Last winter, I built an SIO2Arduino circuit - it is an adapter, that enables the Atari to use disk images loaded on to a regular SD card.

To the Atari, the SD card works just like a floppy drive.  It’s was built following the instructions found here: http://whizzosoftware.com/sio2arduino/

Our 2016 balcony crop has come in. A bit of a disappointment this year, as we were away for most of August, and were not able to care for the garden as much as we would have liked.

• The corn was harvested too late - by the time we returned home, it was overripe and tasted pretty gross.  It looked OK.
• Our sunflowers and some of our other flowers died
• Some of our carrots fared well and tasted great, but another planter of carrots died
• One of our tomato plants died, the other is still doing well and bearing a couple ripe tomatoes every day

I need a balcony friendly watering system!

My “RetroPie” days of emulating old games on the Raspberry Pi are over - from now on, I can play the real thing.

I was given a friend’s old family computer, an Atari 800XL in 2011.  They still had all the parts, except the custom molded cable that connects the floppy drive to the unit.

Like many buildings, the building we live in has a panel at the main entrance which allows guests to call their hosts.  The guest initiates the call by looking up and dialing a apartment specific buzzer code, and the host can remotely unlock the front door by dialing 9 on their phone.

Occasionally, we’ve had the need for an extra set of keys when guests are visiting.  Given the ubiquity of smart phones, I’ve thought: Wouldn’t it be great to build a web interface which would essentially pick up the phone and dial 9, permitting entrance to the building without a set of keys?

I had fun making light-up Valentine’s Day cards this year.

They’re built from a patterns I found on Sparkfun’s website.

My design is much simpler, and requires fewer parts.

About 15 years ago, a friend of mine informed me that Sensirion would send a sample of one of their temperature sensors to anyone who filled a form on their web page (I’m not sure if this is still the case). After the Sensirion sensor arrived in the mail, I wired it to my PC’s parallel printer port, wrote a little code, and built a simple web page that could display the room temperature.