Tiger Woods designed a unique golf experience named the Oasis Short Course in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I’ve never heard of a place built like this, but it sounds fun. The course has 12 greens where golfers can choose different arrangements to play in about an hour. If we had courses like this all over it would open up the game to a lot more people who don’t have time for a typical 9 or 18 hole round of golf.
In Search of the Perfect Wallet
Many years ago, I started the search for my ideal wallet. I wanted something light with easy access to the items I was carrying. I’ve tried countless different products. These are some of my favorites.
JIMI
I found the Jimi in 2005, but never actually carried one. It was too bulky for me. I have kept it in my vehicle ever since though. It holds various reward, membership, and punch cards I would never want to carry with me 24/7.
Slimmy
When I found the Slimmy in 2010 I think it was the first time I drastically reduced what I carried around and started putting my wallet in a front pocket. It was such a great wallet I replaced it with a newer version in 2013. Occasionally things would fall out of the wallet though. Not good.
Evan
In 2014 I came across Ainste and their Small Evan wallet seemed like it would solve the issue I had with the Slimmy. With the rubberband it was actually thinner overall too. The Even had its own issues though. Accessing cards wasn’t easy at all and the biggest problem was the damn rubberband. I had two of them snap while traveling. Without the rubberband, the wallet becomes a folded piece of leather. Useless.
Ridge
Earlier this year I may have found perfection with the Ridge wallet (referral link for 10% off). I bought the cash strap version. It is more compact than any of the other wallets, securely holds cards and cash, feels great in your hand, and even blocks RFID. I’ve been using it since March and don’t have a single complaint.
Do you have a favorite wallet?
A New Hobby
My recent Raspberry Pi project combined with more and more interest in home automation led me down a road I didn’t expect. I find some of the home automation products out there limiting. What if I could mess around and build some of my own devices?
I’ve been thinking about putting some type of temperature sensor in the garage for a while. I heat the garage up in the winter for workouts quite often and never know when it’s warm enough. I’d found my first project! I’d need another Raspberry Pi and at least a temperature sensor. I didn’t really know much about extending the functionality of a Pi, other than I’d need to do some soldering and learn a more about electronics, circuits, etc. Enter AdaFruit. It’s a very cool company with an awesome store and a ton of resources to learn.
Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT hacker & engineer, Limor “Ladyada” Fried. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Adafruit has grown to over 50+ employees in the heart of NYC with a 50,000+ sq ft. factory. Adafruit has expanded offerings to include tools, equipment and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests and approves before going in to the Adafruit store.
I saw Ladyada’s Electronics Toolkit in their store, which looked like a great way to get started. My favorite item is the “solder sucker” even though I may never use it. Such a cool name.
Then I came across AdaBox.
AdaBox is a quarterly subscription service from Adafruit, centered around products from the Adafruit ecosystem. Each AdaBox will contain a curated set of Adafruit products that will help you get started with do-it-yourself electronics.
The second box is shipping out to subscribers soon, but I was too late to jump on board. Lucky for me, they had some AdaBox001 – Welcome to the Feather Ecosystem still in stock, so I ordered one.
It has a wide variety of components. Should help so that I don’t start randomly buying items. I’m hoping to get in on the third subscription, which opens up on the 19th and I will pick up AdaBox002 when it’s available in the store.
Once everything arrived, I started playing around on my kitchen table. I quickly realized it wasn’t the ideal place. I needed a workstation. When I get into something new, I tend to go all-in, which I believe helps me stick with it. So I set a plan to put a second desk in my office and bought more stuff:
- Standing desk
- Drafting stool
- LED magnifier lamp
- Smoke absorber
- Solder tip cleaning wire
- Surge protector with USB outlets
- Safety glasses
- Plastic adjustable organizers (picture below)
I’m excited and really happy with how everything came together.
I found these organizers for about $4 each at Walmart. They work really well for storing all of the tiny pieces.
I haven’t built anything yet, but I’m learning a lot and enjoying the process. My list of project ideas is growing and will keep me busy for as long as I want. As a bonus, I now have a standing desk in my office where I can get actual work-work done when I need a break from sitting.
Hard Drive Purge
After cleaning out some closets I have quite the stack of drives to destroy.
DIY Camera Mount
I’m usually very good at keeping parts, but for some reason, a couple of months ago, I threw away all of the mounting brackets for an old Dropcam. Sure enough, I moved the camera to the garage and had no way to mount it. It had been sitting on my vise shelf ever since.
While cleaning out the closet in my office this weekend I came across an old cell phone car mount. Took apart one of the elbow joints, removed the big suction cup from the bottom, and screwed the whole thing directly into the wall using a longer screw and an anchor. It squeeze around the camera for a solid hold, but I looped the cable around the bracket just in case the arm springs fail at some point, so it won’t go crashing to the floor.
Getting it up high provides a better view as well.
Chrome Complaints
The switch from Firefox is almost two weeks old. It’s been ok. Some things I don’t like about Chrome:
HTTP auth popup dialogs don’t allow pasting a password via the keyboard. You have to use the mouse.My fault!- You can’t drag a tab onto the bookmarks toolbar to bookmark it. You can highlight the address and drag that though.
- It’s taking longer than expected to get used to doing Google searches from the address bar instead of a dedicated search box.
- I keep selecting Copy from the right click menu, when I’m trying to Copy Link Address.
- Clearing the DNS host cache is a pain in the ass. I use my hosts file a lot to load domains from a sandbox server.
Maybe I need to dig around extensions a bit. What are your must haves?
Pi AD2 Accuracy
While developing Pi AD2, 90+% of the testing was done on my Mac. Over Thanksgiving I did use the actual Pi for a 10 minute workout on Dad’s Airdyne, but the UI, code, and formulas are all completely different now. It was unclear how well everything would work on the Pi’s hardware. After a longer 20 minute workout yesterday, I couldn’t ask for better accuracy.
When I finished the workout, the Airdyne showed 458 calories and 6.68 miles, while Pi AD2 showed 455 calories and 6.68 miles. That’s an accuracy of 99.3% for calories and 100% for distance! See for yourself…if you can even see the display. 
I did uncover some usability issues and determined I need to prioritize getting the production build to work. Having to wait for the development build to run can take a minute or more. I should also make the app launch on boot since I don’t use this Pi for anything else.
Traffic Choice
If you had to pick between L.A. traffic and X-mas shopping traffic for an entire year, which would you rather drive in?
Lit
Who would have thought it would be so exciting to light up some LEDs? I had a late night playing with a breadboard for the first time. It was also my first time soldering anything. I had to attach some headers to a Raspberry Pi Zero.
Home Screen – iPhone 7 Plus
A lot has changed since I posted an iPhone 4 home screen in 2010. Looks like I was early to the emoji game. I have a lot more apps now, but keep my #OneScreen membership alive. Many of those app groups have several pages inside.
