Articles
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White lights what?
December 9, 2014
Read moreAs Richard Masoner / @cyclelicious pointed out today, CA assembly member Kansen Chu (who represents Alviso, Berryessa, Milpitas, Newark, North San Jose, Santa Clara, and South Fremont) introduced a really misguided bill, AB-28, which might go up for vote in early 2015. Below is my attempt at educating the assemblyman and his staff, posted via the really quite convenient “comments to author” tab in the legislative information website.
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Raspberry Pi fun and games
August 29, 2014
Read moreWhile I continue to find good uses for Arduinos and such small microcontrollers, lately I’ve been playing around quite a bit with the Raspberry Pi. I got one last year, and fairly quickly set it up to be my surrogate Dropbox, using BTSync. It has been happily chugging along in that role ever since, connected to a small 100GB hard drive and living on my workbench in the garage.
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Holiday Electrical Successes and Failures
December 28, 2013
Read moreAs I’m rattling around the house the past few days recovering from a really poorly-timed evil cold/cough, not feeling well enough to actually go out and do anything but not so bad that I’m flat-out in bed, I figured I’d catch up on some projects.
My DIY sous-vide setup. 
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Dear Sir
December 3, 2013
Read moreDear Sir,
I’m really sorry for not reacting more maturely to your nearly killing me with your car.
I’m sure that you didn’t intentionally make a right turn into your driveway so close to me that, had I not braked and swerved, I would surely have been crushed under the wheels of your automobile. Probably my suggestion of a creative but improbable use of your presumed anatomical features was uncalled for, and for that I apologize. I was incited to this level of reaction by your assertion that you “didn’t believe you came very close” and that “in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal” to be nearly run over and killed.
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The Decline and Fall of the Cell Phone
December 3, 2013
Read more(Another post from the Wayback machine, found stuck in the blogpost “drafts” - this from two years ago, around this time of year.)
My daughter was cleaning out some of her old toys and stuff (in anticipation, I guess, of the forthcoming Christmas arrival of new toys and stuff) and decided it was time to part with this.
Motorola’s Micro T.A.C. Lite 
I gave her this old phone a few years ago; it had been sitting in my parts bin, and I thought it would make a great “play phone” – and it did, until this year it was outgrown and replaced with a desire for a real cell phone (no, Santa’s definitely not bringing a nine-year-old a cell phone for Christmas…)
Looking at the phone, which represented the state-of-the-art when I bought it back in the early 1990s, I found myself musing on what had happened to cell phones since then.