In the car, I like to use my phone for playing podcasts and directions.  My work phone was recently upgraded, and I was looking for a practical way to mount it.

As cars are kept for years, and phones change regularly, I didn’t want:

• anything permanent
• anything that used adhesives (they never come off!)
• suction cups
• anything that blocks vents

The neatest design I’ve seen so far is a steering column mount on Thingiverse, which I had been thinking of modifying for my phone.  As my car has a two-tiered dashboard, I thought I would just create a dock that fit my phone in the lower tier.

While in high school, I bought a really cool rack mount amplifier at a garage sale.  It was branded Queon, and had lots of inputs - it was great.  It was supplemented during my university years with an 8-track player/amp combo, acquired from Value Village.  The Queon met its end when a roommates’ cat knocked over a vessel of water that had been rested on top of the amp.  The 8-track player/amp combo met its end in a post-university move.

I finally moved my weather station from a solder-less breadboard to a prototype board.  I’m actually surprised the breadboard survived last winter.

Until I get around to adding an anemometer and rain gauge, this is probably as far as this project is going to go.

Last winter, I built an SIO2Arduino circuit - it is an adapter, that enables the Atari to use disk images loaded on to a regular SD card.

To the Atari, the SD card works just like a floppy drive.  It’s was built following the instructions found here: http://whizzosoftware.com/sio2arduino/

Our 2016 balcony crop has come in. A bit of a disappointment this year, as we were away for most of August, and were not able to care for the garden as much as we would have liked.

• The corn was harvested too late - by the time we returned home, it was overripe and tasted pretty gross.  It looked OK.
• Our sunflowers and some of our other flowers died
• Some of our carrots fared well and tasted great, but another planter of carrots died
• One of our tomato plants died, the other is still doing well and bearing a couple ripe tomatoes every day

I need a balcony friendly watering system!

My “RetroPie” days of emulating old games on the Raspberry Pi are over - from now on, I can play the real thing.

I was given a friend’s old family computer, an Atari 800XL in 2011.  They still had all the parts, except the custom molded cable that connects the floppy drive to the unit.