About 2 weeks ago, my 2002 Jetta (which just paid off) developed a rather nasty coolant leak. It started dripping something red, usually right after being turned off, and was complaining about low coolant. Needless to say, I was pretty confused.  In my mind, coolant is either green or yellow, and hydraulic fluid is red.  I limped it along a few days (by adding coolant regularly, about a pint a day), and eventually got it up on ramps to crawl under and find the leak. (more…)

After almost 6 years, this spring saw the end of my friend Dave’s D&D campaign, when he moved out of state to pursue his career. We started out playing 3.5e Eberron at a gaming store down in Bellevue, and saw one set of characters into epic levels, with the second set not far behind. The campaign spanned 150 years, with the two parties playing in an enduring world, separated only by time.  The party dynamics changed dramatically over the years; We lost players to schedule conflicts, spousal disputes, anger management issues and system conversions (some people just can’t do 4th edition).

We’d initially discussed trying to continue the campaign through Skype and virtual-table sorts of facilities, but lack of time and motivation for setup haven’t been the kindest to that plan. It’s tempting, here, to recount all sorts of funny / memorable events from the past, but they’re really only important to those of us who played; Gaming is one of those things that people love to discuss (their own experiences), but are often like an “in joke” that’s neither funny nor interesting to a removed party. I’d summarize by saying that, what made the game great was Dave’s attention to detail, “always say yes” attitude and general enthusiasm for the game. While the players showed up for one session per month, Dave obviously spent FAR more time preparing.

Through it all, we had a really great time, and I’ve made a several close friends. Dave’s game wasn’t my first D&D campaign, and it certainly won’t be my last.

Dave K and I are working on a project down at the Makery that requires direct programming of an ATTiny85; Dave ordered the USB ISP programmer for it, but was using a protoboard monstrosity to get it hooked up to the MCU

Since he’s doing me a favor flashing chips for “my” project, he ask (or I volunteered, I don’t remember) to build a more permanent solution.  I took a piece of spare stripboard and built essentially the same thing, just all soldered up. I used the same color of wire for the entire run of each pin (and different colors for each), and don’t have any turns or goofy junctions.

As for power, I’ve mapped down a 7th pin to the ISP header, but I don’t know that we’re going to use it. Pin 8 (Vcc) is already connected to the upper right pin on the ISP header; It seems like a shortcoming of Dave’s programmer that it’s not putting 5v off the USB on that pin. I’m going to discuss with Dave building either a custom cable to accommodate that, or even modding the programmer with a small switch or jumper.

I came across this video, made by the Lincoln East High School computer club, around the year 2000. Credit to Aaron Clark and Stuart Losee for the video itself.

The article (by me) that goes with this video is posted at OmahaMakerGroup.org. The Omaha Maker Group (www.omahamakergroup.org) had an egg drop contest on April 1, 2012. This video shows some of the results, in 240fps.