Posts by year

A Jack Box style voting game that punishes divergence and teaches you to vote with the group. The optimal play is to get eliminated early

You joined a local choir to meet new people. It's a cult. But they turned out to be pretty decent drinking buddies

A systemic eco-horror where two identical Earths destroy each other through convenience, exploitation, and a thousand 'temporary' solutions—until gravity itself turns against them

Speed run humanity's progress towards coffee

The last magic user in the world has lived too long. A hero's journey to defeat him and release magic back into the world

Make a game out of the frustrations of using a telephoto lens while trying to photograph small song birds

A horror story of forced backwards time travel in a fated universe

A robot crossing the country over 10 years, controlled by daily votes from Patreon contributors

Sell flowers to townsfolk who love you, while harvesting the flowers from the town, making the town more gloomy, making more demand for your flowers. (AKA cute drug dealer with flowers)

An interview with the washed up hero who publicly saved the world from an evil most foul at sixteen

Every child in the world gets one wish. Sometimes that wish creates a monster

A galactic religion feeds human consciousness into an AI black box of Doom in exchange for technology. This is the story of the resistance

Talk to NPCs, use 'magnetic poetry' to build a strange fetish, entice the most NPCs to make the most popular orgy. Social game

A puzzle game where you are a lifeform building up your senses from scratch, until you can cook a meal for an otherworldly being

A man discovers his stool samples contain embroidered scrolls that accurately predict his future

Fool the doctor into giving you a sick note. A Fibbage style bluffing game of fake symptoms

You're a detective hunting a Time Looper bomber

A puzzle platformer with a snake style expanding body. Eat enemies to gain their powers, but every meal makes your body bigger and more unwieldy

The best road trip with your friends

Mini game based around who gets to choose the radio station on a road trip

CounterProductive downtime between June 28-July 4

A status update of the Counter productive, Sky Pixles projects

A few tools I keep coming back to when making PCBs: EasyEDA2Kicad, Gingerbread, and KiKit.

2024 year end Movies and TV Reviews

Retrospective of the Tetragonal Trapezohedron polyhedron lamp

How to get a Seeed Xiao ESP32-C6 board up and running with Adafruit CircuitPython 9.1.1 and blink an LED.

ChatGPT pretends to be a useless machine and tries to stop you from flipping the switch.

Retrospective of the Vancouver skytrain and Washinton Metro PCB maps

Retrospective of the dodecahedron polyhedron lamp

PCB design of a pentagon plate of a dodecahedron lamp

Is it cheaper to build your own solution to portable CPAP battery, or buy something off the shelf?

A tutorial on how to enable copy and paste on website that disable copy and paste. Specifically BrimFinancial

Added /now and /uses pages, moved old /about content to a /timeline page, and made /about the new home page.

Looking back at 100 days of daily project ideas in 2023, what got built, what got scrapped, and why I burned out doing it.

A 2024 snapshot of the software, hardware, camera gear, and shop tools I use day to day.

2023 year end Movies and TV Reviews

Plans for a Gulf Islands lavender farm with distillery, beehives, chickens, and a hillside field for retirement.

Patreon subscription for people receive one of Steven’s projects twice a year

GeoHashing on a pendant for exploring the world

A modern decoder ring that uses strong modern cryptography encryption methods

Top down survival game where everything can be leveled up

Cheap and easy way of projecting a message onto a building

A horizontal matrix of 16 water nozzles in a grid on bike carriage to draw with water on the sidewalk

All the rest of the ideas that did not make the cut

Use a sorting algorithm to efficiently sort a list of things in order

A video series of puppets saying common quotes and truisms

Desktop application UI wrapped around common Windows Linux MacOS command line tools

Visualization of robots as they attack critical infrastructure using Conways Game of Life

Create a series of 3D printed jigs for making exploded electronic circuits without PCBs

A Wheres Waldo hunt and search photo book that teaches people how to ID local species of birds.

A art installation where a user enters a room that looks like the inside of a kaleidoscope

A website that uses flowcharts and other tools for helping with life choices all users submitted

Paper sculptures in glass terrarium with flowers, house plants, and other nature things

Sending a Baltic birch plywood postcard via the Canadian post of every mammal in BC

A lamp made of acrylic shards of pressed flowers in the shape of a lotus flower

A staircase tunnel of glowing dried flowers in shards of glass

Post mortem from showing the Flocking AI bird gallery at Maker Labs during Eastside Culture Crawl 2022: pitch, sales, and what to fix.

A gallery of MidJourney-generated 4K UHD artwork sized exactly for Samsung The Frame TV to avoid the mat border, free to download.

Tools and equipment I use in 2022: VS Code, KiCAD, Sony a6400, Sigma 150-600mm, Logitech MX Master 3S, and a Pixel 6 Pro.

Year in review 2021: 31,893 bird photos, 363 species, moving from Vancouver to Burnaby, and a year of working from home stats.

Beginner birding resources for Vancouver: intro videos, local birding sites, and notes from making the Birds of Play card deck.

A list of my current tooks that I am using in 2021

February 2021 brain dump on getting into birding with a Sigma 150-600mm, plotter twitter projects, and a 52-card bird playing deck plan.

Why I will not buy from Dell again: a saga of failed cancellations, lost rewards, wrong shipping addresses, and useless chat support.

A list of boardgames, card games, drawing games, trivia, and social deduction games to play remotely with friends during COVID-19.

Updated podcast list for March 2020 with picks like Clarkesworld, Stack Overflow Podcast, Hello Internet, Reply All, and 99% Invisible.

February 2020 brain dump: pocket operator pinouts, CNC squid kits, maze dice sculptures, photo ideas, and the Hub16 macro pad.

January 2020 brain dump: links on polyhedra, plotter art, LED lava lamps, capacitive touch PCBs, and tools for makers.

Walkthrough of every panel in the digital stained glass window series: beehive, mountains, stars, hexagon weave, heart, sun, and more.

Post mortem from the September 2019 digital stained glass workshop at Maker Labs: what worked, what broke, and what six attendees built.

A workshop at MakerLabs Vancouver where attendees design a 9x9 inch illuminated stained glass window with WS2811 LEDs and CNC-cut foam.

My 2019 tools and equipment list, with notes on why I switched to PlatformIO, Firefox, and away from Samsung phones.

June 2019 bookmarks: a Casper nightlight teardown, the Etch-A-Snap Pi camera, SVG Nest, and stacked paper stained glass.

Slides from the March 2019 ESP8266, NeoPixel, and FastLED workshop I taught at Maker Labs.

Bill of materials for one stained glass panel: pixels, acrylic, plywood, and laser time totalling about $156 CAD.

Why I rebuilt blog.abluestar.com on a fresh Jekyll theme, plus a 20-year history of my CMS choices from plain HTML to static sites.

My February 2019 podcast rotation, with a starter episode picked for each show from Reply All to 99 Percent Invisible.

February 2019 links on Arduino LED projects, an Etch A Sketch CNC, a zombie ESP8266 game, and James Clar's neon art.

What worked and what didn't on a two-month trip through South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and China.

Two days at the Huaqiang Road markets in Shenzhen and the pile of LED strips, switches, and Pi cases I came back with.

Snapshot of the software and hardware I leaned on in 2018, from VS Code and PlatformIO to a Surface Pro 3 and Sony WH-H900N.

November 2018 bookmarks on Wobble Garden, PCB art, SI playing cards, sand tables, and Islamic geometric design books.

May 2018 grab bag of links: pen plotters, ESPEasy firmware, the TWANG dungeon crawler, and a wooden lego planter.

Building hexagonal baltic birch frames for the stained glass panels on the table saw, with a grooved channel holding the acrylic.

Writing the firmware for the stained glass panels with FastLED on an ESP8266, using LED offset sets to drive randomised patterns.

Parts list for the stained glass windows: white acrylic, square WS2812B LEDs, a Wemos D1 mini, and a 5V 5A supply.

How I design the stained glass panel patterns in Fusion 360 and Inkscape, then export SVGs ready for the laser cutter.

Tech demo notes for the stained glass windows: gluing acrylic, building cardstock dividers, and killing LED hotspots.

Inspiration for the stained glass windows project, from Lumina Lab's Stoicheia dodecahedron to mandala work on Instagram.

A python script that hunts kangaroo words, smaller words hidden inside larger ones, across the 20,000 most common English words.

Notes on dropping Evernote for are.na, TeamViewer alternatives, blockchain art, the Ice Cold Beer game, and a pile of bookmarks.

How I buy Bitcoin and Ethereum from Canada using Coinbase, LocalBitcoins, and Quadrigacx, with the fees and signup time for each.

A Wemos D1 and OLED shield that polls the Coindesk API every five minutes and shows the current BTC price and my running profit.

What I brought to Vancouver Maker Faire 2017: the LED Pillar rhythm game, laser kaleidoscope, fox mask, thunderstorm cloud, and more.

May 2017 links: ESP32 sniffers, a giant laser-cut Bulbasaur, an 8-bit computer from scratch, Big Poop Data, and the BLACK 2.0 paint.

What I put in my Vancouver earthquake kit for under $30, parts list, and the personal items I tell people to add themselves.

April 2017 links: Google AnyPixel, a drinkable tequila cloud, the Cubic Cyphercon puzzle badge, ESP8266 deauther, and Shodan.

Notes for any landlord considering renting to Vancouver Hackspace: unpermitted electrical, absentee board, garbage, fumes, missed rent.

A guide to laser cutting in Vancouver after 4000 hours on the machines: where to cut, who to follow, and which shop to avoid.

March 2017 links: a laser kaleidoscope, Lixie nixie alternatives, Vancouver crime maps, Eruv wires above Manhattan, and PBF comics.

Where to do woodworking in Vancouver: rentable shops, intro courses at the Round House and Maker Labs, plus where to buy wood and tools.

A guide to 3D printing in Vancouver: where to get prints done, what printer to buy, where to find models, and which shop to skip.

Working notes on the ESP8266: useful libraries, debugging the Arduino core, taming the 300mA current spikes, and deep sleep gotchas.

February 2017 links: laser-cut art from 1000 Errors, paper beetle kits, Mongoose OS, the USB Killer V3, and the CIA cartography map drops.

January 2017 links: HexCells, the Universal Play Machine, makerjs for laser drawings, Mosquitto MQTT, and Node-RED home automation.

The software and hardware I leaned on in 2016: VS Code, Fusion 360, Wanhao i3, X-Carve, Surface Pro 3, MX Master, and the Makers Notebook.

November 2016 link dump: open source car control, ESP8266 MQTT LED controllers, the Maslow CNC, Boldport, and the poop emoji oral history.

Plain-language notes on picking a threat model and the low to high effort tools I actually use to defend against it.

My running list of must-see movies from Mad Max Fury Road back through Spirited Away, Memento, and Cube, with short notes on each.

A running list of podcasts I listen to, from Radiolab and This American Life to The Dollop, 99% Invisible, and The Moth.

A coroplast low-poly fox mask wired with NeoPixels and a WeMos D1 mini, with a brightness dial after Halloween blinded everyone.

Growing an oyster mushroom kit and over-engineering it with an ESP8266, DS18B20 sensors, MQTT, and Twilio alerts.

Notes on picking up a used Wanhao Duplicator i3, getting started with Cura, and a list of 3D printing resources.

A list of alternatives to Vancouver Hackspace after its community turned toxic, with makerspaces, meetups, and tool libraries.

Post mortem of the CNC zen garden at Vancouver Mini Maker Faire 2016: shorts, skipped steps, and fixes that worked.

How to recover an L3D Cube Particle Photon from the red SOS blink by reflashing firmware on Windows.

An ESP8266 internet button that fires IFTTT recipes, built for an upcoming VHS workshop.

Pattern tests for the firefly room running on the VHS LED wall installation.

A Halloween hat in progress with NeoPixel LEDs driven by an Arduino.

A 1.5-metre coroplast version of the Wintercroft fox mask, built during a VHS giant fox head build night.

A sous vide PID temperature controller box with LEDs, seven-segment displays, and a relay. Not a bomb.

Source code for the IStandWithAhmed workshop, a binary count-up clock with a WS2811 strip and Arduino.

A laser-cut acrylic Wintercroft fox mask for Burning Man, ruined by Gorilla Glue foaming under the panels.

A NeoPixel LED belt built for Burning Man that cycles through colour patterns.

A laser-cut wood yellow jacket in a top hat for the Fancy Bugs Burning Man series, made at VHS.

A laser-cut wood American cockroach wearing a top hat for the Fancy Bugs Burning Man series.

A laser-cut wood blowfly in a top hat for the Fancy Bugs Burning Man series, made at VHS.

A laser-cut wood jumping spider with a top hat, another entry in the Fancy Bugs Burning Man series.

A laser-cut wood praying mantis wearing a top hat, part of the Fancy Bugs series for Burning Man.

A large map of Black Rock City for camp visitors to mark cool spots with push pins and flags.

A low-poly Wintercroft fox head mask cut from coroplast, ready for mirrored acrylic panels.

Laser-cut mustache pendants strung on ribbons, hung from the dome roof as Burning Man gifts.

A nesting laser-cut gift box for Burning Man, sitting in the dome for people to trade trinkets in and out of.

Mario coins and coin boxes that did not turn out, passed along to a kids camp to play with.

A Processing-generated visualization of my 23andMe DNA data, to be laser engraved on the MeeBox for Burning Man.

A 20 by 10 inch laser-cut prototype of a voronoi pylon lantern, aiming for a 7-foot final version.

Reworking an old layered red paper-cut design by adding coroplast spacers between each layer, after seeing Charles Clary's work.

A paper prototype of the slot-together bookshelf from the DIY Furniture book, built before cutting it in real wood.

A 5-layer laser-cut paper circle design with a quick Inkscape tutorial on offsetting strokes with Stroke to Path.

A glowing backlit star sign cut from coroplast with 12 RGB LEDs behind it.

More guilloche patterns generated with an Inkscape macro and cut on the VHS laser cutter, with source files on GitHub.

Cutting spray paint stencils on the VHS laser cutter in 15 minutes instead of 2-3 hours by hand, including Cthulhu and Hypnotoad.

RescueTime tracking summary for July through September 2014.

Using the open-source SketchChair app to resize chair designs and test-cut them in paper before committing to wood or CNC.

Converting Chinese paper-cut silhouettes into vectors and cutting them on the laser cutter, with a branches design as the favourite.

RescueTime charts for March, April, and May 2014, including a stretch on vacation in Shenzhen, China.

Notes on consolidating 100+ domains across 6 registrars into one, with a short list of Gandi, EasyDNS, and name.com compared.

Six-month status update covering Google Authenticator two-factor setup across daily web apps and adding it to a test server.

January 2014 self-tracking dump: RescueTime hours, Moves step counts, Google location maps, BC Hydro usage, and sleep stats.

Three laser-cut 4-pack beer carriers in 6mm birch ply, cut at VHS, with finger grooves that bite when the bottles are full.

A giant laser-cut wooden T-Rex built as an xmas gift, with a wooden base added to keep the 3.5-foot version from tipping.

December 2013 life-tracking dump: app usage, Vancouver movement map, steps, sleep, house temperature, and BC Hydro use.

A laser-cut Frabjous sculpture by George W. Hart, scaled from 4mm to 6mm birch and given to my mother for Christmas.

Three goals for 2014: meditate after every project, post to abluestar.com weekly, and add weight, meal, and sleep tracking.

Thirty laser-cut Mario Mystery Box piggy banks for my nephew's birthday party, made on the VHS laser cutter.

Notes on running EveryDayFiction.com: the cost and deliverability headache of sending 2 million daily story emails a month.

Intro to Making Puppets workshop at VHS on December 7, 2013: finger, sock, sock-monkey, and muppet-style builds.

My life-tracking setup: Google Calendar for every event, phone alarms for sleep, and a spreadsheet of daily habit points.

Open letter to Greyhound after a Seattle baggage checker confiscated two bottles of 12-year scotch from my checked luggage.

VHS workshop on Raspberry Pi home automation: read temperature, motion, and door sensors, log them, and switch relays.

Rant about ShareMouse and Bartels Media selling crapware that disables itself behind a paywall after you set it up.

Intro to password security: long passwords, multi-factor auth, password databases, and why to use different passwords per site.

Star Wars scenes etched into wood on the VHS laser cutter as a birthday gift for a friend.

Step-by-step Raspberry Pi starter notes: NOOBS, SSH, AdaFruit WebIDE, and a Python blink script on the GPIO pins.

A word clock made by laser-cutting a wood mask of words and placing it over a monitor driven by JavaScript.

Intro to Raspberry Pi night at VHS: install the OS, SSH in, blink an LED from Python using the GPIO pins.

Reflashed a GeoGramOne GPS tracker board to POST coordinates to a web server and plot them on a Google Map.

Post mortem on the Giant Claw Game: the claw broke on kid one, so I swapped it for a magnet on a string.

Time-lapse video of the Giant Claw Game being assembled at VHS.

Build photos and notes on the Giant Claw Game cart, drill-motor pulleys, and cable tensioning.

Video clip of the Giant Claw Game cart finally driving across the XY table under power.

Status check on the Giant Claw one week before Maker Faire: claw and joystick done, gantry pulleys still slipping.

Breaker Faire at VHS on May 25, 2013: smash a car, eat pancakes, play the giant claw game, proceeds to Vancouver Mini Maker Faire.

Building a relay H-bridge for the Giant Claw gantry motors after the L298 driver could not handle the current.

Goals for 2013: weekly blog posts, 300 geocaches, learn Rails, build a card game, and add more home sensors.

Using Noun Project icons as a source for laser-cut pendants, engravings, and geocoin designs.

A link list of places to find laser-cut files, project ideas, and inspiration for the laser cutter.

Why laser-cut text falls apart in fonts with closed counters, and a switch to stencil fonts like Stencilano.

A laser-cut wooden map of Vancouver's roads and parks made from TileMill and city open data.

Year-end notes on VHS hitting 110 members, board work, Maker Faire prep, and house hunting in Vancouver.

Prints off the Marginally Clever drawbot, made as a birthday gift for my nephew.

Why I stopped paying for TeamViewer after version 6 was bricked by forced upgrades, and what I switched to.

A holiday card drawn on a Marginally Clever drawbot for the Reddit Gifts greeting card exchange.

A clear acrylic crystal skull built from stacked laser-cut slices, threaded together with fishing line.

Wooden laser-cut pendants using Noun Project icons and Raphael-generated sacred geometry circles.

First test of laser-etched acrylic jigsaw puzzles, with silhouette animals and a paired laser-cut box.

Batch two of acrylic snowflake ornaments, including 3D slot-together designs and Koch snowflake variants.

Research notes on Koch snowflakes, Processing scripts, and slotted paper designs for the next ornament run.

First cut of acrylic Christmas ornaments at VHS, with notes on letter counters and font choices to fix.

Designing acrylic Christmas ornaments in red, white, and black to cut on the VHS laser cutter.

A revised VHS lightning-talk challenge coin design, with 30 cut for the next Super Happy Hacker House.

Laser-cut acrylic challenge coins for VHS members who give a lightning talk at Super Happy Hacker House.

A Prisoner's Dilemma tournament in C with bots like Snitch, Copy Cat, and Forgives, built for a VHS hack night.

Timelapse of building the puppets and sets for our Tender Threads entry in Bloodshots Canada 2012.

A walking and transit-only scavenger hunt list built for exploring Vancouver with friends and family.

Notes from Vancouver Mini Maker Faire 2011: sign posts, a spin-art box, the milk jug dragon, and the Mondo Spider.

The classic five pirates and 100 gold coins puzzle, posted for readers to solve in the comments.

A play-by-play of how one Facebook reply, a Wikipedia rabbit hole, and a game of Winbolo killed an entire day.

A Canon S90 timelapse of the drive from Vancouver to Burning Man 2011, one frame every 60 seconds.

A hacker changes his license plate to a SQL injection string in hopes of crashing the speed camera database.

A short note on why the ping and pong handshake is a quietly beautiful piece of network design.

Three short videos worth watching: Biting Elbows office parkour, ZombinLaden, and the Daffy Duck Wizard short.

A one-frame-per-minute timelapse of Vancouver Mini Maker Faire 2011 shot on a Canon S90.

A roundup of Burning Man 2011 videos from around the playa.

A small jQuery snippet that polls an embedded webserver after a reboot and redirects users once the device is back online.

Recap of Burning Man 2011 with favourite installations Charon's rowing skeletons and El Pulpo Mechanico.

Personal tips for Burning Man: tennis-ball kickstand, marked piss bottles, fresh socks, and bike lights.

Bookmark of an LED light bulb suit to recreate for Burning Man.

Note on Evan Roth's Gold project, which lights up holes drilled into acrylic by reflecting light through the sheet.

A short video post of a dog with a helium voice, which sounds terrifying.

Burning Man 2011 camp placement at Divorce and 7:30 with Retrofrolic, plus the year's street name list.

Idea for a short story narrated over footage of ink swirling through water.

A blunt parody privacy statement for Abluestar.com that says all data is collected, kept, and sold on request.

Rant about InkPop.com sending repeat SEO pitch spam and storing user passwords in plain text.

Year-end review of 2010: lockpicking, QR tags, GPS tracking, wheatpaste Marios around Vancouver, time-lapse videos, and SkyZoo.

A Terry Bisson style rewrite where the aliens discover that humans inside Tron 2 are made out of data.

Building a simple sensor-reading Android app with Google App Inventor, and the features I wish it had.

Plans to watch the Dec 20 2010 total lunar eclipse from Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver on winter solstice night.

A color-naming survey borrowed from XKCD to find common ground on how people label the same swatches.

Bookmarks for an APC220 Arduino wireless transmission kit and the Simpsons Archive list of every food eaten on the show.

A blunt walkthrough of what a website operator can actually learn about you from HTTP headers, cookies, IPs, and user agents.

Notes on writing a will that hands off domains, passwords, and a deadman switch so my sites keep running after I die.

Rules for Yankee Grab, a three-dice game where players keep the highest die from each of three throws and total the score.

A printable Roll the Dice score sheet plus the history, rules, and inherited grandfather strategies for winning Yahtzee.

Meouloaf, a short horror film shot in 48 hours with friends for the Bloodshots 2010 competition.

Rules for Wishing Well, also called Help Your Neighbor, a three-dice game where players race to empty their chips into the pot.

Rules for Who Shit What Shit, a memory drinking game where everyone gets a scatological nickname woven into a rambling story.

Rules for Waterfall, a relay-style team drinking game where each player chugs a pint before tagging the next teammate.

A two-hour Processing.org sketch that does live light painting with a webcam, built for SHHH10 binary beers night.

Rules for Vegetable, a word drinking game where players hide their teeth while shouting vegetable names at each other.

Rules for Up and Down the River, a card-based drinking game with escalating drinks and give-aways across multiple decks.

Rules for UnderOver 7, a two-dice betting game where players wager on whether the total beats seven.

Rules for Twenty-Six, a ten-dice banking game popular in mid-century Midwest taverns until anti-gambling laws killed it off.

Rules for Twenty-One Aces, a five-dice drinking game where the 7th, 14th, and 21st ace pick, pay for, and drink the shot.

Full rules for Kings Cup with every card assignment and a long list of house variations to mix in.

Rules for Jackpot, a medieval tavern dice game also called Dragon's Hoard, played on a board of nine numbered circles.

Why CakePHP was logging users out at random, and the Security.level setting that fixed the session regeneration.

A small Windows C++ sample that calls SHGetKnownFolderPath to find the right per-user spots for app data and logs under UAC.

A rant on Canadian carrier monopolies and a thought experiment about a mesh-networked open phone with no cell towers.

Rules for I Never, the drinking word game where you find out way too much about your friends.

A one-line CakePHP trick to skip model validation in a controller so you can update legacy records full of bad data.

A CakePHP snippet that wires a search box to a paginated index, matching the query against story titles and author names.

A drinking card game where you lick a card to your forehead and bet drinks on whether yours is higher than everyone elses.

A cross-border shipping rant about a $13 UPS Ground order that turned into $53 once the brokerage fees landed at the door.

How to inject per-view meta keywords and descriptions into a CakePHP layout using $scripts_for_layout and the HTML helper.

Rules for Indian Dice, a five-dice poker variant for when you want to play poker but cannot find the cards.

Fix for missing CakePHP setFlash messages after 1.2: the template needs an explicit session check and flash call.

A drinking game where each player fills an ice cube tray with beer and races to suck every slot dry through a straw.

How to reuse one CakePHP view across multiple controller actions by disabling autoRender and calling render() with the template path.

Rules for High, the simplest two-dice game: each player rolls and the highest total takes the pot.

Rules for Golf, a three-dice game also called Dragon Slayer where every non-double roll counts as a stroke over eighteen rounds.

A C++ ConvertHexToBytes function posted as a find-the-bug puzzle using strtok_s and sscanf_s.

Rules for Fourteens, a ten-dice tavern banking game from the 1930s Midwest paying eight-to-one on fourteen hits of the point.

Rules for Fifty, a quick two-dice game where doubles score five, double sixes score twenty-five, and double threes wipe you out.

The undocumented WordPress URL pattern for getting a per-category RSS feed: /?feed=rss2&cat=ID.

Why exported C++ functions show up with mangled names like FirstGetBuf@US&NP and how extern "C" fixes GetProcAddress.

Three svnadmin commands to dump, move, and reload an SVN repository onto a new server.

How to change the Vista Start menu power button from Sleep to Shut Down so a closed laptop stops draining the battery.

A PHP script that auto-generates 79,206 timezone-comparison pages for cities like Vancouver, Paris, and New York.

After 15 redesigns, the 16th strips the site down to a clean simple template that just works.

Notes on fixing the msvcrt.dll _except_handler4_common error caused by a Vista DLL landing on Windows XP.

A code-review WTF: a sleep loop written as for(int i=0; i<PAUSE_LENGTH; i++) { i++; }.

PHP snippet that builds a post object and calls wp_insert_post to add a new entry to WordPress 2.5.1.

A small C++ CMinMaxAvg class that tracks count, total, min, max, and average for a stream of ints.

Step-by-step install guide for phpBB 3.0.1 on an Apache/MySQL host, written for COMP2920.

A 2008 rant against ACTA and what it would mean for Canadian travellers, ripped CDs, and border laptop searches.

Five-step walkthrough for turning on Akismet in WordPress to kill almost all comment spam.

A growing snippet library for NSIS installers: opening folders, registering ActiveX files, checking if a process is running.

A quick xkcd link to Rule 34: if it exists, there is porn of it, no exceptions.

A link to xkcd 330 and its made-up Rule Social-b 99.1 about indecisive friends.

Recipe for Cuban rabo encendido, a slow oxtail stew with port, sherry, chipotle, and Cajun seasoning.

How reCAPTCHA reuses the time people spend solving CAPTCHAs to OCR words from scanned books.

Pointers to a Wired wiki of bar bet tricks and a video of 1000 ways to open a beer bottle.

A small PHP function that strips every non-alphanumeric character out of a string with preg_replace and ereg_replace.

Snippets for enabling, hiding, and moving MFC dialog controls by ID using GetDlgItem.

Walkthrough of the Facebook REST API using PHP to pull friends, check pairs, and look up user info.

Step-by-step build of a hello-world Facebook app with the PHP5 API, from app registration to login.

A clip where Wile E. Coyote finally catches the Road Runner.

A video on the trick for playing nine chess grandmasters simultaneously and not losing.

A bathtub plug shaped like a flower that shifts from pink to deep purple once the water hits a safe temperature.

A bathroom wastebasket from SnowTone with a lid you seal by dropping in a magazine, made for toilet readers.

APEX magazine runs a November subscription drive promising pro-rate 5-cents-per-word pay if they hit 500 new subscribers.

Google Transit launches for Vancouver via TransLink, and promptly routes a 4 km trip as six transfers in 3 hours 41 minutes.

In 1968 a man in a police uniform stole 294 million yen from a Toshiba bank car in Tokyo and was never caught.

Origami Masters Exhibition at the Pendulum Gallery in Vancouver, with work by 25 paperfolders from nine countries.

A viral video about viral videos, cutting together the year's most-watched clips into one montage.

A short film of zombie hordes doing yoga in the park, made to promote Scott Kenemore's book The Zen of Zombie.

Lee Krasnow's Barcode Burr puzzle, a six-piece burr whose notches force the pieces to move in a strict binary sequence.

The ending song from Portal, the black-humour puzzle game from Valve that I would happily replay tomorrow.

Joining MaBeGroMo, the November alternative to NaNoWriMo where you put the razor away and grow a beard until December.

Warren Ellis turns off comments and asks readers to reply via trackback instead, boosting his inbound links and Google rank.

BAXBEAR vinyl toy release party at EL Kartel on Robson Street, November 10th 2007.

A math paradox that proves 3 + 2 = 0 by quietly dividing both sides of an equation by zero.

Comparing Subscribe-to-Comments plugins against coComment.com for tracking replies on the blogs you comment on.

Tool at GM Place opened with Stinkfist and closed with Vicarious, backed by projector visuals, rotating overhead light rings, and mirror-bounced lasers.

Starbucks is giving away one free Grande Iced Cap per day with a printable coupon through September 30, 2006.

Deep Cove Daze on August 27 fills Panorama Park with local bands, a midway, martial arts demos, and a beer garden, free admission.

Portobello West opens August 27 at Plaza of Nations with up to 100 local clothing designers, jewelers, and potters, free to the public.

The 5th Burnaby Lake Antiques Fair packs 250 tables of jewelry, furniture, pottery, books, and toys on August 26 and 27.

John Atkin leads a two-hour Fairview Slopes heritage walk on August 26 starting at the City Square Mall food court for $10.

The Ho-Hai-Yan Taiwanese Cultural Festival runs September 2 to 4 at Plaza of Nations with dragon boat races, a cooking contest, and food fairs.

The 2006 Destination Funny Shorts contest accepts comedic films 3 to 15 minutes long for screening at the September 18 CanWest Comedyfest event.

Summer Addiction kicks off August 30 at Tonic Nightclub on Granville with a beach party set including tiki huts, palm trees, and a VIP raft lounge.

Larch Market on August 26 is a one-day community bazaar in Kitsilano with artists, musicians, books, records, antiques, and clothing.

The Vancouver Zombie Walk on August 19 starts at the VAG, rides SkyTrain to Main Street, and ends at Mountainview Cemetery and QE Park.

The 2006 PNE Fair at Hastings Park runs August 19 to September 5 with the Superdogs, motocross, the Prize Home, and fair food.

A 90-minute night trail run through Capilano Canyon on August 19, with a guided group pace and a competitive category, capped at 50 runners.

A BC parks scavenger hunt running July 1 to August 15 with a checklist and a $250 MEC gift certificate for the prize draw.

Red Bull Flugtag lands at Science World in False Creek on August 19, 2006 with homemade flying machines launched into the water.

The 28th Vancouver Pride Parade rolls down Beach Avenue on August 6 with 130 floats and an expected 185,000 spectators.

Wreck Beach is a 7.8 km stretch below UBC cliffs and Canada's first and largest legal clothing-optional beach.

Queen Elizabeth Park sits at the highest point in Vancouver with 360 degree skyline views, gardens, and the Bloedel Conservatory.

Stanley Park is Vancouver's first park, 400 hectares of cedar, hemlock, and fir near the downtown core.

The Grouse Grind is a 2.9 km trail straight up Grouse Mountain, open daily 6am to 7:30pm with a $5 gondola ride back down.