Hobbies

Woodworking to take up COVID-19 time

Post published:August 12, 2020
Post author:philip

It's been an interesting few months. Lots of time at home. In trying to fill my time, I started working on several woodworking projects. Built a shoe rack for myself, a bookshelf/dollhouse for my kids, and most recently I went out of my comfort zone to build something I had no experience building, using materials I had never used before. https://www.instagram.com/p/CAkmN2MgFmq/ My wife sent me a picture from Pinterest of a bunk bed that divided a bedroom in two. It was designed for two girls that shared a room. One girl entered from one side into the bottom bunk, and the other girl entered the top from the other side. Each bunk had a wall that blocked access/view of the other girls' side. That particular bed was connected to the ceiling and was able to float the top bed without any legs on one side (one side was held up by the wall, the other by the ceiling). I didn't think that would work with our ceiling, so I set out to design something similar, but without connecting to the ceiling. 3D model of bunk bed that splits the room in half I'd love to say I came up with…

An infographic for the keyboard-obsessed

Post published:February 10, 2016
Post author:philip

The web site Go Mechanical Keyboard just released the results of their semi-annual keyboard survey in the form of a very nice infographic, which I've displayed below. You can view the raw data online if you want. 950 people responded from 49 different countries. You need to be a bit obsessed with keyboards to understand everything in the infographic, although if you've been following my other posts on keyboards you should get most of it. Form factor? See my post "How many keys are there on a keyboard?". Switch types? See my recent post "A keyboard with swappable switches" where I change the switches that came with the keyboard. What do you think about the infographic?

A keyboard with swappable switches

Post published:December 23, 2015
Post author:philip

It started out with a post to Reddit that linked to a series of photos on Imgur of a new keyboard the user had ordered from the Chinese e-commerce site Taobao. Taobao, for those who don't know, is a Chinese-language-only e-commerce site run by Alibaba Group that caters to residents of China and nearby countries where people speak Chinese. Many sellers on the site, even if you could navigate the site in Chinese, won't ship outside of China. To meet demand, a whole crop of sites have sprung up just to help foreigners order products from Taobao. These 'Taobao agents' will order the product for you, receive the product in China, and then re-ship it to you wherever you are in the world. Of course, that service comes with a price, and in many cases that eliminates any cost savings you might get from ordering from Taobao. Occassionally, however, there are products on Taobao that are not available elsewhere. In this case, the user (redditsavedmyagain) ordered a keyboard that was in fact quite unique. The keyboard is called the Team Wolf Zhuque+. I had never heard of it and before that post on Reddit most other people had never heard of it either.…

Time for some Pi

Post published:February 4, 2015
Post author:philip

The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

The Raspberry Pi is a single-board credit-card-sized computer introduced in 2012. The computer was designed for use in teaching computer science to a new generation whose cell phones and modern computers had reduced the number of children who knew how computers actually worked. Used in education as well as by hobbyists, the Raspberry Pi has been incredibly successful and has sold over four million units. New versions of the Raspberry Pi are designed by the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, and then built by multiple partner manufacturers. This week the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the availability of their second-generation board, the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. It's not the second board (there has been the Model A, Model A+, Model B, and Model B+ before, as well as the Pi Compute Module for embedded applications), but rather it is the first board since introduction to use a new processor, the Broadcom BCM2836. The new processor is roughly six times as fast as the previous processor, going from a single-core ARM11 to a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor, as well doubling the RAM to 1GB (shared with the GPU). Despite those changes, the board remains backwards-compatible with previous Raspberry Pi software, the hardware is pin-compatible with the previous Model B+ board,…