Yesterday was my birthday. Another year older. Juliet bought me a nifty little microscope. It will be very useful for spotting those soldering errors!
Those pins are on a 0.63mm pitch!
Archive for 2009
This site is currently hosted by a POV mini-ITX machine hidden in the bowels of my house, with its own UPS. You need power tools and lots of time and patience to gain access to it. Luckily it is extremely reliable. It has never crashed.
Anyway, I was inspired by this story to set things up so that when my burglar alarm is triggered a hidden camera records full-motion video of the room where I keep many of the things that are precious to me. I thought about how to hide such a device effectively and I eventually settled on the idea of hollowing out a small chamber within the pages of a book, and hiding the camera there. You see, burglars are busy people. When they break into your house, they don't sit and ponder what would be the best stuff to take. They do a mad dash, picking up stuff that looks like it might fetch a couple of bob. Sometimes they make embarrassing mistakes, stealing stuff that is worthless, and missing other stuff which is far from worthless. But I suspect most burglars believe that books fall squarely into the "worthless" category, and waste no time on them.
Now you see it...now you don't (hopefully!)
I really hope I never have to use it. I was burgled several years ago and lost a lot of stuff. None of it was particularly irreplaceable, but I didn't have any contents insurance, I didn't have an alarm, my windows were in a sorry state, and I was not doing any of the usual things to make life difficult for burglars. The worst thing about burglary is not losing stuff. It's the idea that someone has broken into your house. The police don't particularly care. Unless you can give them incriminating evidence on a plate, they do nothing, but if you take matters into your own hands, they're down on you like a tonne of bricks.
I managed to catch a picture of this bird in my garden today. I'm no expert but it looks from the RSPB site like a male Sparrowhawk:
"I can has cheezburger?"
My friend Ben quit his job to cycle from London through Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and Asia. You can read about his epic journey here.
