Archive for the ‘entertainment’ Category
it’s another cool video by OK Go (“End Love”)
June 29th, 2010
They do most of their videos in a single take. This video is a single take alright, but it was an all-nighter.
Posted in 
LEGO builders; is there anything they can’t do?
June 3rd, 2010
You can watch the video on YouTube by clicking this link. YouTube user horseattack wrote this about the video:
“Lego felt tip 110″ printer connected to an Apple Mac. This is not mindstorms, I designed/built/coded it all from scratch including analog motor electronics, sensors and printer driver, the USB interface uses a “wiring” board.
FAQ: Track name? “Christopher and Raphael just popper Shinichi Osawa distortion disco edit”
FAQ: How long did this take? Hard to say, maybe 3 weeks working evenings.
FAQ: Just a remake of the 1092a? No, I’d never seen the 1092a until now. However some of the parts came from a 8094 kit amongst others many years ago. It is made to my own design, but I acknolwedge influences and the great work of the official lego designers !
FAQ: Does this use mindstorms? Nope, wiring demo board + homemade analog electronics and sensors.
FAQ: DPI? Dots per inch? Approx 75 DPI
FAQ: PPM? Pages per minute? Maybe 1 is pushing it, I sped things up a little in the video editing to keep it interesting to watch
FAQ: Helvetica? Yes of course, respect to those who noticed
FAQ: Full color version/more colours? Originally I was going to do 3 colour version, but I had to simplify as only have 4 lego motors.
FAQ: Open source, schematics etc? Yes, I’ll try to get around to this soon.
FAQ: Wrote your own driver? Yes, how sad is that!!
FAQ: Are? you using some sort of MCU demo board(the black pcb)? Yes. [1] http://wiring.org.co/hardware/
FAQ: re: Mac vs PC abuse? Video not meant as a Mac advert and I’m sorry if the Apple logo offends anyone. I just find them easier to use.
FAQ: Felt tip damage drying up? Yes this is a problem, but one felt tip usually lasts for quite a few pages.
FAQ: Felt tip auto-capping? Nope, sorry.
FAQ: Sensor info: Horizontal positioning using homemade shaft encoder? (black/white rotating lego squares you see in the vid) with a SY-CR102 photo reflector from Maplins, (only £0.89 or $1.30). This is into a sampled analog input as I couldn’t get full enough saturation to trigger the ext interrupt pins. There are also push buttons built into lego bricks for left and right end stop detection.
R.I.P. Gary Coleman (1968-2010)
May 30th, 2010
Gary Coleman has died at age 42. He was just a little bit older than me, and I grew up watching him grow up on TV. He wasn’t a great actor, and he had a lot of personal problems, from what I’ve read in the news and seen on the web, he seemed like he was always trying to do better.
Tags: it’s baseball season
April 21st, 2010
Both my kids have birthdays that fall close to the start of baseball season, so this year, I baked cupcakes for them and decorated them like baseballs.
We haven’t made it to a game yet, but I think that I’ll have a chance to take them to a game during the Bisons’ next home stand. I love watching Bisons games.
The cupcakes are made with yellow cake mix with vanilla frosting, and once I frosted them, I dipped them into a bowl of sweetened coconut flakes (which adhered to the frosting). Then I used a tube of red frosting to draw on the lacing so that they look like baseballs.
The trouble with all these cupcakes is that I like eating them. I gave up eating cheezborgors, but that’s easy to keep up, because there are no cheezborgors in my house, and I’ve got a half dozen leftover cupcakes sitting right there, kept fresh in their shiny zip-lock baggies…. Mmmm….
