Skip to main content

Posts

Halloween Candy Distribution Robot Chute

I am not a hardware guy and my Brooklyn apartment lacks true workshop space but we were able to put together a reasonably well done candy chute robot able to deliver candy directly into Trick-or-Treat's candy bags.  My wife wanted the robot to blink lights and wave an arm. I decided to use a servo motor driven by a Raspberry pi pico running MicroPython. The pico and MicroPython were chosen because I had them already from prior projects with my son.  Legos, chopsticks and leftover screws. Only the best. Cardboard, aluminum foil and Tupperware to protect the electronics. Those are the bags of candy and we managed to go through all of the candy by dark. This is what it looked like up on our balcony. How do you get the candy down to the trick-or-treaters? A dryer duct. Last time we used plastic sheeting and zip ties. The $25 to get a duct was worth it. We tested it with fun sized chocolate, smarties, double bubble gum, skittles and m&ms. The bagged candy, skittles and M&Ms didn

Setting up Twitter Cards in Blogger

There are plenty of blog posts explaining how to add Twitter Card integration to your Blogger posts but I haven't seen any that are written for the newer Blogger UI. The code that does the integration hasn't changed since this article in 2013 , but the steps to add it to your theme have.  If you haven't logged onto Blogger, do so. You should see this panel on your left. Pick "Theme" and you will see something that looks like this on the top portion of your screen. First things first, make a backup. Click on the little arrow If you are using the classic themes, it will look like this.  After clicking on the arrow, pick Backup. Download the file. It's the same for classic themes. Pick download. Save the file somewhere just in case you need to recover your theme. While editing your theme will not destroy any of your pages or posts, it can cause problems for the theme you are using if you make a mistake. If you've spent some time editing your blogroll and cust

Capturing text from any Mac Application into Emacs org-mode with Automator and org-protocol

After decades of using vi and Vim I switched to  Spacemacs  which is an amazing vi keystroke emulation layer running on Emacs and configured with an amazing set of preconfigured layers for different tasks. I decided to give it a try after seeing Org-Mode in action and seeing it was a nice taking system with integrations with almost anything imaginable. A few weeks ago I found out about org-protocol and followed this post  by Jethro on using a bookmarket to capture from the Web to Emacs.  This page assumes a few things You use Emacs on a Mac You are using org and understand how to use capture and capture templates. You need to yank text from random apps into Emacs You don't need to be using Spacemacs and this should work with any install of Emacs that supports org, org-capture and org-protocol. Creating Automator Action Start Automator. It's this icon. I'm guessing many people have had this for years and have never used it.  Open it and pick Quick Action Grab the following t

I can't vote for that, no can do

Abide

Pretty sure I was supposed to drop this off to be developed....

I found my old camera collection, most haven't been used in over a decade. Checked them and all look healthy.

Mastodon