Archive for January, 2009
Thumbdrive freed from it’s shell
I know from my traffic stats that a lot of people end up here searching for things to put on a usb stick drive. I thought some of the traffic here might appreciate this:
My wife went to a trade show last spring and was given a free 1 GB thumbdrive with marketing materials on it from one of the vendors. First of all, I was a little suprised that 1 gig flash drives had reached the point where they can be given away as swag. I got a 128 mb drive going into a concert the summer before, but 1 Gig is actually a useful size.
Except she didn’t have a use for it so she gave it to me. It had this pop top case that looked kinda cool initially but quickly turned out to be a nuisance. The case made it take up too much space in my pocket and the latch on the lid never stayed shut.
I decided to try to tear it down just to the plug and circuit board to see if I could use it to make my own case.
The outer plastic proved to be pretty tough. I could feel that the electronics rattled around a little bit inside it, but I could not get leverage to cut throught the plastic.
I decided to hit it with a really big hammer.
When I did, look what popped out:
There was a whole USB stick inside the annoying case. It even has an activity LED on it that would be covered up by the pop top case.
Geeky Posts
When I started this blog, I wanted it to be a mix of stuff on open source, hardware hacking, and progressive politics. Besides all being things that I’m interested in, I think that these are topics that have a lot of idealogy in common, but the two groups aren’t really aware of each other and don’t really communicate.
So during the runup to the election, I got pretty obsessed with the daily news cycle and all my posts were related to election politics.
So now I’m going to try to balance out that spurt of political posts with some things related to hacking hardware & software that I’ve been meaning to post. Part of the problem is I never finish my geek projects in my spare time so I have nothing to post about.
Congratulations
Congratulations to the United States.
Obama giving his inaugural address
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
Today we are reminded again what it’s all about.
That our system of government can do the right thing. That an election (or two) can turn the course of the country.
That hope is a traditional American value.
My parents were activists in the 60’s and 70’s. I wish that my mother could have lived to see it, she would have loved what Barack Obama stands for. My father, I believe, held on when his health was failing just to see what the outcome of the election would be. Then, when he knew our country was safe again, that we were on the right track, let himself fade and passed away the same month as Obama’s election just a few weeks later.
Congratulations to the United States.
Today we proved that we can still be great.