November 27, 2007
So I’ve decided to take on a somewhat more ambitious project than I probably should this Christmas season. Now that we have a house, I’m putting up a train garden again. Those who know me will know that I’ve done one off and on over the years, culminating when I was up in MA with a large 2-story apartment when I put up an 4′x8′ display that took up most of a spare room. I got into trains when I was little, and my late grandfather always put up a train garden every Christmas.
I have the trains, I have (some) houses, but I’ve decided to do something a little different this year. In order to have an excuse to build some custom electric circuits, I’ve decided to build my own point-to-point trolley setup that will travel from one side of the town to the other. It should be doable, but I haven’t done any electronics work in years and I don’t have any parts anymore, so it’s time to stock up again.
I do still have a prototype board, a soldering gun, and an old BASIC Stamp from college that I doubt even works anymore, and has at least one loose pin. So, off to jameco.com to order some grab bags of resistors, caps, diodes, IC’s, and a drawer set, and another microcontroller (Atmel MEGA8) in case the Stamp is dead; and off to Radio Shack to the items that were cheaper there. I already went to a hobby store with Katy a week or so ago and bought an HO trolley, some houses, and some lamps. I’ll also need to go to Home Depot this weekend to get some particle board and 2×4’s to build a platform.
With any luck, I’ll have a mini electronics lab up and running, and a simple train layout with a few neat twists within the next few weeks.
Posted by john under trains | Comments (0)
November 20, 2007
After owning this domain for the last 4 months I figure it’s about time to really start using the homepage in addition to the photo album site (photos.clemensfam.org). This weblog is set up so that both Katy and I can write to it whenever we want to. There have been a few times recently when I’ve wanted a blog again so I could post things I’ve learned to it. Mainly these involve the joys of home ownership. Maybe by making this homepage a blog we’ll actually post things to it like we should.
I’ve already imported the journal reports I made during our honeymoon, so there’s a little bit of content here. This is wordpress, so there’s RSS and ATOM feeds if you like that sort of thing.
Please note that I (john) will still be using my own homepage on deater.net/john for most Linux/professional/non-blog related things. This page is more for my personal life.
For those waiting for the professional wedding photos to be posted, the delay is caused by a few problems in the web photo album software I wrote. The photographer used film for everything, then scanned in the photos and gave us the digitized scans as well as the proofs and the negatives. Unfortunately, I wrote shutterbug to use the EXIF data to orient photos the correct way automatically, so I never added the ability to rotate photos. Since the photos were bulked scanned in, they don’t have EXIF orientation data like they would if they were taken with a digital camera. And since there’s no way to rotate them, they come out sideways or upside down all the time. When I get more time, I’ll add rotate ability, but for now, it means we can’t upload the professional wedding pics. There’s also a small problem with memory usage of shutterbug while uploading photos, which gets me on WebFaction’s no-no list; so I need to fix that as well.
Posted by john under General | Comments (0)