GLA I – The building of a multi-touch table

September 20th, 2012

The GLA I (Glassomium one) is still a work in progress, but it’s so exciting seeing it come alive! The mirror mounts and camera still need to be put in place, the back needs to be covered, the IR lights need to be installed, a power supply circuitry needs to be built, fans need to be added and a few other minor details need to be taken care of. During the summer I came up with the design, then through the ACM […]

The making of: Arduino controlled blinds with music

August 3rd, 2012

Everyday I have to deal with something way more challenging than discovering an off-by-one bug in a messy 2k lines source and that’s waking up. I love to sleep, what can I say. But a month ago I finally decided that my every morning agony had to stop and that there must have been a way to wake up in a pleasant way. So I decided to brainstorm on a few ideas. For sure I wanted music to wake me up, not an […]

Don’t let your Playbook fall below 1% battery… or just don’t buy one.

July 25th, 2012

Do you like my charger for the Playbook? No, it’s not because I lost the original, neither because I have so much free time that I’d rather take apart my tablet instead of buying a replacement cable. It’s because some engineer thought it would be clever to require at least 1 or 2% of battery left to start the charging process. Now that doesn’t make sense at all. Seriously? I haven’t used/charged my playbook in a month, so there’s no […]

Make a remotely controlled media player out of your home server

January 21st, 2012

If you have a spare old computer and electricity bills don’t worry you so much, what do you do? I decided to use mine as my media streaming server. I put my favorite music and movies onto it and initially I simply streamed them to the Wii in my living room and to my laptop. After a while I realized that when I’m cooking I also like to listen to my music (or web radio). So here came the idea […]

Arduino, why didn’t we meet before? My first basic light show.

December 16th, 2011

So lately I’ve been taking some introductory classes that are part of my Electrical Engineering minor and I have to say that they turned out to be quite boring and never deviated from the typical “looking at graphs on the oscilloscope and calculating values on circuit diagrams”. Yet the subject is extremely interesting (and fun to play with), so I started reading on my own. I was particularly interested to read about programmable micro controllers, so I couldn’t wait much […]

How to remove ads from your ad supported Kindle 4 and Kindle Touch for free

December 4th, 2011

Amazon’s Kindle 4 comes in two flavors, one that is ad supported ($79) and one that isn’t ($109, price difference of $30). If you have the ad supported one, at any point in time Amazon allows you to pay the difference of $30 and remove the ads. In this article I will explain not only how you can remove the ads at no cost, but also how you can replace them with your own screensaver images. Very cool stuff! This […]