While in high school, I bought a really cool rack mount amplifier at a garage sale.  It was branded Queon, and had lots of inputs - it was great.  It was supplemented during my university years with an 8-track player/amp combo, acquired from Value Village.  The Queon met its end when a roommates’ cat knocked over a vessel of water that had been rested on top of the amp.  The 8-track player/amp combo met its end in a post-university move.

I finally moved my weather station from a solder-less breadboard to a prototype board.  I’m actually surprised the breadboard survived last winter.

Until I get around to adding an anemometer and rain gauge, this is probably as far as this project is going to go.

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?