Throughout University, we had these Engineering Design courses, where we would go through a defined process to design something.

In my second year, my team submitted “A System for Maintaining Driver Alertness ”.

I’m not sure where we got the idea, and the solution we proposed was gimmicky, even at the time, but the exercise was more about design process - my team did fine. Imagine my surprise, when I was browsing for something else recently on AliExpress (and on Amazon), that some company builds and sells a device similar to our proposed design.

Six years ago, I built a wifi-controlled pop bottle sailboat. Smartphone control wasn’t great, so I turned my decommissioned weather station into a remote control.

My re-used weather station project board is a homemade Arduino board, with an APC220 transceiver radio. I added two rotary potentiometers for rudder and sail control. I removed the Raspberry Pi in the boat, and connected another APC220 transceiver to the Arduino Uno that controlled the sail and rudder servos.

Ever since I read about the ESP8266 in Make magazine in 2015, I’ve been wanting to build something with it. I picked up a Sparkfun ESP8266 Thing Dev board at Creatron, probably a year ago, and let it gather dust.

Enter 35 degree weather. I have a window air conditioner, that I install in a metal sleeve built into our wall. For some reason, the sleeve is sloped such that water flows INSIDE. When the A/C runs on humid days, the water it collects from dehumidifying can leak inside, creating an unpredictable annoying mess that has to be cleaned up.

This website is running WordPress on an Amazon EC2 instance.

If I were looking to keep a blog, this is not how I would do things, I’d just use a service.  The micro EC2 instance is slow, I have ensure Linux is patched, Wordpress is patched, etc…  But playing around with the server is as much fun as writing the blog.

Here are a few changes to the site recently:

In 2010, I joked “I don’t think any child born in 2010 will get the chance to hear the music of their parent’s youth”, as DRM encumbered media would be unplayable.

Even in 2010, we’d seen Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” music (launched 2004, RIP 2008) not play on Microsoft Zune (launched 2006, RIP 2015).

Today, Microsoft announced that it is revoking the ability to read books purchased on its book store. It is refunding its customers.

My Epson XP-830 started dropping black ink globs on my prints, which would smudge and wreck photos. As I had recently installed $150 worth of ink, I didn’t want to just go out and get a new printer. I also liked the compact format of this printer, and wouldn’t just buy the same one, as this was starting to look like a doorstop after its 2nd set of cartridges. I wasn’t concerned about breaking the printer at this point, because I was ready to throw it out.