What is the best way to mount LED strips on polycarbonate panels?

Polycarbonate panels are cheap, strong, light, durable, and easy to buy. They are perfect for constructing large scale LED strip installations. But what is the best way to secure your LED strips to the panels? I’ve done a lot of testing to find out, and the most reliable method turns out to also be one of the cheapest and easiest…

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Why did Google declare war on HTTP?

Google is waging a war to force websites to only serve content over secure
https connections by demoting the search ranking of websites that continue to use normal http connections. “…we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure.”

At first take, this seams like a magnanimous move by the internet’s benevolent dictator. Security is a good thing, so by forcing lazy websites to finally go secure we are all better off… right?

Unfortunately, things are not so simple and Google’s motivations are likely not so benevolent…

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Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails!

Yikes, looks like the new version of Outlook 20016 has broken the POP3 implementation. If you are currently using the “leave on server and  delete after x days” function, the you should check your account because it seems like that the new Outlook is actually deleting your emails almost immediately after retrieving them over POP3. You might also be seeing dupes.

TL;DR If you are using the Outlook 2016 to download from a POP3 server, you should disable automatic updates and/or downgrade to a previous version or else your emails are likely to be deleted almost immediately.
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“Prove me Wrong” Kickstarter Campaign

I just submitted a new campaign to Kickstarter where I ask backers to prove me wrong. The larger story is that I think the new Orison Power System Kickstarter is destined to crash and burn like way too many others have. My campaign is an experiment to see if anything can be done before everyone looses. My past efforts to intervene in crash and burn crowdfunded tech have been painfully ineffective, so I will keep trying new stuff until I get it right!

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Boiling Batteries – The Effects of Extreme Temperatures on LiPo Voltage

There is a very slight and recoverable output voltage drop when charged LiPo cells are subjected to temperatures above about 75C.

Cells that have been subjected to under-voltage, however, show a very quick and non-recoverable drop to 0 volts when they reach about 75C.

If you are one of the (very few) people who are interested in all the details, read on!…

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Getting Real – Using Blind Send SPI to Turbocharge the Adafruit DotStar Libraryspi,

Last time, we experimented with spiritual blind-sending as a way to theoretically speed up SPI on AVR. While there were lots of fancy oscilloscope traces and impressive demo code, there is nothing like an actual, real, practical application to get people excited. Read on to see how much faster we can make the already highly optimized AdaFruit DotStar library with a little blind-sending action… (spoiler alert – the answer is lots more faster!)
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