I thought it would be fun to setup a prop on my porch for Halloween that did more than just sit there. Of course I came up with the idea very late and so this whole thing was cobbled together in just an hour or two. Looking around my house at a ton of the gadgets I had the idea of putting a Jack-o-lantern on the porch that I could control the light in. Searching the internet for scary Halloween sounds caused things to quickly evolve into adding motion sensors, controlling a couple of lights,...

In order to shoot the Halloween greeter video I needed something stable to hold the iPhone. The best way to hold a camera stable is with a tripod, but the iPhone doesn't have a built-in way to mount to a tripod, and neither does my case. I did a few searches to get ideas and saw lots of crazy contraptions using suction cups, 3D-Printed things, piles of stuff picked up from the hardware store, and other crazy things. The biggest thing they had in common was they were designed to work only...

Last week after a meeting in Sunnyvale I took a trip over to WeirdStuff Warehouse . This place is great, they have all kinds of obsolete things to ogle, make fun of, and buy for cheap. One of the things they had was an old HP DesignJet 488CA that takes E size 36" wide paper, with the bonus roll feeder, cart, and paper catcher. They let me plug it in to see that it at least powers up and I bought it and took it home, hoping I could get it up and running. HP DesignJet 488CA After...

During the last week or so I've been having a lot of problems with my two security cameras. For a couple of years I've been using a Windows XP box running WebcamXP with 2 USB video capture devices and a couple of outdoor cameras. It's worked well enough, but now all of a sudden it will disconnect one camera or more commonly, switch one camera into a 320x240 picture. Sometimes rebooting helps, sometimes it takes a few reboots. Today however no matter what I do I can't get it to...

Saturday morning I jumped in the Magnum to go to the grocery store. I started it up and went to put it into reverse and the shifter wouldn't budge. I tried a few things to free it like rocking the car and pulling harder on the shifter but I didn't want to break it. I tried pushing the secret pink release inside the cover, nothing. Fine, I'll just take the Ranger instead. But the battery in the Ranger was dead! "Of course." No problem, I can jump start it with the jump...