Robotic Etch-a-Sketch
What happens when you combine an Etch-a-Sketch toy screen with the Raspberry Pi? You get Micah Tilton robot Etch-a-Sketch project.
Your bedtime story has been replaced by AI
Do your kids like bedtime stories? Stefano Mazzocchi has put Fably, the AI storytelling companion, on a Raspberry PI Zero.
Just push the button, tell it what kind of story you want, and enjoy the results. So much for bedtime stories with the kids.
This project is open source and you can build one for yourself or run it from your laptop. The project is located here: https://stefanom.github.io/fably/
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Flame throwing robot dog
Throwflame bills the The Thermonator robot as “the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog”. It is now available for purchase for $9,420.
The Thermonator is a quadruped robot with an ARC flamethrower mounted to its back, fueled by gasoline or napalm. It also has LIDAR for mapping and obstacle avoidance, an onboard camera for first person view, and laser sighting.
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Oregon keeps losing population
While other states are recovering from all the things that happened during Covid, Oregon went from being one of the #1 places to move to now one of the 8 states that is now losing population as people move away.
The picture is even a little worse than a one-year metric because this isn’t a one time thing. Oregon, and the city of Portland, has lost population for 3 years running. The state demographers have been using their own numbers and ignoring US Census data; and have been wrong (3 years in a row) saying these were only blips and incorrectly predicting quick rebounds.
Demographers are now starting to sounding economic impact alarm bells and the state faces the possibility of losing a seat in congress. Some have pointed out that this is exactly how rust belts formed in the NE.
Oregon now has the dubious distinction of ending up on a recent Visual Capitalist chart.
MelGeek MojoPad Numpad
MelGeek has created this beautiful numpad that reminds me of some of the cool, clean designs coming from Teenage Engineering.
It looks like it would pairs with their Mojo68 and Mojo84 mechanical keyboards really well.
I’m glad we’re still seeing some beautiful industrial design going on. While Apple has done a good job elevating computing devices, I think we have a TON of room yet to go. I think some of the older pc’s from the 50’s and 60’s were things of beauty we still haven’t reached.
Preserving Floppy disks by reading raw flux data
Tech Tangents talks about how preservationists use tools like GreaseWeasle to back up disks.
It helped me a lot when learning how to back up and write my own disks.
Update: Using a Greaseweasle and a 5.25″ floppy drive turned out to be critical evidence/court records on a nearly 50-year-old floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11.
Using Greaseweazle to make bootable DOS disks
Have written previously about my experiments with the very excellent Greaseweazle; but that was reading things like my old Kings Quest 5.25″ floppy disks from my modern 12th Gen Intel PC running Windows 10.
Recently I acquired some old pc hardware and put together a retro 486-DX pc. To that end, I needed to create a DOS boot disk for this old system. That meant I needed to write a 1.2mb DOS boot disk.
Previously I used some boot disk images to create an old DOS virtual machine running Windows 1.0. For that, I used a bunch of archived boot disks images from WinWorld archive.
But how do I write these little beasts?
I floundered around with greaseweezle’s command line but this guide from Tech Tangents really helped out. There’s clearly a lot more I need to learn, but this got me a bootable 5.25″ 1.2mb floppy disk. I was able to test it on 2 different drives, and both worked. So, that’s pretty sweet!
Greaseweezle command line samples
How to write DOS 6.22 image to a 5.25″ 1.2m floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the cable twist:
gw write --drive b --format ibm.1200 Dos6.22-5.25.img
To write a DOS 3.30 image to a 5.25″ 360k floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the twist:
gw write --drive b --format ibm.360 DOS330-360k.img
Shifting a John Deere 4020
When I was learning to drive tractors, I first learned on a John Deere 720, then on a John Deere 4020
The 4020’s had a synchro-shift transmission that I liked to think had 3 ‘zones’ that consisted of a high/low forward and a reverse. As you moved down the tree, those high/low/reverse combos got faster and faster.
Did you ever drive one? How did you work it out in your head?
Klingons without ridges
Worf: They are Klingons – and it is a long story. We do not discuss it with outsiders.
Reconnecting SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7
How to reconnect your Steelseries headset after swapping it between systems.
Even though this headset is supposed to work without their Nova 7 Bluetooth dongle, I found you had to connect to the system with the dongle first. The buttons you press are also not intuitive so this was very helpful.
- Press and hold the power button 4 seconds on the Nova 7 dongle until it fast blinks
- Press and hold the power button 4 seconds on the headset until it blinks and then connects