You might wonder how I got here. I was looking into chiptune music, and a colleague recommended Jeremy Blake’s music, which is indeed awesome if you are into this stuff. I recommend listening to his album called “Superstructures”. This album is created using a tracker, similar to the trackers I used on the Amiga 500 back in the days. My favorites were Protracker and later when I had a MIDI keyboard Octamed. It turns out Jeremy is using a Dirtywave M8, which can also be built using open source software and one of these handheld gaming consoles. Houston we have a project!
Category: Fun
Print posters on a regular printer with Excel.
I recently needed to print out a big schematic diagram of the RX/TX board of a Kenwood TS50 Transceiver. This did not fit on a single piece of paper. Instead of downloading all kinds of crappy tools or uploading the image to some “free” site which is going to use it for whatever they think justifies their definition of “free”, I found out you can do this in Excel. Here’s how:
- Make sure the image you want to print out as a poster has a decent resolution
- Open Excel (maybe this will work in LibreOffice too, I haven’t tested, let me know)
- Drag the image into a new worksheet so that it is top-left of the sheet.
- Open the “Print preview” (the little icon in the bottom left of the window)
- Resize the image so that it covers more than one page, up to the number of pages you’d like the poster to be. Your screen should now look somewhat like this:
- Optional: Adjust the page margins.
- Print.
After this, you’ll be gluing the pages together, but I think you already figured that out beforehand.
Have fun!
iOS7 hidden features
If you’ve just installed iOS7 and like it as much as I do, you are probably interested in all the new features of it, and where to find them. On behalf of Apple, I’ll be happy to point out where all those neat new features are, and share my happiness about this wonderful new magical market-leading mobile OS.
Script: Text-to-NATO-spelling
In my morse training adventure on lcwo.net, I hit a slight bump in the road. At Koch lesson 33 (of 40 lessons total), I can’t seem to copy with 90% accuracy, which is the criterea for moving to the next lesson. See my downward trend here. It is partly because of gradually speeding up the Farnsworth timing from 10wpm to 12wpm so I can be on 20wpm at lesson 40. It is also because of shorter, less focussed daily training sessions, I must confess.
I experimented a bit, and it seems I can recognize characters easily at 37wpm, but I can’t form the words and recognize letters at the same time. More accurately: I can’t seem to be able to remember 3 to 5 characters, form a word and listen to new characters at the same time.
Make your buildserver talk
Have you ever started a shell script which takes a while and you keep monitoring that window because you really need those results? If you are working on a Mac, you can use the Mac’s power of speech to tell you a command is finished. Here’s how:
./yourreallyslowbuild.sh; say "really long build is finished"
With a little curl and shell scripting magic, I told my Mac to constantly monitor our Jenkins buildserver, and bug everybody in the office when the hourly build is failing:
Shoot salt at flies
Lorenzo had a great idea. In stead if being one of those “having fun at the bar” ideas that never actually see the light of day, Lorenzo followed through. Did you ever have that urge to just take a gun and shoot that fly that is constantly buzzing around your head or food? Well now you can. Check out his invention at www.bugasalt.com.
Seeing his gun, I remembered making pea-shooters at high school from a roll of tape and a party balloon. I adjusted the idea for flies (smaller nozzle), and it works beautifully. It only holds one shot, and it looks not nearly as cool as the shotgun idea of Lorenzo, but if you can’t wait to start shooting those flies, here’s how to make your own low-budget, one-shot salt shooter. Enjoy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjI9rTNCRqs]
The Useless Machine
The past year, you may have seen me tweeting some “#secretproject” tweets. Last week, the project was finally revealed, and here is the video, in case you’ve missed it:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nkebVQL5zc]
This is what is known on the internet as a “Useless Machine” or “Leave-me-alone Box”. In case you want to make one, there are plenty of instructions online. I think you can build a basic version of this in about a weekend, and it will cost you less than ten euros.
Catnip Watering System
Here’s a one minute how-to on growing catnip without having to water your plants every day.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jyqNzNeQeE]
Problem Solving for Dummies
Some people can not seperate cause and effect when solving problems, and every now and then you run into a great example.
| If this is your problem… | this is not your solution |
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The towel bin is next to the sink. Why would anyone walk all the way back to the toilet to throw their paper towel in there? Well maybe it’s because they have nowhere to put it? There is a simple solution to solving problems with other people’s behavior, without having to put up signs and making up silly rules:
Make the right thing to do
the easy thing to do.
spacing
The Car Buying Story
Stephen needs a new car. Being dilligent and a car lover, he takes the time to write down all criteria for a great car. When he finishes the list, he notices that the only car matching all his criteria is a Ferrari. Well, he always loved a Ferrari so that makes sense. To make things more realistic he adds another criteria, called “price”, and starts looking for alternatives.