This post is about my attempt at a technological solution to gun problems. I built a working prototype, but ultimately I believe that this is not a solution to the problem of mass shootings. There is no technological solution that will prevent someone who is sufficiently motivated from doing significant harm yet still afford us…
Category: Personal Projects
A Kalahari Christmas
After Erin took me on a ski trip to Salt Lake City for Christmas 2010, I was far behind in the Christmas Karma. For 2011 I planned to take her to a resort in Wisconsin Dells, which is sort of like the Las Vegas of Wisconsin, except with water parks instead of casinos. Of the many resorts,…
Fast Scanner
Since I’m moving in a few months to an apartment of significantly reduced size, I am starting to reduce the size of my collection of stuff. One thing I’ve been carrying around is everything from my college career. I have every syllabus, paper, homework assignment, handout, midterm… in total it was three boxes full of…
Mouse Modding
Last night I made some changes to my mouse; we’ll see if they’re improvements or not. Originally I was dismantling it to clean it. Something had gotten inside the wheel and was causing it to scroll inconsistently. Once I got inside, though, I saw an opportunity to tune it. First was the clicking on the…
Laser Pointer Interface
A while ago I built a computer input device using a laser pointer and regular usb web camera. It was a pretty simple setup, and I used a lot of existing tools as a jumping off point. Here’s a writeup of my work and details for how to replicate it and what I learned. First,…
Broken Car Lock
It’s no secret that I love my car. It’s been extremely dependable, has treated me very well, has a good personality and an adventurous attitude, and doesn’t ask for much (it’s a 2000 Chrysler Neon, and yes, I mean Chrysler). I’ve had it for almost 10 years and put over 100,000 miles on it myself…
Partially Failed Cheesecake
Saturday I had a party for work, so I thought I’d throw together a cheesecake. I used the recipe I’ve used a few times in the past. Better Homes and Garden, by the way. Rather than melt some semi-sweet chocolate, I went instead with a bottle of Hershey chocolate sauce. I was getting to the…
Camera Troubles
Erin handed me a camera a week ago that had gone through some tough times. It had been dropped while on, and the lens assembly was broken and askew. The camera couldn’t recover from it on its own, and so I was brought in to see if I could fix it. Having been able to…
My Empty Cupboards Project
For about a month leading up to my move, I stopped shopping for food. I was trying to clean out the cupboards and start over fresh. It was surprisingly easy. For a long time I was fine with meat from the fridge or freezer, for a few weeks I had fresh vegetables, and I had…
TV Remote Alarm
We had an interesting problem at work. There’s a display in the main lobby of my building that shows the calendar of all the conference rooms and a map showing where they are in the building. It’s pretty handy for visitors and looks really slick. The problem, though, is night. There’s no point in having…