Back in June, I was in Kansas City with some friends for the Maker Faire there.  We decided just a week in advance that we were going to be spending the night, so we were a bit late booking our hotel. We’d initially tried to book several hotels that were “preferred” for one reason or [...]

Last weekend, Becky and I had opportunity to stay at the Aloft hotel at Town Center in Leawood, Kansas. The hotel is located at one end of the shopping center, near several restaurants and a parking structure.  Most of the shops are within walking distance.  Additionally, the hotel offers a complementary shuttle with a wide service area. [...]

A few months back, now, I traded in my Samsung Moment for my first keyboardless smartphone, the Motorola Photon.  The Photon (as with most keyboardless phones) is substantially thinner than my Moment, and a whole heck of a lot faster. I’m not going to bore you with specs, but it’s very comparable to my Viewsonic [...]

I’ve been screwing with custom ROMs on my Viewsonic gTablet for a while now, but so far have settled on Froyo as I found the Gingerbread ROMs to be lacking in terms of stability and performance.  I’d heard rumors that they’d gotten Honeycomb going on the gTablet, but had been putting off playing with it [...]

Tonight, I did some prep work on a new EasyDriver (on breadboard) that I ordered for an upcoming project. I mounted a 4-pin Molex Floppy connector for the motor output, and pin-headers reversed for breadboard mounting. I also milled the gear off of a scrap stepper motor and built a coupler to a fancy leadscrew I [...]

Since I started lifting weights (a few times a week for just 10 or 15 minutes at a time), I found that it’s far more convenient to do at home than at the gym (or at least, I like having that option).  I initially priced a 35# kettlebell and found the cost to be outrageous [...]

For a while now, I’ve been using KVM on my Ubuntu server for all sorts of things.  Once I got it running, it was really quite slick.  This post, however, isn’t about the merits of KVM as a virtualization platform. One of my virtual PCs is a Windows XP Home instance which I use when [...]

Becky and I have always been big fans of the various Farmers’ Markets around Omaha; I’m not a huge veggie person, but actual fresh produce definitely tastes better than the stuff trucked in from wherever that they sell in the grocery store. This year, Becky decided to join the Tomāto Tomäto CSA (Community Supported Agriculture group). [...]

Becky and I pack pretty lightly when we travel, but we certainly carry our fair share of stuff. This entire post might sound a bit over-thought and pedantic, but when you carry the entirety of your luggage for two weeks on your back, every cubic inch has value and each ounce matters.  Our strategy revolves [...]

Last week, I picked up a new Android tablet to supplement my smartphone and hopefully replace some of the functionality of my aging laptop.  I chose the Viewsonic gTablet for its feature set, and very reasonable price.  The two main tradeoffs were a lack of Honeycomb (Android 3.x) and a limited screen resolution (it’s a [...]