brainwagon

I’ve been pondering the classic board game Risk for a bit, and wrote a few chunks of code to help evaluate the odds of dice rolling. Hey, it’s what I do for fun. It’s just how I roll. But I remembered that I had a book somewhere that described a somewhat simplified cousin of the […]

It’s kind of amazing when things that you have been thinking about for a while come together and make you think that the world is trying to tell you something (or perhaps something that you have been trying to tell yourself). A couple of days ago I posted quick link to a short video that […]

Back on May 2, 2024, I was aboard a plane heading toward a real vacation: ten days spent on a cruise and visiting friends and family in Florida. While on the plane, I jotted these notes in Markdown, detailing some of the reasons why I was considering switching my blog (now past twenty years old) […]

I’m a bit of a puzzle fan. My wife and I do a daily gauntlet of puzzles, including Wordle, Quordle, Octordle, Stepdle, Worldle, and the New York Times Crossword Puzzles, both the mini and the regular one. It amounts to about an hour a day, with maybe a bit more on Saturday and Sunday, but […]

Warning, spoilers ahead for those who are still interested in doing the problems themselves. Part 1 of Day 19 was pretty simple, really. You could go ahead and read the specification yourself, but basically you have a relatively large number of text patterns which consist of jumbles of a relatively small number of characters (examples […]

As part of my daily puzzling in December, I’ve been engaged in the Advent of Code 2024 challenge. This is the kind of thing that sane people only do when prepping for job interviews (which I suppose I could be) but I do more for fun, in some hope that I’ll buoy up my ego […]

This will be a bit of a rambling technical ride on a particularly nerdy topic, so buckle up (or bail out now while you still can.) I’ve been interested in Meshtastic for quite some time. It promises to be a decentralized network that allows users to create a mesh network which is independent of any […]

After tinkering with making a 3D stamp yesterday, I thought that maybe I would tinker together a stamp for the QR code that would send you to my resume-ish site mvandewettering.com. I had used the qrcode library in python to generate them before, but it wasn’t clear to me how to use that to generate […]

Apologies to Hermes Conrad. Further apologies to those who won’t get this Futurama quote. During COVID, I spent some time in my shop doing more woodworking. At the time I was trying to figure out how I could sign the work that I did, mostly for fun rather than ego (my woodworking skills remain modest […]

I’ve been an on-and-off enthusiast for 3D printing for quite some time, but in the early days, it wasn’t what I would call “practical”. They used to be fairly unreliable. In particular, my aging Creality CR-10 had difficulties with bed leveling, and while I kept modifying it to add sensors like the BL-Touch to automate […]

So, part of my incentive on working on my WSPR beacon was one of my coworkers decided to try to do some operating from the local Emeryville Marina, and I thought it might be nice to use the opportunity to try to pack up my WSPR setup and see if I could get some spots […]

Okay, it’s not really a “shop”. It’s really just my garage. But then again, it’s hardly ever had a car in it in the last two decades, so calling it a garage is perhaps even a bit more of a stretch. But I’m trying to convert it into a place where I don’t mind spending […]

So, last night I didn’t actually get any woodworking done. Carmen actually did more than I did: she took the orbital sander to some (very rough) and cheap fence material that I’m going to use for the slats on the shelving and cleaned them up. They looked much nicer after this process. At just about […]

I got home from work today, and decided that the best way to lower my stress level was to go into the garage and make something. I didn’t really have a project in mind. I’ve been pondering making a drill press table and have been thinking about a couple of design options, some of which […]

Got home from work after seven last night, so didn’t have a ton of time in the workshop. I was also impatient to actually get the parts for my tool caddy actually glued up, so I worked rather more quickly than I should have. I taped the edges, spread some glue, rolled up the sides […]