About a month ago, I got a pair of security cameras for the house. It took a bit of research to arrive at the right ones. There are a lot of cameras on the market, and most of them are cheap things locked into a vendor ecosystem. It was a bit more expensive, but I … Continue reading Open Architecture Security Cameras
Category: Projects
Experiments in Glass Etching
Every fall I bust out the candlemaking supplies. My skill in that department isn’t going to place my candles in fancy boutiques, but they’re functional enough to provide some warmth and ambience throughout the winter. And every year I hone that skill or broaden the scope to adjacent domains. I’ve mainly stuck to producing container … Continue reading Experiments in Glass Etching
Reduced Drinking with a Victorian Design
In day-to-day life, I drink a lot of water and a lot of tea. If there’s a drink in front of me, I go through it fairly quickly. Unfortunately, this mechanism also applies to alcoholic drinks. At happy hours and out at bars with friends, I can go through quite a number of drinks before … Continue reading Reduced Drinking with a Victorian Design
Video Rekognizer
This year at Amazon’s re:Invent conference, Rekognition premiered as a new service. It is a “deep-learning AI” service that performs image recognition on pictures you show it. It provides labels of objects and concepts it finds in the image. It can also do facial recognition. Hitting the Rekognition API is only a few lines of … Continue reading Video Rekognizer
NES Sprite Display
Let me tell you a little bit about a project I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. The NES Sprite Display is an Arduino-based program to display assorted NES-era game sprites (primarily Super Mario and Zelda) on a large 32×32 LED matrix. It looks a little something like this: The inspiration for this project came … Continue reading NES Sprite Display
Designing Game Show Buzzers
At my workplace, we have all-company Friday lunches. Often we will have a speaker giving a presentation — either someone from within the company or someone from the local community. Once, we had a silly game show. It was successful enough that we brought it back a second time, but this time with a little more … Continue reading Designing Game Show Buzzers
Designing Amazon Web Services Playing Cards
I have used a few of Amazon’s more popular web services, both on the job and on my own. I’ve deployed code to EC2 and Lambda. I’ve synced files and stored backups on S3 and Glacier. I’ve experimented with a few others. But what is WAF? SNS? CloudTrail? I wasn’t even sure I could tell you what those acronyms … Continue reading Designing Amazon Web Services Playing Cards
Building an Unusual Video Game Controller
Every so often I visit OMSI After Dark. These are occasional adults-only evenings that the local science museum puts on. A few months ago the specific After Dark event was about the history of video games. They had (and still do have, for a little while longer) a full exhibit, including some free-play games from Ground … Continue reading Building an Unusual Video Game Controller
Free Paper Cowboy Hats
You may recall my in-real-life trolling stickers and signs — the voice activated paper towel dispenser, the fake power outlet, and the baby changing station — from a previous blog post: I have some new stickers now that are less of a troll and more of a chuckle. Like the previous stickers, I cannot take credit … Continue reading Free Paper Cowboy Hats
Evil Prank Stickers
UPDATE: Since posting this, I have a new design (“Free Paper Cowboy Hat“), plus all of these stickers are now available to purchase. Back in the day, some friends and I would hang out at the late night coffee shop, coming up with all kinds of amazing ideas. Great ideas that could get us … Continue reading Evil Prank Stickers