Articles. About Stuff.

(Late Summer 2019) I wrote previously about my successful animatronic eyes build using some ping pong balls as ’eyes’, which moved around on a rig, each powered by 2 servos, for 2 axes of movement and controlled by an Adafruit Crickit and the Circuit Playground Express [CPE]. It worked well enough and the effect was quite interesting, but for what I wanted - eyes moving in a hood as party of a creepy monster animatronic for Hallowe’en - there were a few drawbacks. I could put the Cricket/CPE behind the eyes and use the onboard LEDs to shine a creepy red light behind them which looked good, but it was difficult to see them under most hood ideas. Also, I could program the ’eyes’ to move in a nice creepy way, but the servo noise was a bit distracting. ...

MiniDV tapes aren’t old in the grand scheme of things, but they’re getting up there. I owned and used a Sony Handycam HC-48 from roughly 2007 to 2010 give or take, getting only about 14 hours of video. I think this is when I found out that as a family, we’re more photo than video oriented. It also dovetailed into smartphone video capabilities ramping up, and for me, action cams. ...

For the last few months, my 5 year old Asus RT-AC68U wi-fi router has been dropping connections. I tried adjusting management channel, checked for local interference in the house or with other wi-fi networks, and eventually did some signal checks with NetSpot running on the Windows 10 laptop. From looking at the NetSpot graphs above for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, it looks like that the whole signal was dropping off a cliff increasingly often, leaving pages not loading and in some cases devices being disconnected. I tried aerial adjustments and other things on the unit, rolling back firmware, doing factory resets, but to no avail. Also the small satellite range extender didn’t seem to help at all. ...

January 2013. That seems like quite a long time ago. In fact, that was pretty much 7 years ago. Certainly life was very different back then. That was the time I’d just built a new PC based around an Intel i5 3470 CPU and an AMD 5750 graphics card. Heady times for sure. Here I am, seven years later looking to do another build, so yes, I feel like I got my moneys worth out of those parts, and as you read this, they are on an auction site, looking for a low end buyer. I did upgrade some parts in the mean time - I added a USB Asus U7 sound card in 2014 to address some bad audio interference I was hearing from the motherboard audio chipset, a new nVidia 1060 6GB graphics card in late 2016, and a new Samsung SSD in 2018. So what we’re really talking about is a new CPU, mobo, memory and boot drive; and a new monitor; and a new cooling fan. ...

I documented a few months ago how we’d been keeping our family photos and short videos in Apple iPhotos and then Photos for years. My issue was that when I actually went to look in the library bundle at the folder structure it was all over the place - different folder structures and naming conventions, whole libraries and their sub directories imported into a single date directory and so on. Basically it seems like they stored photos based on import to library date, rather than the date the photo was taken, and that might be fine for some, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for. There was also that phase where folders were named by event. ...

After a few years on the rather excellent Grav system, I’ve moved brightblack into the Jekyll static site generator. Why so? I like Grav, I really do, but I didn’t use or need most of the functionality, as this site is very simple in layout, it’s just me doing it. As an example, eventually I was putting things together in local text editors - which is more my workflow for most things - and pasting into the Grav editor. That’s not making the most of Grav, and points to a potentially faster method for me. ...

I seem to be running out of Raspberry Pis compared to the number of small projects I’m using them in. As it is, my Pi3 is torn between Kodi/LibreELEC and some animatronic duty and the Pi2 is being used in my wi-fi car which is currently a live project. That’s why at some point I need to buy a Pi4! I also wanted to bring back my Pi-Hole, which used to be on the Pi2. What to do? Well what I’ve done is re-install Raspberry Pi OS Lite and then Pi-Hole on my ancient Pi 1B, and so far it seems to be working fine, no heating or load issues as far as I can tell, so it feels good to get some more functionality out of that. ...

(Summer 2019) For a while I’ve wanted to do a simple animatronic for Halloween. Each year we do a simple setup outside our house for the neighbourhood kids, and each year we try to add to it, usually with some better items we pick up over the year, but I wanted to start adding some home made items, in that spirit of home-made Halloween fare. A couple of years ago I did a head prop I made from a 100yen polystyrene wig stand, first as a ‘grey’ alien head, then I got some latex and a craft knife and made something a little more gory. I quite enjoyed making it and looking at the response it got from both kids and adults, they seemed to be intrigued too. ...

A new page? Damned right. Tech Grunts. Stuff I’ve done in tech in the last quarter. Savour it, because frankly I don’t do enough technical anything out of my job to warrant a page, but here’s some simple bits, which will leave you realising how dull and domestic my life now is, from a certain perspective. Sigh. Home networking. This was actually a bit funny. I was copying some files to the 2011 Mac mini which is currently bolted to the TV (sort of) and also copying the ~100GB of photos on there to the backup server, and thinking. “This seems slow. This could be quicker”. Peering behind the TV, the horrific amount of cabling, under all the dust, was a dear, old friend - my Planex 8 port switching hub. More specifically, my Planex FX-08IMW which is a 100mbps switching hub. That in itself is not a bad thing, and the device is 12 years old, and works so well that I’d completely forgotten about it. More power to it. However, files have gotten bigger, and that photo backup, not to mention GoPro video backup was indeed taking longer and longer, so I went to cost up an upgrade. ...

Off the bat, I’m not a ‘maker’ but I have an interest in that area, and have for a long time had some Raspberry Pis, an Arduino Uno board and some other random things about the place for various small home projects and general tinkering. Here then, I’m going back in time a few years to the Summer of 2016, and the Raspberry Pi wifi robot car I built. It’s not that complicated, and largely was done by following a project guide, and getting components from Adafruit.com. I had a Raspberry Pi 2 kicking around and was looking for something to do with it, and something which my kids could do some thinking around and tinkering with, without it being a simple remote control item. ...