Adventures in PCB Burning

In some of the projects I’ve been working on I’ve had to design a basic to intermediate circuit to control the electronic components of the project (typically a bunch of LEDs, which you don’t want to use a Raspberry Pi for because the resulting current of multiple LEDs will be too much for the board,…

What’s in the Box?! Inventory of my Sparkfun Dumpster Dive

Sparkfun does an inventory clean-out/Dumpster Dive event once per year, it’s like Christmas for the Maker. They come in two variants, a 1.5lb box and 0.5lb box, and sell out pretty quickly. This was my first year but I’m a fan of the various Sparkfun contests and “unique” events they hold so I figured this…

Semi-static Website Hosting in AWS S3 Buckets: SanAngeloSheep.info

Amazon Web Service’s S3 object storage is a fantastically easy and robust way to host a simple website. The only catch is that it’s an object storage so you can’t use any server side scripting like php or python; Simple object storage also means you can’t use any databases either so your data must reside…

Testing Failures and Fault Recovery of PHP and Mysql

Often I’m tasked with having to architect highly available and fault tolerant systems of varying styles; architecting and designing is one thing, but when it’s built you then have to test, test, and test some more.  In the course of doing this over the years I have a number of horror-stories, and I’ve also picked…

G2 Logo Sign for Office

My company, G2 Technology Group, was moving to a new office with more space. I wanted to celebrate the move by creating a sign for the brick wall outside our front door. I’ve seen sign’s in the past that were a little three dimensional and wanted to get the same effect without making the whole…