hobbies

Seriously, the last screwdriver bit set you will ever need. I’ve been looking for one of these for a long time. Besides all your standard philips, hex, Torx, and square head bits (in every imaginable size from tiny to huge) it also includes a whole ton of “security” bits, including those for secure hex, secure Torx, those crazy one-way philips-head screws you see in public bathrooms, and a few others I’ve never even seen before.

With this kit, I can take apart just about any piece of electronic hardware (or public bathroom urinal) I’m likely to encounter. And it was only $16 at Fry’s. Definitely a must-have.

This week I finally received my Arduino Starter Pack from Adafruit. The Arduino is an awesome, Open Source, easy to use platform for getting started in embedded programming. It uses the ATMega168 AVR processor, and there are a bunch of great Open Source toolkits for programming and working with the platform. Very fun.

One of the great things about the AdaFruit starter pack is that it comes with the ProtoShield, an easy daughter-board for prototyping. The ProtoShield also comes with two extra LEDs and a spare button you can wire up to use in your projects. They’re great to use as built-in status LEDs or mode buttons.

But there is no documentation anywhere on how to use them. Poking around at the board and looking at the schematic, I eventually figured out that there were just a couple spare holes on the board that you can use to access them. But they don’t lead to any of the onboard headers, so they’re hard to use.

Fortunately I had a left over three-position header from the kit, so I wired it up with jumpers on the underside of the board.

Its ugly, but it works. Now I can just run jumpers to my breadboard to take advantage of them.

Hopefully somebody else will find this useful.

Browsing through Netflix this morning I made an awesome find:

Under “Special Interest” of all places, Netflix has an excellent selection of movies, documentaries, and instructional videos about sailing and racing. Some good picks that I’ve already added to my queue include:

• Sail Trim
• The Shape of Speed (a classic)
• Alinghi: The Inside Story

They’ve also got all the classics like Wind and great instructional videos. Definitely a good find if you’re a boater.

I’ve just returned from my first Washington surfing adventure and, despite its best efforts, the ocean didn’t manage to kill me. But I think I’ve caught the bug. Any sport in which beer drinking and campfire making is so integral is a winner in my book.

Update: I’ve also uploaded my first YouTube video… a short clip of the break from this morning.

Self Portrait Fisheye

Earlier this week I got an awesome new toy… A Peleng 3.5/8mm fisheye lens for my D100. You can take some really fun shots with it and I’ve created a Flickr set for all my fisheye work.