Saturday, I deconstructed a broken CD-ROM to make a toy. This is essentially a so-called “symet,” which is the simplest device in the BEAM robotics world. Usually, they are made with solar cells and the accompanying logic, but as I don’t have any of those, I just used a AA battery. One battery, a motor pilfered from the aforementioned CD player, and some vacuum tubes glued on for balance (they serve no electrical purpose; I just had them sitting around and they look cool). Pretty simple but more fun than a box of Transformers. Possibly.
This is what the inside of a 1st gen CD-ROM looks like:
This is what the inside of my MP3 player looks like:
I spent a few hours yesterday doing the house-wiring thing. Again. I’m running cable for HDTV from my attic to my living room. Therefore I have little pink bits of fiberglass insulation everywhere. I have the cable running the whole distance to the TV but I had to stop short of getting it actually into the living room. It appears that I will need to reopen the hole in the wall from last time to drill a new hole through the stud to let the cable up from the crawl space. And then patch and repaint. Why am I doing this again?
In the district the other day I saw a jeep with spinners on the spare. Awesome, dude! I bet that guy has 20″ rims if-you-know-what-I-mean.