Category: Random Ramblings

Anything that catches my fancy as a topic I want to cover. Truly random crap.

DIY Signboard

Web server outages suck. Let’s celebrate the Blahg’s return with a DIY LED project – signboard 2. And no, I don’t know what happened to signboard 1 – maybe if you look, you can find it and report back?

signboard.jpgOn this page, I will introduce the electronic signboard with PIC16F84A.

112 LEDs are used for message display and 50 LEDs are used for around.

Latch registers by CPLD are used for the display of the LEDs.

Interesting little project there. I could see spending some time building my own programmable LED board. (via MAKEzine)

[tags]Signboard, DIY, LED, MAKEzine[/tags]

Sumotori

I hadn’t even heard of this game before, but Sumotori looks worth trying just based on these videos and the 96K download size. In fact, if you are still stuck on a 1200 baud modem connection and find 96K too large (psssst – this page is bigger than that), you can instead get a tiny 29K version.

Drunk cubism fighters? Sign me up.

[tags]Sumotori, Gaming, YouTube, Drunken Cubism[/tags]

Wii-remote head-mounted virtual-room tracking

This is simply awesomesauce in a little controller.  While catching up on my Penny-Arcade reading for the day (and by the way, might I recommend the PennyPacker extension to you if you are a Mozilla user), I caught this video of a project to make a head-mounted device to give a user the visual sensation of a truly three-dimensional image on a monitor.

The first minute or so of the video might seem a bit boring, but it’s a setup for a really neat demonstration of the effect of real spatial movement effecting the display.  I tried snagging some images from the video to show the effect, but it’s the motion and not the image that makes the effect so cool.  In motion, parts of the image do appear to stand several feet out from the screen, and moving forward will put you behind those parts of the view so you don’t see them any more.

[tags]Penny Arcade, Head mounted display, 3D enabling technology, Wii, Nintendo, Sensor bar[/tags]

Gordon Freeman calls Coast-to-Coast AM

Man, this is hilarious.  Have you ever listened to the kook-show Coast-to-Coast AM?  Well, listen as Gordon Freeman, of the Black Mesa Research Facility, calls in and shares concerns about a mysterious person at his workplace that he and security-guard buddy Barney call the G-Man.

That’s just rich, isn’t it?

[tags]Gordon Freeman, Barney, Security, GMan, G-Man, Half-Life 2, Coast to Coast[/tags]

More kid pics

huey-and-daniel_zoo2-resize.jpgBecause it’s my web site and I haven’t posted much about my family lately, I think I’ll post more images of my kids. This is another shot from the zoo taken late last summer. You’ll notice that this picture suggests my kids and I went to the zoo without their mother. That’s pretty much how it happens 80+% of the time.

As you could see in the last picture, the boys used to get inside the space behind that totem pole mask in the picture. This visit, there was a new sign (in red behind the littlest one) that asks people to not climb on the totem pole. Guess we’ll not be doing more pictures of them on/in the totem pole.

My kids

Here’s a picture of my two sons taken late this past summer.

huey-and-daniel_zoo-resize.jpg

I realize recently I have very few pictures of my older son.  I’ll be working on rectifying that soon, and will probably share some of the pictures here when I do that.