A while ago I had an idea that goes roughly like this: you open a shop in some location with lots of tourists – maybe in the Mall of America or in a place like Estes Park, CO – the type of place where people are in a spending mood and have those cheesey “Old-Timey [...]

I’ve updated artscii – now faster, with fewer bugs and more features. Get the new version here.

A picture is worth a thousand letters:

Here’s a little something I’ve been working on, a program I call “ARTSCII”.
You can download ARTSCII here. (Windows only for now, sorry)
It’s different from normal ASCII art in a similar way to how my collage software is different from regular photo mosaics.   I went at the problem from a completely different [...]

I had this idea about 5 years ago, from watching a kid assembling train tracks for a toy train.  I thought, what if the train could just “record” the tracks?  You put the train in record-mode, move it around a bit, then it plays that loop back over and over again.
Normally what you should do [...]

I managed to get second place in a Gizmodo mosaic photo contest.  My entry seems to be pretty popular with the commenters too.  As I mentioned with my submission, I wrote the software that created the mosaic.  Also note that the target photo is one of the component photos, so you can search for it [...]

I haven’t posted anything here for over a year and a half. During that time I’ve:

Traveled the world, visiting Holland, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Ecuador (including the Galapagos Islands), Argentina, Chile (I was there for the 8.3 earthquake), England, Turkey,  Egypt (pre-revolution), South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.  Before you [...]

Boost circuits are an awesome way to power microcontrollers. Instead of 4AA batteries or a 9V (usually regulated down to 5V or 3.3V), you just boost one or two AA’s up to your desired voltage.  The only problems are that boost ICs (like these two) are a little expensive once you decide to [...]

I’ve gotten to know the insides of the Xbox 360 Guitar Hero controller quite well, and I’ve decided to share what I know.  Modding these controllers to play songs automatically or do other interesting things seems to be a popular electronics project, and the information below should be helpful for anyone embarking on such an [...]

This is the start of my project blog.
Mostly I intend for this to be a place I can just post about things I’m working on, so that I can say “well here, I wrote a little about it, I’ll send you a link”.
So the posts won’t necessarily follow a specific theme. Some of it [...]