Chocolate Cookies

So after the best part of a year of saying I’d share it… here is our family cookie recipe…

Perfection with chunks !

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Skeleton #2 : Taschen

My second skeleton kit is called “Build Your Own Human Skeleton: Das menschliche Skelett zum Selberbauen (Taschen Specials)”. Taschen is the publisher I believe.

Shirley the skeleton. Isn't she cool ?

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Changing file extensions of files on linux

A line of shell-script helps me change all my image files from having an upper-case file extension to one which WordPress recognises:

for old in *.JPG; do mv $old `basename $old .JPG`.jpg; done
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Skeleton #1 – Osborne

When our daughter said she had to learn about bones for her school science quiz team, I thought it would be a great opportunity to build ourselves a life-sized human skeleton.

I found two on the inter-web, and thought I’d get both to see which is the best…

First up is the subject of this post: “Make this life-size cut-out skeleton” by Osborne publishing.

Completed Skull

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Raspberry Pi sticker arrives

To help the Raspberry Pi project with ironing out any issues with their ordering process, I ordered a sticker from their web-shop.

It arrived today. Huraah !

Dutifully installed on my laptop case. :-)

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Garden Fence project

A very enjoyable weekend honing woodwork skills, helping to put up a windbreak/fence…

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House announcement system – Text to speech on events

My wireless doorbell project was a huge success. But it got me thinking that all these events I’m capturing from sensors around the house should be good to listen to as they happen, not just the doorbell.

Time for some text-to-speech, like this

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What’s the best power supply for an arduino in the UK ?

Well, it seems that not all power supplies are equal. I had a shock yesterday (not literally that is) when I hooked up a power meter to my arduino-powered XBee-to-ethernet gateway controller. It measured a staggering 14watts !

Not this 14-watt monster that's for sure.

 

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Make: Electronics Enclosure in Cardboard

Don’t you think the normal electronics enclosures are dull ? They are all square boxes in grey/black plastic or die-cast aluminium. Time for something more stylish… and cheap, which is always a perfect fit for your latest electronics creation… time to get some much-underrated building material : cardboard !

Here’s how my first attempt turned out :

Enclosure with electronics inside

Enclosure with electronics inside

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Shrink image file size prior to upload in Ubuntu

Before I can upload any files to this blog, I want to cut the image file sizes down, or I’ll blow my free-allowance limit. How to do this ?

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