Singapore Formula 1 Race. At Night. Tilt-shifted.

Gruber pointed out this absolutely gorgeous set of photos of the recent Singapore Grand Prix Formula One race. As it was the first F-1 race held at...

Hole in Pipe? Remodel 1/2 the House!

At the beginning of the year, we gave our house a colonoscopy to see why the kitchen/laundry drain tended to back up. It didn’t go well. Give...

Compound Miter Saw Table from Recycled Kitchen Cabinets

Let me be frank: Circular saws scare the bejeezus out of me. Always have. Rotating blades of doom ready to swallow a finger in barely a heart be...

info@bulk-mail.org

info@bulk-mail.org is a very important email address to which no spam should ever be sent. Thus, please make sure that you never place info@bulk-ma...

Smoked Tomato/Garlic/Basil/Eggplant Sauce

Update: Just made this again with the final tomatoes of the season. Refined the recipe a bit and produced a sauce that is pretty close to perfec...

Power LEDs from 120 Volts? Sure.

Update: The circuit discussed below is really only acceptable for low power LEDs, such as those in the night light. It will also drive the 10MM LE...

Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii)

Roger was in the front yard with some friends and he yelled “Hey, Dad! A hawk just landed on the tree right over my head!” Sure enough...

Easy Baked/Grilled Chile Rellenos

When we arrived home yesterday, there was a generic USPS flat rate large box. As I wasn’t expecting a package, I had no clue what it might b...

All On One Grill: Cheeseburgers & Grilled Whole Potatoes

When grilling food, I like to try and prepare as much of the cooked foods for a meal on the grill, if possible. It is generally a matter of timin...

The Cobb: Compact, Portable & Versatile Grill

A little over a year ago, I wrote an entry describing a very simple means of producing extremely tasty grilled pork chops. About a month ago, Tom ...

Meet Cody (v2) — One Awesome Dog

Meet Cody. The second Cody dog that my parents have had. Cody is a yellow lab mix of something. She is also completely strange. Of course, most of...

SLR Lenses: Seeing Ghosts

Roger recently turned 8 years old and, of course, I pulled out the camera to document the event and share it with the family. This is a shot of Rog...

Roger’s Geode Collection

This is Roger’s geode collection that he has amassed over the last couple of visits to Missouri. Well, three geodes and one bit of pasta for ...

Paul Jackson and the iPhone’s Camera

Since the iPhone’s release, there has been much criticism of the built in 2.1MP camera. Certainly, there is room for improvement. Personally...

From Piece of Pooh to Beautiful Butterfly…

Meet the juvenile black swallowtail larva (I’m pretty darned sure). This little guy looks like a piece of bird pooh for a reason. Specifical...

Super Duper Macro (Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5X Macro Lens)

Anyone who has had a poke at my photography knows that I totally dig macro photography. I love taking photos of flowers and critters where the ex...

Followup: What is good tequila?

When I posted What is good tequila? I had no idea that it would generate anywhere near the number of comments that it has. Great stuff. Thank you ...

Roger in Red

I have been very very busy working on lots of things that I can’t talk about. Roger is but days away from his 8th birthday. In this photo, h...

Appliance Hell: GE Refrigerator & Samsung Microwave

Recently, we have been experiencing a bit of appliance stupidity in our house. Replacement parts for our refrigerator seem to be a major profit cen...

Aperture: RAW 1.0 vs. 2.0 (Self Portrait in Red)

A couple of days ago as Ben and I were biking into work, we stopped at an intersection and chatted with one of the folk who maintains the stoplight...

Cocktails: Beautifully Designed Mixology Tool

Prior to prohibition in the United States, gathering together in a party atmosphere, collecting fine quality ingredients, and precisely mixing/serv...

Apple Remote: Remote Control Done Right!

This morning, my software update queue was full of goodies. Notably: iTunes 7.7, iPhone 2.0, and an Apple TV software update! And the App Store i...

Apricots Galore (And Muddled Apricot Margarita Recipe)

As my sister so eloquently documented, our Apricot tree has gone completely bonkers this year. The last time I saw an apricot tree produce in thi...

Cactus!

Our neighbor, Ron, gave us a couple of these ball cactus that had sprouted off of a cactus he has had for year. Ron said it had really pretty flo...

Change Your Point of View

Duncan posted a bit of a write up on changing your point of view when taking photos. Specifically, take a typical scene and shoot a picture from s...

George Carlin to Rise from Grave on 7/23/08 at 7:30pm.

Apparently, George Carlin will rise from the dead on 7/23/08 at 7:30pm to entertain audiences one last time. At least, according to TicketMaster (a...

Netflix: Cancelled

I cancelled our Netflix subscription today. In answering their “why terminate service?” survey, it really came down to several reasons....

What is good tequila?

This weblog post is at least a decade in the making. Seriously. I wrote the original version of this sometime in the late ’90s as a mailing...

Morels & Smoked Pork

Things have been a bit quiet around here. I have been a bit distracted over the last week. Today was spent doing a mass amount of yard work; trim...

New Spammy Comment Policy

I am seeing an increasing number of spammy comments that are obviously written by a semi-intelligent human actually responding to the content of th...

One Very Beat PIN-BOT

I recently acquired a new pinball machine. Got it in unrestored condition for a decent price; low enough that I could make my money back and then...

Cannon Multimedia PC: Design Over Usability

From the press release, this device contains features such as “a 28-in-1 media card reader, front IO, USB and fire wire connections, dual NT...

Bubble Fun!

While out and about today, Christine picked up a Turbo Bubble Machine. We tossed the bubble solution into it and set it up on a pot in the middle ...

Shell Script to Control iTunes

For mother’s day, one of my wonderful wife’s requests was to have a bit of a Ms. PacMan marathon. So, out came the ghetto arcade contro...

The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk [TGIMBOEJ]

Over the weekend, I received one (1) box of electronic junk. Not just any box of electronic junk (as I have many of those, as it is), but one Grea...

Fatblogging: Wii Fit @ 238 pounds

Quite a while ago, I wrote about fatblogging and, as of about a year ago, that my attempts to get myself below my then 240+ (247 peak in years past...

5 years @ Apple

Hey! Today is 5/19. Five years ago today, I was sitting in Apple’s employee orientation with a big glass o’ the kool-id in fron...

Yellow Prickly Pear (Opuntia unknown) Blooms

I have always had a soft spot for cactus. They are really quite remarkable plants, after all. A plant that has figured out a way to exist in some ...

American Express Blue

Update: Embedded the BoingBoing TV segment on reading AmEx blue cards. American Express decided to “automatically upgrade” my plebeian...

perpendicunormal

I coined a word today — perpendicunormal. I was trying to describe some of my friends in NYC as “definitely perpendicular to normal...

Wii: Boom Blox

I picked up Boom Blox for the Wii today. Even in playing it for only a bit, it is truly an awesome game. The physics are just flat out fantastic...

Desktop Flame Daffodil

Full size. Desktop works well.

Bay Area Vegetarians

The Bay Area Vegetarians linked to my Maker Faire 2008 post in their summary of their presence at the Maker Faire. Specifically: And then there wer...

Truffle Salt

The Maker Faire is always full of surprises. The fine folks at Far West Fungi had a wonderful display of growing mushrooms, were selling mushroom m...

Maker Faire 2008

Maker Faire 2008 Day One is over and done with. The show feels like it is about twice the size of last year. The scale of awesomeness is definit...

Early Spring Bugs in Missouri

In the forest, the various bugs common to the leafy undercover were waking up, too. This is a red velvet mite (Trombidiidae). They play a critical,...

Last Pinball Factory Around

The New York Times has an awesome article about Gary Stern of Stern Pinball, the last pinball manufacturing company around. This may not be entir...

Early Spring Critters in Missouri

Of course, any time we spend a while visiting my parents in Columbia, Missouri, Roger looks for any and all wild creatures. Within minutes of arriv...

Water & Light

Roger and I (and Christine, for most of the week) have spent the last week in Columbia, Missouri visiting my family In other words, Roger and I hav...

Castle Rock State Park: A Walk in Four Micro-climates

During the first weekend in April 2008, Roger and I headed to Castle Rock State Park for a bit of a walk in the woods. Castle Rock State Park is lo...

Using a Vertical Stack Counter to Debounce Switches

At left is a simple EMSL AtmegaXX8 Target Board (same board I have written about before) 3 bit up/down counter circuit. Push the left button? Count...

Alligator Farm

On Tuesday of our Easter Florida Adventure, we visited the Alligator Farm in St. Augustine, Fl. It was actually a really neat zoo with a real focus...

Critters in Florida!

We are in Florida for Easter, visiting family. Roger, of course, captured a couple of toads and a frog within the first 5 minutes of being here. On...

Fresh Start

So, by now, you are well aware that Sony was charging $150 ($100 for the right version of Vista + $50 for the cleaning service) and that they dropp...

DirecTV: Canceled

Update: Wow! I am surprised by the number of people who have indicated that they have canceled or are canceling their cable/satellite subscription...

Multitasking in the AVR Microcontroller

Well, multitasking would be stretching it… When writing AVR micro-controller code, you typically end up with something like this: int main(v...

Blinking Two LEDs; Bit Manipulation Macros Oh My!

Before dealing with switches and debouncing switches, I wanted to add a second LED to the circuit. Trivial: #include <avr/io.h> #include &#...

Subversion repository for ATmegaXX8 target board hacks

I have created a directory in my public subversion repository for EMSL ATmegaXX8 target board code. http://svn.red-bean.com/bbum/trunk/avr/ATmegaXX8/

AVR: Programming the EMSL Target Board from Mac OS X

The EMSL Target Board is built around the ATmega 168 micro-controller (same controller as the Arduino — which, frankly, I couldn’t care...

AVR: Prototype Board Ready for Prototyping Pinball Flippers

Ben picked up a ton of SIP machine pin sockets from Halted recently. I grabbed about 200 from him and populated my EMSL Atmega target board with en...

A Photo Feed for Apple TV

I went through my Flickr photos and set up a new set called Apple TV. (Pictured is a blossom on my apricot tree. It was covered. Hopefully, the ...

AVR Microcontroller Prototype Board

The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories whipped up an elegant little kit that includes an ATmega168 AVR Micro-controller, 4 or 5 discrete comp...

Daemon (by Leinad Zeraus)

I just finished reading Leinad Zeraus’s book Daemon. In short, it computer oriented, current themed, science fiction that is the polar oppos...

Flower.

How to harvest a turkey.

Update: Seems I ruffled some feathers over on the VegPage.com (free vegan community) web site. A person called “Adam” posted this alon...

Ruffled Feathers.

Seems I ruffled a few feathers in a particular vegan community after they discovered my post about harvesting a turkey. So far, I have been called ...

Walking Sticks

For his fifth birthday, Roger was given a pair of stick bugs (with our permission). Little did any of us know how much stick bugs are the epitome o...

Crabtacular 5: Tequila Mockingcrab

Update: Photos of Crabtacular 5 are being tagged with ‘crabtacular5′ on Flickr. Thanks to Ash Ponders for uploading an awesome set o...

Gardening Season Begins

Or, I should say, Gardening season began in late January, but we are just getting around to starting our gardening in mid February. Roger and I pla...

First Crocus of Spring

Growing up in the midwest, the first sign of spring for me was always the first crocus that I spotted in the yard, typically peeking through the sn...

Water from a Hose

Water from a hose.

Some Can Walk on Water

Some cannot.

Spring Flowers: Thermonuclear Orange Poppy

Roger and I took a walk around the neighborhood today. As we move later in February, the flowers in the bay area are just starting to bloom. Some...

The Cube’s Fatal Flaw

With the recent release of the MacBook Air, there have, of course, been a flurry of reviews and, more relevant to this particular blog post, armcha...

Aperture 2.0 on Shrooms

At left is a big pile of mushrooms that Roger found in our yard after a heavy rain. That rather large pile pretty much shot out of the ground ove...

HD-DVD Month Three: New Levels Of Suck Achieved.

As I have written before, I picked up an HD DVD player as it was the cheapest way to vie the BBC’s The Planet Earth (HD DVD) in full 1080p H...