Found a new site dedicated to staying in contact with other members of the armed services, Together We Served. I was squid back in the early 1980s, and a brownshoe at that. I’m in the second row from the front, fourth from the left. I am humbled by the privilege to have met and worked with a fantastic group of men.
Crewmembers of HelAntiSubRon Fifteen
To all former and current members of our US Armed Forces, I bid thee fair winds and following seas!
Yeah, yeah. I rarely post. I have a job that keeps me busy flitting about the US from Miami to Syracuse to Seattle to San Diego and most major metros in between.
I now have on order a new toy called a ybox2 and so a new post.
ybox2
LadyAda says it shipped today, so I hope to have it by Saturday. It’s kinda like a Chumby, but mostly not. It’s similar in that it outputs PAL or NTSC composite video to a display using widgets, but not as it doesn’t come with an AC adapter, a display, or a furry cover. Nor are there many widgets as of yet. Hopefully, with time, more will come. But not from me, alas. I took many, many coding courses back in my college daze - assembly, basic, pascal, pl1, fortran, c, and one or two others - but didn’t understand that I needed to focus on becoming fluent in just one, then move on to a new language, one better suited to what I wanted to accomplish. I was young, petulant, foolish, wasteful of time and money, and so cannot code worth a damned in any language. While I’m no longer so young…
I ordered a display, a PSOne screen which runs anywhere from $40 to $100. I considered the Pyle 7″ widescreen which is 2″ larger and more versatile, but settled on the PSOne due to price. Besides, I can hack the PSOne to be portable using ExtremeTech’s tutorial on how to substitute white LEDs for the high voltage backlighting bulb, thus allowing it to run on just 5V. I’ll eventually find an enclosure and drop in a LiPoly battery and charger circuit I got from SparkFun some time ago. I picked up a couple after selling a number of MintyBoosts, deciding to develop a self-contained rechargeable version. However, I gave it second thoughts upon realizing exactly what the warning “Vents with Flame” means after watching this video of a LiPoly pack “venting.” Most decidedly an understatement.
I’ll update after getting it assembled.
UPDATE II: During the original build, I apparently over-torqued the display mounting screws to the point that the plastic cracked. I was up until the wee hours of the morning rebuilding it using a black, brushed aluminum project box I saw on one of M3’s Customized Kits pages. I ordered from Fry’s Electronics. While it looks okay in the photo, I probably should have gone with the silver box as the scars from a clumsy fabricator (that’d be me) are pretty evident. It was a bit more difficult than I anticipated to cut the display slot. If I have time, I’ll stop by RadShack, see if they have black grommet material to cover the rough edges in the display slot and the wiring holes.
After completing the project in Syracuse, I was directed to travel to Wilmington, Delaware. It was such short notice that no flights were available to Philadelphia, just a 30 minute drive from where I needed to be. I’m such the trooper that even though I’d had less than two hours’ sleep, I volunteered to drive five hours it’d take during good weather. Unbeknownst to me there was a fairly severe snow storm headed my way. That five hours turned into an eleven hour battle with the elements, other cars, and ten ton tractor trailers.
I’m in Syracuse to do an E911 WLG swap out - Netra 240s replacing Netra 20s - for AT&T. Got here late (for me) last night, around 10pm. I was routed through Detroit. How do I hate Detroit’s airport? Let me count the ways! There are many, but first and foremost is that of all the connecting flights, not once have I ever gotten where I was going on time. In fact, I’ve missed my connection twice. It’s loud. It’s dirty. It’s convoluted. I hate it.
Lady Ada of Adafruit Industries sold me on yet another kit, the MintyBoost. It’s a USB charging device that fits into an Altoids chewing gum tin.
I’m back on the road again doing TruePosition Enhanced 911 stuffs. Since early ‘04 I’ve been a field test engineer setting up 911 network overlays for Cingular and T-Mobile in South Florida (Miami), Orlando-Tampa, Minnesota, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Oregon, and Washington. Read more »
UPDATE: I’m an idiot. Once I removed the protoshield, I saw that the board has clearly marked these pins as PWM! D’oh! I guess I got too comfortable using the shield and never bothered to actually look at the Diecimila itself.
I’m using this particular prototyping shield (others can be found here, here, here, or here) and ran the tests again on the bare Arduino, but found nothing wrong with the shield. I need to research this to find out why. I’ll update this post when I discover the reason.
TigerHawk rips the NY Times for, yet again, not doing simple research before blathering and making utter fools of themselves. Look, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the run up to the primaries and even less about Mitt Romney, but it is positively moronic to attempt to associate Romney and the phrase “In God We Trust” to McCarthy for at least two reasons: 1) McCarthy was right, there were dozens of communists in the highest levels of US government; and 2) it takes mere seconds to Google “in god we trust history” then select the US Mint hit. Less than half way down the page you’ll find this:
The Congress passed the Act of April 22, 1864. This legislation changed the composition of the one-cent coin and authorized the minting of the two-cent coin. The Mint Director was directed to develop the designs for these coins for final approval of the Secretary. IN GOD WE TRUST first appeared on the 1864 two-cent coin. [emphasis added]
Econ professor Mark Perry, University of Michigan, has on his site this map of the United States. Instead of state names, the name of a nation whose gross domestic product (GDP) is equal to that state’s.
I came to this by way of the sidebar in Coyote Blog, to Houston’s Clear Thinker’s post.
