My sister had added a request for a custom made book bin/shelf to my niece's Wishzilla . She said she needed something to get the books off her bed because it made it hard to sleep on and the books would also fall down between the bed and the wall. This was made to my sister's specifications. It is made of clear pine which she later painted. The design is fairly simple, with the curves and routed profile on the ends. There is no back on it since the wall should keep the books from...

Just received a pair of little wireless Bluetooth serial modules in the mail today. They came from Dealextreme and arrived in just under two weeks which is pretty fast for them. I saw them on reddit in /r/arduino and for under $9 I figured that was a pretty cheap option to tinker with wireless on the Arduino or Teensy. Bluetooth modules with cable They included a cable but to hook to an Arduino I'll need to replace the connectors on one end with something that has pins. To plug into a...

Sometimes it's handy to have a way to add coins by pressing a button, either because your game doesn't have a free play option or because when the game is put in free play it no longer goes into the attract mode. For MAME cabinets it's nice to have a way to get into the MAME menus, add coins, and exit the games. Using the player 1 button as the shift button on an  I-PAC  can often be problematic because sometimes all the players panic to hit start to continue their...

Completed cabinet After moving into our new office it became clear that we needed a cabinet for our kitchen area. The microwave was balanced on top of the mini fridge, and all the kitchen supplies were piled precariously on top of the microwave. The slightest bump would cause the whole pile to come crashing down, often into the garbage can. The space available for the cabinet was very limited. I wanted something counter height but as shallow as I could get away with. I made it 3 feet wide...

Woke up this morning to find one of my servers was under a DDoS attack. Not just any attack, but one that was originating from Microsoft. There were hundreds of requests per second coming from a lot of very very large blocks of IPs from Microsoft. All the requests had one thing in common: they all claimed to be Bing. It created a major load on the server trying to serve that many requests and my only solution was to block all of the IP ranges at the firewall. I'm not sure what Microsoft is...