My sister wanted a wine bottle light, like she spotted on the internet somewhere. It’s not really a chandelier, I gave it my own twist. The bottles have been sprayed with frosting, and are lit with 5050 LED RGB strip; allowing for any colour light.

When I first started seeing the Ambilight (Philips’s lighting system that allows the display to bleed out) clones popping up I knew I wanted to create one myself. The open-source system has been fairly well refined to this point, such that it is pretty much plug and play with Raspbmc (XBMC for the Raspberry Pi). ‘nadnerb’ has already created a tutorial for the process, which I followed, so I won’t go into the process here. This post is just to share my results.

My last AirPi post has been popular – and still is – but part of why of like Arch linux is that it is constantly updating so you must be hands on, learning a new part of the OS the hard way!

One module I took during the final year of my degree was ‘System Modelling and Simulation’. A well taught and great module, one of the tasks was to model a double pendulum.

I’ve had a BootCamp partition on my Macbook since it bought it; I waited specifically for the Intel CoreDuo Macbooks. Sometimes I don’t want to restart just to run an app or test something out, so developed this bash script to boot it using Virtual Box.

An update of my MusicalColours script to provide lighting feedback for my TV! Demo’d by playing Halo 4.

My ‘cross season has gradually gotten more serious, with two bikes and a pressure washer; both vital at last Sunday’s National Trophy. I’ve always wanted a pressure washer anyway (partly for washing bikes but also because I like mechanical things!) and this £100 GumTree special couldn’t be turned down. It’s been good to me so far but it’s clear the previous owner didn’t look after it. I noticed one of the pump mounting bolts had vibrated loose and after some suspicious drips, then loosing a bit of oil, I decided to take the thing apart to learn about it and give it a service.

I was wondering what the technique is called that you used on the K matrix before solving for U? The one where it takes the BC and makes 0 rows and columns, and then makes the K(i,i)=1 at the BC – GoPDemon

With a cupboard full of old hard drives and some spare time, I recently set about making a persistence of vision clock. Using the platter of a hard disk, a slot is cut to allow backlighting to be emit. When the disk is spinning at 5400rpm+ and backlight constant, the disk appears opaque, as the slit is ‘refreshing’ each point of the revolution faster than our eyes. The trick is to measure the revolution time then flash or change the backlight colour at a fraction of this revolution time at the same point each revolution, in order to create a light segment. For example, flashing the light at a frequency twelve times the disk frequency in phase with the disk will create 12 light segments:

My MacBook is the 2006 original; the white Core Duo 32bit. I got it upon starting University and that ended up taking six years. Amazingly, it is still going strong and whilst I want a nice retina MBP, it would be truly frivolous, given how well this one still runs.

For my AirPi, I needed to make my Raspberry Pi wireless. Being the man of thrift that I am, I found the cheapest dongle on eBay: a (Digitaz) RaLink RT5370.

Those little window sucker things for GPSes and cables dangling everywhere get on my tits. Since getting the van, I’ve been intending a dash integration of sorts, whether completely containing a GPS unit, or building a CarPC with my Raspberry Pi, it was put on hold until I had some time. With the race season over and Uni finished, now was the time.