem
I walk the dog on the beach – I take my flip-flops off. Why? Somewhat irrelevant to this post, but flip flops may be the […]
Operation Stop-the-Damned-Dog-Jumping-the-Fence
The Issue We got our dog, Honey Doughnut, 2 years or so ago. She was only 6 kg and the size of an aubergine then, […]
Jon Amazing Jokes API (for Magic Mirror)
I built a ‘MagicMirror’ a while back for Zoe. It’s been working well, and I have installed some of the third-party modules: the tides one […]
Double-sided Mirror Spotted in the (Chinese!) Wild
This morning I came back from a one-night-stayover trip to China, to watch a facade being tested. It is a long way to go for […]
Smart(or Magic) Mirror
In my (so far) unsuccessful quest to mirror & control my Android phone on a Raspberry Pi + touchscreen (for my car), I kept on […]
Curtain Wall on The PwC Centre, Christchurch
The PwC Centre is a newly completed office building in Christchurch. The facade is a glazed unitized curtain wall which was made in China and imported […]
(More on the) Reel Mower
We were visiting a friend. They are managing an accommodation property out near Murawai. There was lots of old rusty agricultural hardware littered around the place. One […]
Old Trunk to Shoe Cupboard
An old travelling trunk perched on a pile of crap in a skip is something you shouldn’t really see. It’s sad, particularly on a street […]
Lawn Mower Reel Lamp
I found a rusty old reel – that’s the helical blade bit – a while ago and pondered what to do with it. I gave […]
Subaru Legacy AUX-IN
I have had a great number of fails this summer. It has not been that productive. Pleased with this one though. I managed to get […]
Outdoor Shower: The Pressure Problem
The Success So I have been getting around a 50°C water temperature for solar shower on a good sunny day. It heats up from around […]
Fixing Steering Wheel Control Button
Youtube video below is pretty useful as a starting point – he is replacing the steering wheel. Heed the video author’s advice to disconnect the […]
Legacy GT: It is a B Spec?
We bought a new car. Its a 2006 Subaru Legacy GT spec B 6MT. Trying to find out the exact model of your Japan-import Legacy […]
Barbeque Beer Bread
I didn’t think of this recipe, I cribbed it from this book, but good luck finding that book unless you are in Rarotonga, Cook Islands. […]
Subaru 2006 GT-B Wagon
New Subaru Teething Problems The new car is great, but I shall cut to the chase – there are a few wrinkles to iron out. […]
WeatherBox
WeatherBox Datafeed I added a thermometer to my outdoor solar shower, and a bit more. Table below shows the the most up-to-date data coming out if […]
Reprap Prusa i3 updates
Have made some updates to my DIY printer. Whether all these updates been successful? Jury is out. Octoprint Power Supply Auto-bed levelling Cooling fan Octoprint This […]
Vintage Radio in the Movies
In this post I described how I had done up an old (60s) Philips radio. I was on a plane to Sydney the other day, […]
Franken-bike
For a couple of years, I had two bikes and lots of bike bits in the garage, gathering dust. I decided to roll the bits […]
Outdoor solar shower
]I have built a solar outdoor shower in our back garden – it connects into the outdoor garden mains tap. FYI The Mark I used […]
Day Engine – plan your day away
Day Engine was a web app I created for the 2013 Google Cloud Developers’ Competition. It fared badly in a kind of no-useful-feedback-at-all kind of […]
Vintage Radio
I bought an old radio from the local charity shop – the man in the shop (who, incidentally, is also my neighbour) thought it might […]
Automatic Door Opener Part 2 – Electronics. The Sound Modem
Synopsis I am using an Arduino microcontroller to control DC motor powering the Doggy Door Opener. I might also use the microcontroller to monitor a […]
RepRap Prusa i3
My first exposure to 3d printing was working in the architecture departure at Auckland Uni. I was also working for an engineering consultants at the […]
Automatic Door Opener – Part 1
Introduction We got a dog and with it quite a bit of hassle. Dogs are a hassle. The constant-eating-stuff thing is manageable, and well documented. […]
Design Code Derived Wind Loads vs. CFD – Introduction
I intend this to be a series of posts looking at using computational fluid dynamics to model wind pressures on a building facade for the […]
TwistTable
Introduction A dining table with a touchscreen computer in it always seemed kind of a good idea – I sketched a coffee table with a […]
Mr. HandKey
I had an operation on my right shoulder which put my shoulder in a sling for 3 months. The sling restrained by whole arm to […]
Leak-o-Meter
Our washing machine is rude. Whenever it does something it beeps. The beeps alway sound aggressive – normally a tirade of angry beeps. The most […]