Timothy S. Carlson's Blog

SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATES. Here's another idea I had. I bought a solar-powered spotlight to light our flag at night (protocol states that if you leave a flag out at night, it should be lighted). I had stuck the spotlight in the ground, pointing up at the flag, but here was this spotlight in the middle of the lawn, looking out of place. And then it struck me - put the spotlight at the end of the flagpole and point it down at the flag. Heh. It should work alright - the real test will be tonight. Update 09.0615: After two days of playing with this spotlight (a piece of crap, BTW), I finally got it to work somewhat as I want. It originally came with three LEDs, which could hardly light up enough to tell that it was on, let alone 'spotlight' anything. I installed an additional three LEDs after the first night, but it still wasn't bright enough. Last night I installed another three LEDs, for a total of 9 LEDs. That seems to work well - good thing, too, as there's no more ro...

Prototyped using a Basic Stamp board (a PIC prototype board with Basic embedded) and parts from a solar-powered lawn light and 8 yellow LEDs. I'm going to try it out tonight. Parts cost: - 8 yellow LEDs: $4.00 - 1 lawn light parts (plastic cap, solar cell, battery): $3.50 (4 lights for $13.00) - PIC board: sub $1.00 Total - $8.50 In actual production, the costs would probably be sub $3.00 each. Think they would sell for $19.99? Update 09.0615: Dammit. The idea is already patented.

I just put in a new faucet in the kitchen sink for my Mom. It took me twice as long as it would have before the strokes, but not a bad job.

KFat can be found at www.kfat.com, KPig at www.kpig.com (duh!). Or you can just click on one of the images, above, to go to the websites. If you lived near Santa Cruz in the 80's/90's, you'll remember these stations. Enjoy!

This is from the Jamestown Elementary class photos posted earlier. We _think_ this is my Dad, it looks like him, but there's no notations anywhere on the photos as to who is who, or even what year it was taken.

We went to the National Cemetery today to visit my Father. We miss you, Dad.

My old laptop gave up the ghost - well, I helped by giving it an inadvertent bath while powerwashing the roof, it's a long story - so I finally replaced it. It's a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 (to the left). It's got a 10" screen, 160GB hdd, wireless, and HDMI outout. So I also bought the HP 20" LCD monitor, with a 1600x900 resolution. And that's a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Laptop - $300 LCD - $150 BT Keyboard/mouse - already had it Very, very cheap. The cost for a new motherboard for my old laptop would have been around $300 - and there's no guarantee that's all that would need to be replaced. No idea if the LCD on the old laptop fried or not. And the key caps on the keyboard were starting to fall off, so... And the new laptop is very lightweight and should be an extremely nice system to travel with. And when I'm at home, I have the bigger screen and the bigger keyboard / mouse. Heh. It also plugs into my 42" flat panel, but that only goes up to...