We’re often asked if we can host an introductory programming class or two; in fact, our resident Classmaster informs me that a full 19.76% of former students report they’d be “very interested” in programming courses. To that 19.76% of a representative sample size, boy have I got an offer for you!

I’ll be teaching Introduction to Programming and Python on October 6th, right here at NYCR. What will you learn, as a vaunted and privileged member of the 19.76%? The goal is to bring you through the basics of programming using some practical and simple examples, to a point where you can begin to learn independently and take home some working code that you can customize and hack on.

What do you need to bring with you? In the hardware department, you need a laptop with some variant of UNIX, like OS X or Linux. If you’re a Windows user, a virtual machine running Linux will be fine. In the brainware department, I won’t assume any prior programming experience, but I will assume a moderate amount of familiarity with computers in general. You should know your way around your own system and be curious about how things work. This is designed to be a gentle introduction, not a crash-course for the impatient, but I’ll be happy to change the pace of the course as necessary.

Interested? Head over to the class page and sign up!

Questions? Feel free to get in touch with me at [email protected]

Photo via Flickr user steve caddy, because cats.

While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasn’t stored as an uncompressed bitmap.

After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image with a hidden message from “Thu, Nov 20, 1986“:

Read on for the reverse engineering details of how we recovered this and the other three photographs stored in the ROM, and some information about the Motorola 68000 era Macintosh.
Continue reading »

SMT is here to stay, so let’s all just get on with it and learn how to use these tiny things. You can make better, faster, cheaper, more durable, smaller and neater projects. Bonus: you will feel like a great big giant.

Resistor member Raphael Abrams will be teaching an introductory course this Sunday at 3PM. Come on down and get modern!

Click here to sign up!

Just look at this accelerometer datalogger! It's got a 40Mips uC, a 4MB flash, RGB LED, RTCC, and a battery to last a week, all in about 1.5 inches. And it can be thrown against a wall without breaking. Half the parts on here are only available in SMT packages.

This is neither a tree root nor an eldritch horror — it is a thirty year old wiring harness from a punch card sorter. If you enjoyed our IBM 129 card data recorder restoration or are a fan of vacuum tube era design and mechanical engineering, you might also be interested to see what we found inside an IBM 83 card sorter.
Continue reading »

I’ve recently switched to a standing desk from Geek Desk and wanted to be able to free my hands for more important things, like drinking coffee. The foot pedals are a cast off Behringer FCB1010 MIDI foot controller, which outputs events as MIDI messages. To make it work with any computer without requiring additional software, I wrote a combination MIDI to USB HID mouse and keyboard converter that runs on a Teensy 2.0.

The Teensy translates the pedal events into various mouse or keyboard events (Escape to return to command mode in vi, Shift-Insert to paste the X11 cut buffer, mouse wheel events for the pedals, etc). Full source is available to build your own and configure your own mappings. Read on for some details on the hardware interface.
Continue reading »