In an effort to make the best use of my fairly small master bedroom, I designed and built a king size loft bed. It was a few months in the making and took far longer to build and puzzle together than I expected, but I’m glad I did it. The original need was to accommodate two dog crates underneath, and while I was at it I wanted to make space for a small couch to allow for a few more people to watch a movie if the opportunity arises. Maybe some day there will be space for media viewing in the living room, but right now it is full of plants!
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Over the past few months of using Anki consistently, I have been trying to streamline my process of adding and organizing cards, as well as making them somewhat pretty. It has not been easy!
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I had seen and run the defaults command many times on my Macs, usually in the course of following a tutorial to change some behavior Apple had removed the ability to easily modify. I never looked into the command much, but now that I did, I am glad I will be able to automate more of my setup!
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I designed and built an aquarium stand this past week as my first foray into woodworking, and it turned out well. I used about $60 in wood and other materials. I’m now thinking about what else I should build!
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Back in April, I ordered a large magnet to have some fun. I intended to make some sort of art project using pieces of metal suspended by thin strings, but before I got that far, the magnet ended up as a centerpiece on our dining table for most of the year.
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Two winters ago I bought a faux fur coat at a secondhand store The Retique in Milwaukee. I intended to take it to Burning Man in case it got cold. And it did, but I forgot the coat. This year I intend to not forget it, and I also managed to spend some time putting lights into it today. I hope to improve it, but I am documenting it now lest I never get back to this.
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Today I received a newsletter from Mapbox that linked to a tutorial for JavaScript based heatmaps. It looks pretty cool, and I wondered how it might look used to plot runs.
I wrote in November about Runkeeper heatmaps and a method to generate images from run data on a computer …
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Two of my roommates let me know Friday the Internet sucked in the kitchen. I knew this used to be the case, and I suspected our metal framed kitchen table of causing issues, but I thought it was solved.
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We’ve had some network issues lately, so I dug out one of the Raspberry Pi Model Bs I got for free from Adafruit with my first couple of orders in September 2013. I then set it up to do network monitoring using Smokeping. Since it takes 10 or 20 seconds to generate the graphs, I switched to a master-slave setup where the graphs could be generated on my web server, but the measurements taken from the Raspberry Pi on my home network.
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A few weeks ago I got addicted to installing SmartThings in my house, and I wrote of my initial woes getting that set up. This is just to say I managed to get mostly everything working as desired, mostly using the default provided “SmartApps”. I am still having consistent problems …
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Soon after I moved in here last year, there were a number of suspicious incidents in the shared garage. I’m told a rental car was stolen and later found by police, and another time a rummager took some items, including keys to some motorcycles. At least one of the incidents did not involve the door being accidentally left open, but we weren’t sure if they had a key or taped a lock open or something.
Anyway, it seemed some more theft might be imminent, so Paul bought a Nest camera and installed it in the garage. It’s worked pretty well, sending notifications to all our phones on activity in the garage. There are false notifications due to light changes from vehicles driving by, but it’s alerted me to the door being left open many times. One such time, we got the alert in the middle of the night and found a video of someone poking around. He took a few things, but we’re not sure what exactly.
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I finally got a fast Fourier transform working on an Arduino Due! This is not exactly a final product but just a documentation of progress. I am working my way toward beat detection, but am still getting a better feel for FFT processing and observing different types of music and beats. Below is some information about how I got up to speed, and at the end are videos of where I am now.
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I’m just starting to get my feet wet with the Arduino Due, which apparently can read from analog input a hell of a lot faster than the FLORA I have been using for sound reactive projects.
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In a recent journal entry I said I would post more details on the lights I’m using in my apartment. I wanted to spend some more time on the program itself first, but the weekend disappeared too quickly, so that will be an ongoing process. For now, here are some parts lists and information on setting up. I’ll also try to make a similar post for my rainbow spirit hood.
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The super cool lights I set up in my Tokyo apartment made the journey back to the United States, but they’ve been incapacitated after I was tinkering and then got slammed with work for months. I finally sat down to organize some of the code and get the sound reactivity back, and it’s better than ever!
Hardware details in a separate post.
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In the made prep for Burning Man 2014, I went in with more knowledge than I had the year prior; I knew I needed lights. Now I have an ongoing project that is an exercise in programming and attempted durability.
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As explained in my journal, I built my first hackintosh this week. While it’s functional enough, I hope, I still have some potentially major problems with the USB ports, lowering my confidence about using an external drive to store all my data.
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Today marks my first Chrome app release! Embedder is a Chrome packaged app for generating embed codes for Google Photos and Picasa Web Albums content. It is available in the Chrome Web Store.
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One of my work clients is undergoing a migration from Movable Type to WordPress, and the decision was made to change the URL structure of basically every piece of content. While not ideal, this move can make sense, especially if the old structure wasn’t very future proof and started causing duplicate URL conflicts.
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This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. Even cooler than my silly temperature + Fitbit history chart maker app, Weatherbit 
.
Update: Check out an example map from CityStrides.
This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. I figured there must be a web service that creates these based on Runkeeper data, so I Googled "runkeeper heatmap." Apparently there isn't a readymade service, but the top result gave me exactly what I needed to do it myself.
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I don't remember exactly how I came up with this idea, but when I was looking at some D3.js powered charts, I decided to make something so I could play with them. Somehow I chose to try pulling my daily step counts through the Fitbit API and graphing it against temperature data. I found a neat weather data API, Forecast.io, and used my Foursquare history to determine which location to use for weather data each day. Once I got this working, I created a web page so others can create their own graphs. And I called it Weatherbit.
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My mom needed arrange for 18 new employees to meet each other via a series of group sessions of four groups meeting at a time. In order to make each session as long as possible, she needed an efficient set of combinations to have each person meet each other person in as few sessions as possible.
She ended up manually grouping all the employees and came up with a solution that required nine sessions, which is pretty good. But I wrote a program that solves her problem using only eight sessions. And it only takes a few seconds, versus the much longer amount of time to do it manually.
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