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Month: March 2020

Virtual Tour of the Winchester Mystery House

Virtual Tour of the Winchester Mystery House

Due to the Covid-19 virus, many famous sites are closed – such as the Winchester Mystery House. But now for a limited time, you can take a video tour that is pretty much the same one an actual visitor gets when they visit.

Take the video tour here

The Winchester Mystery House is located in San Jose, California – and has a much storied past. It’s mostly known for it’s sprawling, confusing, and often ghost-rumored history. There was even a recent ghost movie called Winchester.

I’ve taken a tour of the house myself, and found it to be less a den of mystery and ghosts than the somewhat sad reality of a house that was under constant re-construction by a reclusive, eccentric woman that had the very common and superstitious spiritualists beliefs of her era. Combine this with decades of self-ascribed ‘ghost hunters’ and mystics with … shall we say ‘inventive’…re-interpretations of Sara and her house, and you have something that takes a life of it’s own.

The architectural oddities can almost all be attributed the constant additions and renovations – as well as to her health and superstitions. The outside of the house is much more beautiful than the often spartan and sometimes unfinished interiors. The real, original house is the front section, and it was expanded, re-expanded, changed, re-worked, sections torn out, and expanded again. A number of rooms were simply never fully completed – some even sitting with bare plaster lathing. Shockingly, this is especially true in those original front rooms damaged during the great San Francisco earthquake. She got trapped in her room when the door was pinched shut and she simply boarded up the rooms out of fear of going back in them. They sit today with broken, exposed plaster lathing.

Other oddities are very simply explained as modifications when her failing health required changes – like tearing out steep stairs and replacing them with easier stairs. For example, changing out a simple staircase to a long winding one that had 7 bends and 42 steps. This becomes easy to understand for an older woman that’s 4 feet tall and has advanced arthritis. There is an elevator, but the old technology meant it went terribly slow (a minute or more to go one floor). Today people would put in a ramp or a lift chair. Other oddities simply came about from the constant re-construction and whims of a woman that didn’t always finish projects before a new one began.

The famed ‘staircase leading to nowhere’ was often described as being built to confuse spirits. This is pure conjecture by modern ghost hunters as there is nothing in Sara’s writings or stories to suggest that was her goal. Sadly, I think like many things, you get a lot more press from shock value than actual truth. The real truth is that it abuts a garage and was likely part of the carriage house/garage reworks.

But most of all, Sara Winchester was a spiritualist -a superstitious fad popular with many early 1900’s era middle and upper classes. A spiritualist convinced her to keep building her whole life – which lead to a building that was constantly being built, torn down, rebuilt, and put together more like a patchwork quilt than one with any kind of plan. Today, most people would call these beliefs superstitious and the people charlatans; their tricks were much explored and discredited by people like Harry Houdini himself. With all the resources at her disposal, one wonders what good she could have done helping the living over spending those decades following superstitions and hiding from ghosts. Her memory might be completely different today – much like the Gates foundation or the Carnegie libraries that were provided to untold generations.

The fact she added things on wherever and whenever was convenient explains much of the rest. Anyone that’s seen farm out buildings or software projects built this way can tell you that finding doors into walls, stairs that got cut off and go to the ceilings, or exterior windows that now find themselves turned into interior windows are common in these kinds of hap-hazard constructions. And these oddities are very much the exceptions rather than the rule. The majority of the rooms are well constructed and at least partially complete.

While the house is very empty for tourists today – with only a few rooms with furnishings surviving – when she died, it took 8 truckloads a day for 6 1/2 weeks to empty all the furniture and items from the house. Today, we might call this kind of thing ‘hording’.

While definitely a good tour and worth a visit, I think a lot of the ‘mystery’ is generated from conjecture and quacks as there is very little proof of their claims. I honestly left the house feeling quite sad for her and what good she could have done in the world. Instead of a robust life, she lived one of fear, isolation, and superstition.

Walking your dog with a drone

Walking your dog with a drone

With isolation orders spreading around the world, people are staying inside to avoid spreading coronavirus. Some people are coming up with clever ways to avoid catching this disease…even when walking their dogs.

Oregon custom plate search

Oregon custom plate search

Want to get a custom Oregon license plate? This guy made a twitter feed that checks for common and funny words you might want and when they come available.

You can check the availability of your desired vanity plate online here: https://dmv2u.oregon.gov/eServices/_/#1

  1. Look at ‘Vehicle Title & Registration’ section and click ‘Order a new plate’
  2. ‘Custom Plate Search’ section and click ‘Check custom plate availability’
  3. Enter 1 character at a time into the 7 position slots and click search. It will tell you if that is available or not.

Interestingly, even if the plate is available it doesn’t mean you can always get it. All vanity plates must pass through 3 different reviewers independently to make sure you’re not trying to slip something nefarious by them. Also, there are some other limitations:

  • Currently 6 characters is the max and 1 character is the minimum
  • Transliteration happens for the letter O => number 0. i.e. LOOPY == L00PY
  • Just because a plate is available for reservation, doesn’t mean it will be issued. Requests can be denied for a number of reasons.
  • All Oregon Custom Plates go through a panel, of 3 persons (I believe), who review appropriateness of each Custom Plate Request.
  • Just because because a plate configuration isn’t currently restricted doesn’t mean it will pass the review panel.
Sugoi

Sugoi

This has to be one of the best series of Japanese commercials ever. A better story than 80% of current movies and tv shows…

Balancing a bouncing ball

Balancing a bouncing ball

Electron Dust shows off a nifty machine that can bounce a ping pong ball, while keeping it balanced and centered on its moving platform. It uses combination of open-source image processing software and Arduino-controlled stepper motors to work its magic.

It is an arduino project with 120 FPS OpenCV image processing and smooth stepper motor moves. The machine calculates the ball’s 3D position from the image processing data and uses this information to control the orange ping pong ball.

Uses an e-con Systems superb See3CAM_CU135 camera. Find out more about the camera here: https://www.e-consystems.com/4k-usb-c…

This machine requires the following things to work:

  • 1x Teensy 4.0 Microcontroller
  • 4x StepperOnline DM442S stepper motor drivers
  • 4x Nema 17 Stepper Motors with 5:1 planetary gearbox
  • 1x 48V 8A power supply
  • 1x e-con Systems See3CAM_CU135 camera
  • 1x Windows Computer with OpenCV installed on it –

All the parts defined the Fusion360 project – Custom Windows Application (made with Unity). Read more here: https://electrondust.com/2020/03/02/t… Complete code and Fusion360 data on Github: https://github.com/T-Kuhn/HighPrecisi…