We recently ventured out and acquired a Canon SELPHY CP1200 printer and the specialized paper and paper cartridge necessary for printing pages of photo stickers, eight identical stickers to a page, similar to the photo stickers produced by Japanese photo-sticker (purikura) booths. No small amount of fiddling with camera settings and a few sticker sheets […]
Lately, I’ve been spending chunks of my free time futzing with cheap microwave doppler radar sensors and soda-can antennas. Last night, it was all about hooking up teensy all-in-one MP3-players and itsy bitsy little OLED screens to Arduino boards. I’ll write more on that soon. Right now, let’s talk about money. Or, rather, the latest […]
A new (minor) personal first: connecting and driving a display, from Arduino. Thanks to Adafruit for the tutorial (Monochrome OLED Breakouts) and open-source libraries I’m using to drive this little 128×64 OLED display. Note: I am a repeat Adafruit customer but purchased these particular displays from a Taobao merchant for a fraction of the Adafruit […]
What do you see when you look at the photo above? If we wanted or needed to take a simply descriptive route, we could say it’s an image of an accumulation of shells in the wrack line at a beach near my home, taken with the camera lens aimed straight out at the sea, with […]
It’s getting to be that time of year again. Hong Kongers and others in this part of the world must buy cheap (but not too cheap!) premium foreign chocolate products to give as gifts. S. and I recently bought a box of Cadbury Glow chocolates, for our own consumption. Verdict: perfectly alright, but neither of […]
Recently, the onset of Hong Kong’s version of winter presented us with another chance to savor the intersection of the city’s near-total lack of residential climate control and its hilariously dysfunctional retail culture. Weather forecasts are calling for lows in the mid-to-low 50s℉ (10-13 or so ℃) in Hong Kong within the next ten days […]
Late last month, after needing to re-do a substandard bit of my own soldering work and finding it quite a challenge to get the solder to melt and flow, I did a of reading and concluded that I ought to try another solder alloy from a different manufacturer and that de-soldering might be a heck […]
Say, that’s a nice mask.
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This post was precipitated by the necessity of testing a twitter cards WordPress plugin and my desire to share a photo of an exceptionally charming fox half-face mask.
One recent weekday night, I sat down assembled the miniature Strandbeest shown above from a kit which I’d purchased a week or two earlier. Here’s a YouTube video about the same (or a very similar) kit. From what I can gather by browsing the official Strandbeest site and webstore, this beest appears to be an […]
The ruddy orange hue of the bellies of the clouds visible over the sea one recent evening was so striking that I had to snap a few photos. Then, I turned one of those images upside down and thought it looked even nicer. And now here it is on this site. In retrospect, I might’ve […]
Above: On this t-shirt, My Neighbor Totoro meets Bioshock and Satsuki becomes a Little Sister standing beside a Big Daddy rather than Totoro. While I have watched Totoro, I hung up my spurs after finishing Super Mario Bros. 3 and haven’t gamed on anything newer than a Super Nintendo system. That being said, never having […]
Last week, I wanted to test-drive one of the 24-LED WS2812 5050 RGB LED rings I’d bought a ways back. Getting it working, controlled by an Arduino board running the Adafruit NeoPixel library, was easy peasy. Except for the soldering step. For reasons that weren’t apparent to me while I was wielding my soldering iron, […]