Projects past present and future. Back in grad school I was kind of photophobic and wanted very low, controlled light levels in my bedroom. I had 6 channels of independent light control, all coming from a serial port controlled power strip (from Hive76, from some nameless datacenter). I wrote a small daemon to accept commands over 0mq and write them out to the serial port. To control the lights, I generated 0mq messages from, initially, three sources, with plans to extend this. The first two sources were at and cron jobs which would run Python scripts. They interspersed blocking and nonblocking commands to play music and turn on lights in gentle sequence. The third source was F1-F4 on the keyboard of a small laptop placed on my way upstairs. The laptop ran a hacked version of the OLPC Moon Activity which would describe the state of lights in my room independently from the key input processing which used either TriggerHappyDaemon or keylaunch. In 2018 I wrote a web applic
Slippery Camera Lens Caps Nikon center-pinch camera lens caps are hard to grip. Cut cross-hatching into the center grip surfaces with a whittling knife, really butch up that inner surface, and they become much easier to handle. Sugru, hot glue, plasti-dip, or sand paper are also all worth considering as surface treatments.