I've got a $25 Google Play gift card that I'm giving away on Twitter! You can use it towards millions of books, songs, movies, apps, and more from the Google Play store. Redeem on the Web or Android devices, no credit card needed. All you need to do to enter is retweet my message and follow me . At 8pm Pacific tonight I'll pick one random winner from all those who have participated. I can either mail the gift card to the winner (and I'll probably include some vinyl...

As usual I procrastinated on deciding what I wanted to get people for Christmas. By the time I got around to looking at my sister's Wishzilla, there wasn't much left and not much that was very inspirational. I happened to think of looking at her Pinterest instead, and while it was mostly outdoor landscaping ideas, there was just enough there to give me an idea. If you follow me on twitter you probably saw I was messing around with OSB and experimenting with what kind of joinery I could...

I made these gift tags by filling a sheet with "From Chris" in different colors. The colors were picked at random and I staggered and repeated the "From Chris" so that it filled the entire page. I then printed the page on full page label sheets and cut out the lettering. You could cut the letters by hand but I used my vinyl cutter to do it. To keep the letters together as I removed the backing and put them onto the package I used the blue masking tape and didn't...

I've been on a quest to get a working NES emulator on my Raspberry Pi. By working I mean that it can run full screen and has audio that works both on the analog jack and the HDMI out. I tried out a few and while some can at least display the video, none have working audio. There have been reports of people getting MAME and MESS to work on the Raspberry Pi, but in digging into it I found out that it's AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMESS, which are over seven years old. If you're much into...

I was getting ready to do an experiment with the Raspberry Pi and see if I could get it to work with a USB device. I expected that the USB device would probably want a lot of power so I dug out a powered USB 2.0 hub. As I was hooking up the USB hub I was suddenly startled to see the Pi power up! I checked to make sure I hadn't accidentally bumped my power supply and turned it on. The power supply was still off, the power was coming from the USB hub! This seemed really strange to me...