Author Archives: benjamenjohnson

9) I Made Penny Batteries #NewThingEveryDay

I was watching the King Of Random’s channel again last night and I found his video on how to make a three penny battery. I’m an electrical engineer, but I’ve never made my own battery even as a kid, so I thought this looked like an interesting project for this afternoon. This project works because […]

8) I Built My Very First Android App #NewThingEveryDay

Today I set out to build my first Android app. I have a future project that involves using a phone, so I wanted to start learning the platform. I’ve a fair bit of programming experience, so this wasn’t a huge accomplishment, I’ve just never built anything on the Android platform, so I wanted to get […]

7) I joined Pinterest to Organize My Project Ideas #NewThingEveryDay

Like most creative people I collect pictures of neat looking things for inspiration. For instance when I see a cool LEGO build somebody has created I’ll usually save the photo to a folder on my desktop called LEGO. I’ll do the same for woodworking projects, craft projects for the kids, or whatever project I’m currently […]

3) Have Son Teach Me How to Play Minecraft #NewThingEveryDay

I tried Minecraft once when you could download the free edition for tablets. I never could understand the appeal. But, my son eats, lives, and breathes Minecraft. He’s always trying to tell me about something happening in in the game or about something he made. Sure, I’ve picked up some of the lingo from talking […]

Not Just Hype: Antec Earthwatts Power Supply

My the overload protection in my power supply started randomly shutting down my computer, so I figured I’d replace it with an 80 Plus rated power supply. It happened that Antec was offering $30 rebates on their supplies so I picked up a EA-430. There wasn’t anything remarkable looking about the supply and it adequately […]

ffmpeg: Batch Converting

    I was getting tired of converting each individual flash video to mpg by hand, so I wrote a script to convert every .flv file in a directory. #!/bin/shfor f in *.flv ;do FILE=${f%%.flv}; ffmpeg -i "$FILE.flv" -target ntsc-dvd -s 320×240 "$FILE.mpg" done     Using my favorite bash scripting tutorial: The Advanced Bash scripting Guide, I figured […]

Snapfish/Costco Quick Upload in Firefox 2.0

    After upgrading my wife to Firefox 2.0, she complained to me that the Costco quick upload feature was no longer working.  She had to upload her photos the painfully slow way.     It turns out if you change your User Agent to Firefox 1.5, Quick Uploader will work.  Here is how to get Snapfish/Costco's […]