Road Rule #6 – Following distance is not important.

So last night – early this morning? – I went for a drive. The drive started out well, weather was alright, amazingly oncoming traffic was (mostly) turning off their high beams, and there weren’t too many people travelling in the same direction as I was. I decided to take a run out to Canmore, because I don’t trust that my normal driving road has been fully fixed from last years floods. I don’t know that, because I haven’t been out there since the floods, but I’m not willing to chance it at night when I can’t see past the end of my headlights.

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Well that sucks. (Arduino Stereo Part 2)

Well I received my RN-52, got it all soldered up, and hooked up to my laptop for the initial setup. Once I figured out that I needed to hit enter after entering a command, I got everything set to start streaming music from my phone.
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From Tablet to Microcontroller (Arduino Stereo Project Part 1)

Continuing on from yesterdays post about my car stereo, I explain how I came up with this crazy idea.

The first thing I found when starting on the idea of building a car stereo from my Arduino, was that the Arduino doesn’t handle audio well. That concerned me for a while. The majority of topics I found concerning the Arduino and audio in projects was about a wired connection from the Arduino to an iPod or iPhone, and using the Arduino to control those devices. I want the control, but I don’t want a wired connection. They also want to connect the Arduino to an existing audio system. Again, not what I wanted. I want to replace my stereo. I was not off to a good start. Continue reading

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A Tale Of (First World) Woe

For the past couple of years, I’ve been looking for some solution for my in-car audio that does exactly what I want. When I  bought my Thunderbird, I eventually bought a Bluetooth enabled stereo (a Pioneer DEH-P700BT) to replace the factory deck that was in it. At the time, I had my first Android phone, the original HTC Desire. And it worked, somewhat. I had a bunch of music on my phone that I could play over the Bluetooth connection. Unfortunately, the phone wasn’t the most robust device out there, and would quite often flake out when playing music. So I also had a USB stick loaded with music.
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I (insert activity) This, So You Should Too.

Every once in a while, I watch a TV show, and feel like posting a recommendation or condemnation of it.  I get that feeling after some movies as well.  Music, yup, feel like that as well.  Restaurants, not so much, but still, I could easily recommend a greasy spoon or two.  The problem?  Well, first off I’m lazy.  It’s been a couple months since I actually posted anything here.  I’ve written a few drafts, but never polished them off in order to post, and their content is now a little dated.  And second?  Secondly, you might not actually like the same things that I do.

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Aaaarrrggghhhh!!!

For fuck sakes why?  Why do people believe that by changing their profile pictures they’re doing any fucking good to a cause?  Honestly, it does nothing.  The latest fucking brilliant idea from some idiot using Facebook?  Change your profile pic to your favourite childhood cartoon character to raise awareness of child abuse.  Really?  Do you really think that is going to do anything?  Is it going to make a child abuser go “I shouldn’t smack the shit out of my kids because people on Facebook are more aware of child abuse”?  Is it going to make a victim of child abuse go “I get the shit kicked out of me by my parents/guardians/siblings, but it’s OK, because Facebook users have changed their profile pics to some stupid character from a cartoon”?  No.

All it does is give some fuck-wit that wanted to see how many people s/he could get to follow along with them changing their pic with some spurious reason an ego boost.  If you want to do it, at least make a donation to a victim support group, because showing your support for the cause without actually doing anything to support the cause is ridiculous.  Changing your profile picture doesn’t give any money to the people actually helping the victims.  It doesn’t help the police catch the fucks that abuse the kids in the first place.

And yes, I have covered this before, but more people are following along with this than any other “Support this cause” action I’ve seen on Facebook.  And it annoys me to no end.  It gives the people that start these stupid things the idea that they are actually helping the cause, when in reality they are just trivializing it.  It becomes the fashionable thing to do.  “Support” a cause with no further actions than a couple clicks of the mouse and no money out of pocket, time spent mentoring the victims, or any other meaningful activity to help with victims of child abuse.

No meh.  Stop being stupid.

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Road Rule #5: Blocking traffic on a corner is perfectly all right.

I’m surprised that I haven’t written this one before, because this is one of the most common abuses of the law that I see.  When you make a left hand turn on a lighted intersection, there has to be enough room for your vehicle without blocking cross traffic if the light turns green for them. Continue reading

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Interesting. A Recipe Website for the Lazy Bastard.

As many of you know, I love to eat.  What I spend on food in a month could feed a family of four for the same time period.  What I hate is cooking.  I get distracted when I’m cooking, I never have the right ingredients for what I want to cook, and sometimes, I just don’t know what I want to cook with the ingredients that I have.  The first two are something that no application or website is going to help me with.  But I just found a website to help with the third. Continue reading

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I added this app for (insert charity here) and if you support it, you should too.

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of people making their status updates on Facebook about how they support this or that charity.  And it annoys me.  Now, most people can see that I don’t update my facebook status that often, because if you really want to know what I’m doing at any particular moment, pick up your phone and use it for what it was originally intended for.  Phone me.  If I’m busy, I won’t answer.  Leave a message and I’ll probably phone you back. Continue reading

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Road Rule #4: Whoever is behind you is far more important than you are

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve seen anything on the road that was Road Rule worthy.  I blame the lack of driving lately.  But I saw one last month (Jesus I need to update more often).  Well, was involved in one more like it.  See, driving home, I was doing the speed limit.  Oh dear god how could I be doing the speed limit? Continue reading

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