How to keep comments relevant on your WordPress.com site

tldr; If you publish articles, you should moderate all comments and only publicly post ones that expand the info in the associated article. If you use wordpress.com, here is how you can set this up in less than 5 minutes using settings and a bit of CSS.

TFW the article is choc-full of high-density information, but the comments are page after page of “This is great!” and “What changes would I need to get this working on my my 1978 Chevy Tahoe with the special Darfur 18V option?” and “I English Not how make do it?“. The few useful comments are lost in the noise.

Don’t let this happen to your articles. Please. Here’s how to chaff-proof your wordpress.com site in 5 minutes…

Continue reading →

The Most Ironic Chinese Counterfeit Fail Ever

What do you do when you see a Chinese seller pop-up on Amazon selling a product for less than it costs just to make it? You order one and wait to see what comes!

61qopymiyml-_sl1000_

Can you figure out how anyone could sell and ship a non-copyable product for less than the manufactured cost? Oh, the sublime irony of what actually showed up!…

Continue reading →

A Quick Test for Crappy WS2812B Neopixels

TLDR; If you see ink flooding around the die when you touch a Sharpie to the face of a Neopixel, you should probably throw away the batch. Disturbing video example after the jump. 

DSC_1614.JPG

I recently found a huge lot of WS2812B Neopixels on Alibaba for $3/meter, which is about 1/2 the going rate in China and about 1/8th the price for similarly spec’ed strips on Adafruit. So I bought a lot (both meanings) of them. A NeoPixel is a NeoPixel, right? How bad could these NeoPixels be? Very bad, it turns out…

Continue reading →

When to Lie

 

Question #1

Your grandma has Alzheimer’s disease. This morning she woke up and could not find her husband. He died 5 years ago. If you tell her, she will be sad and upset… at least until she wakes up again tomorrow. Should you lie?

Continue reading →

trumpWap – Make the web great again

Remember when almost every image on the internet was trump?

With trumpWAP, we can make the web great again. This is huge.

TrumpWap_Housing_2016-Jun-04_02-29-43AM-000_CustomizedView22652486299.png

Plug in the trumpWap and on day-1 you’ll get between 20% and 90% more trump (depending on your browsing habits). It’s that simple.

salon

Continue reading for more examples of trumped up websites & apps, a perfunctory video demonstration, and info on getting your own trumpWAP!

Continue reading →

Bigger is better: Build an Arduino-powered monster scrolling LED sign for about $15 a foot

DSC_1381

Would you do with a massive full color animated LED display? How about…

  • Read your Tweets in giant 140 char gulps from a block away
  • Add English sub-titles to the Eiffel Tower
  • Display a live-updating, 45 digit long countdown of the number of atoms left in the known universe

What if you could build the display however long you needed it, for only about $15/foot?

What if it was really easy to build and used everyone’s favorite low cost micro-controller so you could easily change the software to do whatever you wanted?

Well you can! Read on for details and perfunctory video!

Continue reading →

Parallel Processing Arduino Style – Make Massive NeoPixel Displays With Nanoscale Concurrent Computing

We’ve already seen that it is possible to drive thousands of WS2812B NeoPixels with a lowly Arduino using careful bit-banging. But what if we could bang out 8 bits at a time rather than sending them single file? Could it be possible to drive 8 times as many strings (or get 8 times the refresh rate) from our Arduino by processing bits in parallel? It would be like having a tiny pipelined GPU render engine inside our Arduino!

Read on to find out the results of a quick proof-of-concept test!….

Continue reading →