brainwagon

3D printing is a big topic, and I’ve done a lot of work with this printer. There is no way for a short blog post to completely describe my experience. Consider this post the slimmest introduction about 3D printing, and a request for questions that can help others who are interested in the topic. My […]

I’m tired this morning, because at 2:39AM I was awoken by a magnitude 4.5 earthquake centered in Berkeley. It was over before I gained full consciousness, but it was a pretty sharp series of jolts that rattled the house pretty good. No damage.

If you are like me, you have lots of accounts, and lots of passwords.   Keeping track of them all is a bit of a pain, and it’s increasingly something that you just can’t do with your brain. Several of my accounts now refuse to allow you to use a password which I consider manageable for […]

Over the last year or so, more and more of the video content that I consume is coming by way of streaming over the Internet. Very nearly every device that I have (TV, phones, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV stick, and even my completely unremarkable Blu Ray player) has the ability to use WiFi and […]

For several years, this blog was my major creative outlet on the Internet.  Facebook was founded in February of 2004.  Twitter was founded in March of 2006.  But I was already using WordPress to scribble down random bits of flotsam and jetsam as early as July 21, 2002.    Over the next fifteen years, I’d […]

I set up a plugin so that trying to access http://brainwagon.org should now automatically redirect to use https and the HTTPS protocol.   If anybody has any difficulty with pages, drop me a quick comment here, or a note via twitter (@brainwagon) and I’ll try to see what’s up. Coming soon: my review of Google WiFi, […]

Well, I have decided to do a little well needed maintenance on the blog.  I installed an SSL certificate so my blog will now be available via HTTPS, and played around a bit with a U2F Zero dual factor authentication key.   My goal for the New Year is to try to spend 30 minutes every day working […]

Okay, I bet that hardly anyone comes to this blog anymore.  I’ve been slack, and there hasn’t been any reason other than the simple fact that I haven’t felt motivated to invest the time and energy to talk about any of my projects.  But that doesn’t mean that I have completely halted all attempts at […]

This post is the kind of round about post you get first thing in the morning.   I’ll get to the title question at the end. This morning, I was interested in doing a tiny bit of tinkering. I had found one of these 4 digit 7 segment LED displays while digging around for something […]

A few years ago, I got seriously interested in amateur radio and satellites. I would often haul out a small Yagi antenna and my trusty Kenwood TH-D7A and try to talk to other hams by bouncing signals off the various satellites which acted as amateur radio repeaters. During that time, I wrote a Python version […]

First of all, if anyone is still swinging by this blog, yes, I’m still alive. While I haven’t exactly been prolific in my leisure activities, they haven’t stopped entirely. I worked on some simple embedded development for the hackaday.io 1K code challenge, which you can see on my hackaday.io page, and which hopefully I’ll write […]

I didn’t have a ton of time to tinker when I got home, but I did play a tiny bit more with the WeMos D1 R2. I got it mounted on an old breadboard that I had previously used for Arduino experiments, and then tried reflashing it with new, fresh NodeMCU firmware that I built […]

I just got a trio of WeMos D1 R2 boards from Banggood this morning. I haven’t had a chance to do anything with them yet, other than power one of them on and check it for basic function, but I thought I’d give a brief review. For those of you who maybe haven’t been tracking […]

Okay, I’ve done two, with nearly identical outcomes: a fine network of relatively shallow cracks in the “capsule”, the thin layer of fine particles which encapsulate the core. I’ve been rereading various accounts on how other people make dorodango, and have noticed a couple of differences which I think I am going to test. I […]

Sigh. My second attempt has also cracked, although it is beginning to look pretty shiny.