Fitbit has discontinued their Fitbit One step trackers, which seems like a good opportunity to step back and reflect on wearing one for the last decade or so. I’ve enjoyed using Fitbit trackers, but the One devices seemed like they broke down too often. I’m pretty proud that I ended up earning all the activity-related […]
#gadgets hack
10 posts
21 Oct 2019
23 Nov 2014
If you’re a geek like me, there’s probably a bank or cluster of micro USB chargers somewhere in your house for recharging phones, tablets, Kindles, headphones, etc. Lately I’ve been playing with a couple USB chargers that I really like. One is a USB charger with 3.5 amp (!) output. Just for context, a typical […]
28 Dec 2013
Today I made a Bluetooth garage door opener. Now I can open my garage from my Android phone. There’s a short how-to YouTube video from Lou Prado. Lou also made a website btmate.com that has more information, and you can watch an earlier howto video as well. The project itself was pretty simple: – Acquire […]
1 Jul 2013
Back in the 90s, the heart of a computer was the CPU. The faster the CPU, the better the computer was–you could do more, and the speed of the CPU directly affected your productivity. People upgraded their computers or bought new ones whenever they could to take advantage of faster CPU speeds. I remember the […]
13 May 2013
This is the last half-finished “hairball” blog post about USB devices on Linux. I actually did manage to get a working program that controlled a USB foam missile launcher. Unfortunately, I didn’t document all the steps, so this blog post just sort of stops at some point. I got a USB Missile Launcher for Christmas. […]
What, *another* half-finished blog post about Linux USB drivers? Yup. Suppose you have a device and want a Linux device driver for it. There are a few steps you’ll need to take. One of the heroes in this area is Greg Kroah-Hartman. Greg wrote USBView, which is a Linux tool to enumerate a list of […]
For a while, I was really into reverse-engineering USB drivers. Don’t ask why. The heart wants what the heart wants. I didn’t finish this “hairball” post, but it has some info in it that still might be good. I recently stumbled across this post and it inspired me. I decided to try to reverse engineer […]
You can ignore this ancient “hairball” blog post. Gather round, kids, and witness this blog post from a time *before internet-connected scales*. That’s right. Back then, we had to hack our Wii balance boards to connect them to the internet. Of course now you can buy wifi-connected scales from Fitbit and Withings. But in a […]
You can ignore this “hairball” blog post. This post dates back to a time when people actually curated, saved, and managed their bookmarks.html file. Then Google Chrome introduced the ability to save and sync all your bookmarks, extensions, etc. in the cloud. Now I sign in to Chrome and everything is synced in the cloud. […]
What’s that? You’ve never heard of an XMPCR? Don’t worry, the rest of the world hasn’t either. You can ignore this “hairball” post as I do spring cleaning on my blog. TimeTrax was a program that allowed XMPCR owners to listen to XM Radio on their computer. Even nicer, the program would “time shift” the […]