Fiction Nature Preserve She set her drink down with a resolute clink. "Well, as long as you're being so persistent, yeah, there actually is a forest around these parts. People just don't like to talk
Fiction The End of Days The END OF DAYS was much more peaceful than anybody expected, but really, that shouldn't have surprised anyone. When word got around that THE END was in fact near, there was a small
Projects LuxBase: DIY Smart Lighting GitHub repo Ages ago, dismayed by the price of Hue bulbs, I started looking into DIY smart lighting solutions (don't go read the post, please, I hooked a single RGB LED up to
Fiction Minimalist Lighting Inspired by the style of Uel Aramchek's incredible writing at North of Reality. "So why do you want them again? I'm just curious, you know, we don't really get very many orders
Polytechnical Difficulties Edit 3/30, 4:15PM: this post inaccurately stated that Dr. Jackson disbanded the Faculty Senate. This is untrue; the Board of Trustees was responsible. The post has been updated to reflect this.
Breaking In From the Inside The situation was thusly. I have a server running in my apartment, from which I've forwarded several ports to access services on it when I'm out of the house. One of those services
Projects FactBlaster Updates It's been a while but there were a few standing issues I had to clean up with FactBlaster. I had originally planned to put in features for adding facts and users, but I
CheckTheMirror HackRPI 2015: CheckTheMirror I could be wrong, but I think everyone has a different mentality going into a hackathon. Some people have an idea well before the hacking begins, so they've had time to flesh it
Serving Multiple Reveal.js Presentations Reveal.js is awesome. It generates slick presentations, it’s packed with features and plugins, and it’s got one hell of a good in-browser editor. But what if you’
Some Updates Q: What does it look like when someone neglects a blog for months? A: Hi I’m Kienan, nice to meet you. I figured instead of doing what I usually do, which
Voices in My Head As a general rule I try to remember that buying products based solely on name is a very bad idea. Examples: "Fun Size" anything, "As Seen On TV" anything, Doritos. I ignored
Pi Fillings Part 1: IP Phone Home Pi Fillings is a series of articles I'm planning on writing about tips and trick for working with the Raspberry Pi. They are things that I've found quite useful in everyday Pi use
Projects FactBlaster A month or two ago I was sitting at my desk when my phone began ringing; a close friend was calling me. We exchanged pleasantries, and when I questioned why I'd been called
HID Hacking: Part 1 Two things. One. Access control systems--the majority of them, at least--are weird. They're based on the principle of confirming identities and choosing to allow or deny access, but from my experience, that confirmation
Pebble on the Shore Many people get buyer's remorse. It is a noted psychological phenomenon for no small reason. I feel it's worth noting, though, that I get it in reverse. I will sweat over the purchase
Ireland A year and a half ago, I had one of the most fulfilling opportunities of my life; I was able to take a ten-day tour by bus and foot of Ireland. It had
Extending Humanity "Bionics is not only about making people stronger and faster. Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into electromechanics."--Hugh Herr I watch Ted talks far less often than I should. It is
I Downloaded Wikipedia: Part I Guilty secret: I've wanted to for a really really long time. Every few months the Wikimedia Foundation bundles up different compilations of Wikipedia's content, including just current text, just abstracts, all revision text,
Be Kind Loss is something with which I don't deal very appropriately. Emotions often seem to pop up at the wrong time and place (and conversely sometimes don't appear when they should). I occasionally wonder
Adventures in RasPi OS Dev: Part 1 In case you can't tell by this point, I really like the Raspberry Pi. It's self-contained, it's easy to break out, it's a great learning tool, and it's portable as all heck. And
Hue-It-Yourself: Part 1 At some point in the past few months I realized that home automation and intelligent house systems are actually becoming a thing. By "becoming a thing" I mean that it's no longer a
Beeping Linux A while back I picked up a cheap Dell Optiplex and stuffed it with Debian to serve as a server. It's been working perfectly well since then (aside from a few scary noises
Keane in Concert A few weeks ago I had the privilege to see Keane performing live in concert at a local venue. I admit that I'm something of a latecomer to the band, having started listening
Out-of-Print Quite a while ago I was dismayed to hear that the Borders bookstore chain was closing down multiple stores and possibly going out of business altogether. I was deeply saddened by this, as