At the Fivium Christmas party this year I got given a Strandbeest kit in the Secret Santa. I thought this was excellent and had enough fun building it and playing with it that I figured it was good enough to make a quick post about before closing out the year. Below is a picture of the box I unwrapped (along with a kazoo, but that’s another story entirely) and it instantly made me want to go home and put it together.…

Another year working for Fivium, another Fivium Hack Day. The format of the Hack Day at Fivium is now fairly well settled so the organising was much as it was for previous years. Unfortunately this year I wasn’t working in the main office to do the bulk of the organisational work but thankfully there were other people more than willing to do the arduous work of sending out a couple of emails and seeing what prizes people might want.…

My girlfriend works for a company that was having a cake making contest recently. This company has its own registered tartan (yes, individual tartan patterns can be registered) and a logo of an eagle which looks pretty cool and we figured would look even better all made out of icing. A quick google for “tartan icing” reveals minimal decent results and what is there is mostly just printed patterns rather than hand-made.…

As with most typical geeks sport usually isn’t one of my main interests. One of the few sports I do enjoy is Formula One however with its well designed and engineered cars, abundance of technology in the cars and behind the scenes and the general noise and spectacle of the sport. After watching it on television for many years now I thought it was high time that I actually went along to a race to see it in person so this summer myself and my girlfriend went along to the British grand prix in Silverstone for 6 days to enjoy the camping and racing.…

I have been thinking about interfacing with my Game Boy for a while via the link cable but had no way, other than destroying a cable, to connect to it. Eventually I stumbled upon a blog post where someone had written about creating a link cable breakout board. Unfortunately they didn’t distribute their CAD files but I figured now would be a good time for me to learn how to create my own PCBs as it’s something I’ve never even attempted before.…

Last summer I wrote about 3D printing a replacement gear for a mechanical device in my office at Fivium. This topic came up recently while talking to one of the directors during the company’s 10th birthday party and I mentioned how it was a fairly simple thing to do, fun and how much I’d like to do it more yet the cost of paying a third party to print is a high barrier for personal projects.…

I bought a Leap Motion years ago and despite a few hack day projects here and there it doesn’t get much use aside from gathering dust in one of my cupboards. During lunch with a friend we got talking about 3D scanning tools I figured I’d see if the Leap could do it as aside from a 1st generation Kinect I don’t have anything which has decent stereo cameras.…

Rust is all the rage these days and it seems that barely a day goes by without a post on Hacker News extolling the virtues of Rust: blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety. After what feels like decades of reading all this hype I figured it would be a good idea to jump aboard that hype train and try my own hand at making something with Rust that would take advantage of the features Rust gives you as a developer.…

This past Christmas (2015) I was given a Konstruktor camera. The Konstruktor is a Do-It-Yourself kit of a fully-functional 35mm SLR camera which comes in a fairly flat box with all parts, except the mirror assembly, requiring assembly. The Konstruktor kit was created and sold by Lomography, an organisation dedicated to experimental and creative photography, with a fairly heavy focus on analog photography. Building the camera was quite fun and only took an hour or so, with some minor confusion around the gearing system for winding film but no real problems.…

In my previous post, Contributing to iText, I talked about my use of a great Java library called iText that lets you create and read PDF files. This is a post explaining the project, Adventurer, that I was working on which uses iText. All the way back in December 2012 I backed a Kickstarter project by Ryan North for a choose your own adventure version of Hamlet called To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure.…