Larger versions on flickr:

I went to a fabulous new year's party:

Click for full flickr set

Since I helped set up and am a regular participant at the space running the party, I had a staff badge, which consisted of a piece of aluminum with a spray-painted logo. I wanted to make mine better.

My Christmas present to Anne's family was to extend their wireless network to the guest house next door. I first tried boosting the power on their existing network, but that wasn't quite enough to push the signal usably into the house.

Click for flickr set

Full size on flickr

Rusty of Hazard Factory did a small welding class this morning. He showed us stick/arc welding, MIG welding, and plasma cutting. I made this... thing.. with the MIG welder.

I (briefly) got a Macintosh Portable to boot and function. It's been living in a garage or an attic for 10+ years, and hasn't successfully booted until just now. I had to swap out the battery pack with an external one, poke around in the guts a bit, and manually trigger the "yes, the battery is installed" switch. Getting software onto it involves hooking up an external USB floppy drive to my "real" Mac, and bouncing in and out of the vMac emulator since Apple distributes a lot of the old Mac software in self-extracting archive format. This means I need a functioning old mac (or emulation thereof) to get the software I need to run an old Mac!

Here are some pictures:

Unfortunately, it's no longer booting. Not sure why. Actually it's no longer powering on at all, whereas at first it at least showed the checkerboard pattern and a mouse cursor.

I hope to get a telnet client installed and hook it up to the internet, either over PPP-over-serial or Ethernet-over-SCSI.

Two weeks ago I reported failure getting the AVR programmed from my new mac. It turns out not to be either a hardware problem or an OS version problem. I grabbed the old binaries from my previous machine, and those worked. (Rosetta is great!)

I've got the accelerometer hooked up to the compass belt, and I'm getting good data from it now. Every update cycle I get a 6-tuple of XYZ data from the magnetometer and from the accelerometer.

I want a high-speed video camera. They're crazy expensive, so obviously the thing to do is to make my own. Granted, this may end up costing just as much, but at least it will be fun. I've started fleshing out the various parts on the project wiki, at High Speed Camera. I think I've identified the image sensor I'll use, the Cypress Semiconductor LUPA-300. It's capable of 640x480 at 250 frames per second. There's an even better one available from Micron that does 1.3 megapixels at 500 fps, but that's trickier to interface to, and substantially more expensive. I'll aim my sights a bit lower for the first go-around.

I've got a new MacBook Pro and I have been unable to get the AVR programmer working with it.

Here's the output from avrdude:

This week I partially re-grouted the tub. It was approximately thrilling as it sounds. Plenty of incentive to get back on the accelerometer so next week doesn't suck like this one did. Sorry guys.