$10 DIY hanging Bikerack

In my apartment the “guest room” only has room for our sports equipment. Even with that it is difficult to get to the snowboards with the bikes in the way and everything is a hassle. From the time i thought this up to when I had the bikes on it was about an hour. It also cost less than $10 and only required a handsaw!

I went to home depot and got an 8′ 2×6 (~$4) and an 8′ 2×4 (~$2). I cut the 2×4 down to maybe 5′ and cut a bunch of 6″ long pieces of it to make the “hooks” that the bikes hang from. I used some 3″ decking screws to put it all together and hung the bikes on it! It is simple, cheap, and I’m no longer stubbing my toes on bike pedals at night. That piece of 2×6 on the left hand side is scrap and just resting there. The 2×4 extends to the left wall.



This bike rack gently leans against the wall and supports both bikes easily. It could work in almost any apartment, and you could probably even fit a third bike in underneath it. For the price it can’t be beat.

Note: If you were to put this on a hardwood floor then you would definitely want some sort of rubber foot on the bottom. As it is, the carpet and gravity hold it nicely in place.

Geek gift guide for 2011 – electronics geeks

    _Electronics geeks

Hello, world! This is the second geek gift guide post. The first was more general, and this is specifically showing gifts aimed at electronics geeks. Keep your eye peeled for a few more guides.

    You can measure up an electronics geek by the amount of time that passes between unwrapping a gift and pulling out a screwdriver in order to open it up. They (we) like to build things and break things in the quest to learn how they work and how we could make them work better. The gift ideas below range from beginner to advanced and are sure to have something to please.


    Kits from make mag or sparkfun or adafruit
    Electronics kits are a great way to get your feet wet in electronics. They generally contain everything you need in order to make your project and all you have to do is solder the components on the board. This is a great way to build a frustration-free project, and you also get to see how things are designed “the proper way” Pick out a kit that looks interesting from either of those places and it’ll be a sure fire couple of quiet hours spent with the soldering iron.


    Ponoko gift card – Ponoko is a great company out of new zealand that helps makers build stuff. They have laser cutters and all kinds of other tools that you can pay to have them cut materials with. This is really good for getting laser cut acrylic cases or gauge clusters.


    Hackerspace gift certificate – depending on where you live, there may be a hackerspace near by. This is like an artists collective for geeks. They usually have all kinds of tools, materials and like minded people. They are good places to meet other geeks and collaborate on projects. They generally charge admission to cover rent, so a gift certificate is like free entry! Look for a hackerspace in your area here.

    9 more geeky ideas after the break!

Geek gift guide for 2011 – Misc Geeks

Tinyenormous Geek gift guide for 2011

There are a lot of sites out there that have gifts for geeks. The problem is that it is really difficult for a non-geek boyfriend or girlfriend to pick something appropriate unless they are geeks themselves. The purpose of this guide is to break down a bunch of gift ideas based on the type of geek you are shopping for. There are general ideas that are broadly applicable to most geeks, there are electronics geeks, photo geeks, audio geeks, gaming geeks.

This first post goes out to all of my comrades fighting in the cubicle turf wars. It is a general list of things that appeal to a broad swath of geeks. For those of you who just want to shop, not read, click here to go straight to the amazon mini-store and see most of the items below.

_Misc Geeks


nice multitool – regardless of if it is needed, geeks love knives and tools. It is almost impossible to go wrong with something like this skeletool from leatherman or (at a third the price) this one from Gerber You always have something to open a beer with, and you don’t feel like a wuss at work trying to open a box up with your car key.

Their own domain name!www.GoDaddy.com would love to give you a domain name on the cheap. “.com” domains can be had for under $10 a year and are like real estate in that if you don’t buy it now someone else may. Buying firstnamelastname.com or thelastnamefamily.com may seem silly now, but they aren’t making any more .com addresses…


Maglite XL100 flashlight This one kind of goes with the multi tool and the knives. It’s super useful in the car, it’s great for when you hear a bump in the night, and it helps when you drop something tiny and reflective on the carpet. The XL100 in particular uses a motion sensor to switch between the light modes! Fancy!



scan gauge
– If there is one thing geeks love it is data! This cool little thing plugs into your car and tells you exact info straight from the cars sensors. You can use this to check and reset engine lights, and you can use this to get very precise, instantaneous mileage measurements. This can pay for itself fairly quickly if you use it to increase your gas mileage, or it can avoid having to go to the shop to tell you that you didn’t put the fuel cap on tight enough.
more than 10 awesome ideas hiding after the jump!

Wired is supposed to be techy, right?

Why can’t they figure out their blog summary code? It has looked like this as long as I have been reading it. Most of the summaries include blog-only code (like “previous image-next image” above) or errors in passing non-text elements (“???” everywhere!) “Beyond the beyond” was the worst offender, but they seem to have finally gotten rid of that.

Do not get me wrong: I love Wired. I have had a dead-tree subscription for well over a decade. This won’t even effect my near-daily refreshing of their website. It just seems a little out of character for a company that helped start it all, survived the dot-com crash and is still on the cutting edge of all that is cutting edge.

Building the Bliptronome v0.1 and 0.2

So here is the followup to my last Bliptronome post. As I said I bought a bliptronic-5000 from thinkgeek over christmas break and was working on it back at home. I didn’t have very much for spare parts or tools, so I had to make due with that I had.

Here is the box it comes in. Try to contain your excitement.
monome clone from bliptronic-5000

Here is my first prototype. I learned a lot with this, not the least being that using old ide cables can be a very frustrating way to prototype. After re-wiring the arduino 3 or 4 times I finally tested the cable only to find that 5 of the pins were all grounded internally (somehow). I ended up with the breadboard here and it worked out for a test.
monome clone from bliptronic-5000

Since the ide cable failed I ended up taking the female header off of the scrap board and mounting some solid core wire to it.
monome clone from bliptronic-5000

This is the top of the the button board.
monome clone from bliptronic-5000
more gory details after the break

Cheap Monome built from a toy and and arduino – bliptronome

I’ve watched the monome videos for quite a while now, and I’ve really enjoyed them. I love how the unlabeled device looks so useful in someone else’s hands, but I know it’s really tough to learn. I have wanted one for a bit, but the makers (who seem awesome) only release small runs every once in a while, and they are generally highly (~$500) priced as well.

I saw a few links saying that you could build your own from an arduino and a bunch of gear, and that really got me interested. Over here at flipmu they have a full shopping list for building an arduino based monome clone that is called an “arduinome”, but it still looks like it comes out to almost $300 with shipping AND it is still very much a kit.

More recently I saw that some people had hacked their $40 bliptronic-5000s into arduinomes and that really piqued my interest. The hack basically uses the shift registers, buttons and leds of the bliptronic, and swaps in an arduino as the brains of the operation. The hardware is nowhere near as nice as the actual monome is, but it is approachable financially, and it’ll be useful for other things once it is connected to the arduino regardless.
Hit the jump for the details!

Thank you for voting / Ponoko test fit pieces!

First – a big thank you to everyone who voted for me in the sparkfun / ponoko / Geekdad contestI won!

From here on out I will be documenting my process as I go from rough prototype to finished laser cut beer vending machine!

There will be an upcoming longer piece on how to design for laser cutting. I have been amazed as to how many variables you need to keep in your head, and I haven’t even gotten the pieces yet! It seems like once you get it all figured out it is very systematic, but my design wasn’t nearly as tight as it needed to be in order to be laser cut.

This post is all about prep work. I have been talking with Josh at ponoko, and he suggested that I cut a few test pieces to figure some things out. I am planning on using t-bolt assembly. The good thing about that is that it ought to withstand both the thermal rigors of being refrigerated and the physical stress of having 12 oz cans banging around in the machine. The bad thing is that it adds another unknown to the design. I decided to test a bunch of different slot and tab widths to find one that fits as close to perfect as possible.

One interesting thing about designing for laser cutting is that you can easily control the cut dimensions within 0.1mm, but you don’t have any control over the thickness of the acrylic. Due to variances in manufacturing, the 3mm sheet could be +_ 15%! On a 3mm sheet your thickness could be off by up to 0.4mm. This means that for a tab and a slot, you have to make the short sides precise, and the wide sides a bit sloppy. Definitely an interesting twist.
hit the jump for more laser-cut plastic action!

Dear Media temple, why do I keep getting hacked?

I have been running my two blogs on media temple for quite some time. Recently they have been getting hacked. Very frequently. My hosting provider is Media Temple, and I can’t say I am very happy with them right now. I am hesitant to say that the hacks all are media temple’s fault, but at least one of them was (they admitted it) and they aren’t giving me any evidence that this has been as pervasive as they say.

This is the fourth time they have gone down in under a year, and the second time in less than a month. I want to believe that it is not specifically media temple’s fault, but if that is the case, then (even worse) I am just really disappointed in wordpress as a platform.

I have done most of the things listed in order to harden your wordpress install, and I am having a really tough time believing that even 10% of the existing wordpress installs out there are (a) jumping through those hoops and (b) still getting hacked.
Continue reading “Dear Media temple, why do I keep getting hacked?”

Vote for TinyEnormous! wired/sparkfun/ponoko contest


Sparkfun, Ponoko, and Geek dad from wired have all teamed up to create a contest for us makers. The rules are simple: design something that uses sparkfun’s parts and Ponoko’s cutting services. The top ten coolest designs get picked by a panel and then the best one gets picked by an online vote! I have submitted two ideas and I really hope at least one of them makes it into one of them made it into the the top ten! I was surprised by how few people entered, but I guess the whole line about…

Submit a photo, render, sketch or scribble on a napkin to the GeekDad pool on Flickr (and tag it ‘ponoko’) or leave a description of it in a comment below before the end of the weekend

…was too daunting for some people! Regardless, I put two entries into the contest. One is a laser cut beer vending machine that is designed to retrofit an old dorm mini-fridge into a beer vending machine(!), and the other is a physical progress bar.

Here are pictures of the (very) rough prototypes. The beer vending machine should be pretty self explanatory.


Continue reading “Vote for TinyEnormous! wired/sparkfun/ponoko contest”

What do vendors gain by making closed hardware?

I have a Hp mini netbook, an xbox, a canon 7D dslr, a canon powershot point and shoot camera and an iphone.
The netbook is a hackintosh.
The xbox has a mod chip so it can act as a media server.
The powershot is running CHDK which enables an intervalometer and motion detection.
The iPhone is jailbroken so I can run non “approved” apps on it.
I paid full price for all of those devices and I haven’t caused any direct monetary loss for the producers of those devices. I consider that a win-win situation. The hardware manufacturer makes good hardware, and then I am able to do something with it that was not initially considered by the manufacturer. I paid for it, I should be able to modify it.

When I bought the 7D I knew that there was a ‘hacking’ effort underway and I was looking forward to some day when it would bear fruit. I have checked in every few months since then and I finally realized that instead of bearing fruit, Canon has killed the tree. With each consecutive firmware update, canon has locked the hardware down more and more. They have made it harder to develop for and now it is at the point where development has stopped. How does this help canon sell even one more camera?

I honestly don’t expect them to go out of their way to help us hack their hardware. I do expect them to help their bottom line by making innovative hardware cheaply, and making it as flexible as possible so that huge numbers of people buy it. Their continued efforts to encrypt and lock down the firmware on their cameras confuses me because their cameras still have a lot of flaws. The time that their programmers and engineers put into “locking the gates” could have been spent adding audio levels, reducing shutter effects, or enabling a record time greater than 12 minutes! As a law abiding purchaser of their hardware I am really offended. I am offended that they went on the attack instead of graciously acknowledging that their cameras are the focus of some innovative creative people. I am also saddened because I can not think of a way that it is good for the company, or the consumer, or the industry. This seems like equal parts greed and ignorance.

If you understand why they do this, I would love to hear it. If not, then I’m sure canon would love to hear it.

Public Relations Department
Corporate Communications Division
One Canon Plaza
Lake Success, NY 11042
E-mail: pr@cusa.canon.com