The Curious Engineer

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We Saw a Chicken …

scruss.com/blog

work as if you live in the early days of a better nation

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’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
4,860 from 4 Jun 2003 to 19 Jul 2026
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weekly (26 in the last year)
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personal blog
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Latest

July 2026

  1. New font: NearlyQ
  2. in which I invent disemvowelling
  3. computer fire 1977!
  4. the vertical hold was off, I remember
  5. the mail to cro(y)don
  6. Early concern for Alan Longmuir
  7. unfortunate frog pyre
  8. the unfortunate princess
  9. quite an extensive record collection
  10. I want to be an e(n)gineer!
  11. plane tree trimmer
  12. New font: OCRmA
  13. Look Mum, No Socket!

June 2026

  1. Home-made Random Digits
  2. It’s baby skunk time again!
  3. New font: nic7pin
  4. New font: A73

May 2026

  1. New font: E73
  2. Twenty Past May
  3. The Broken BASIC Years
  4. ROT13 and other cypher silliness

February 2026

  1. Official SCRABBLE®Brand ANAGRAMS
  2. Crosstown is finally open and I am 😐

December 2025

  1. Commodore PET startup sound (again)

November 2025

  1. Looking for: mystery conference call music, c.2008
  2. mz2synth: make sounds from images

October 2025

  1. The Epic of Mitorzp (fragment)
  2. Reading Atari ST floppy images on linux
  3. Tom Pittman’s “A Short Course in Programming” for the RCA 1802
  4. Raspberry Pi vs used Thin Client

August 2025

  1. The smell of smoking RIFA capacitors
  2. local wildlife
  3. img2blocks

July 2025

  1. lightsleep vs deepsleep on Raspberry Pi Pico
  2. For 4 MB ESP32-S3 users

May 2025

  1. Just before the Extinction

April 2025

  1. it’s white sucker time!
  2. plotter stuff on that Brother printer

March 2025

  1. SparkFun Retired Products Archive Reference

February 2025

  1. Snow-loving Solar Marble Machine

January 2025

  1. MicroPython Benchmarks
  2. The 100 Doors Problem, on a very small computer
  3. Parallel MicroPython Benchmarking
  4. Trumpeter swan got harmonics

November 2024

  1. BASIC-52 on tiny CH552 boards via Linux

July 2024

  1. Raccoon kit dojo
  2. Cheap NeoPixels at the Dollar Store

June 2024

  1. Brother Canada laser cartridge return label

March 2024

  1. Thousand Days: Concept

February 2024

  1. Crickets in February

January 2024

  1. We used to have to *wait* for our memes …
  2. “… that Chinese instruction manual font”

December 2023

  1. The Potato

November 2023

  1. can we…?

September 2023

  1. Autumn in Canada: NAPLPS
  2. The glorious futility of generating NAPLPS in 2023

July 2023

  1. SYN6288 TTS board from AliExpress
  2. Adding speech to MMBasic
  3. Markedly less success with three TTS boards from AliExpress

June 2023

  1. SYN-6988 Speech with MicroPython
  2. Welcome to Trash Panda City
  3. Speech from Python with the SYN6988 module
  4. baby skunks!

May 2023

  1. A terrible guide to singing with DECtalk
  2. Using the IBM Wheelwriter 10 Series II Typewriter as a printer
  3. The Joy of BirdNetPi

December 2022

  1. Edwin Morgan’s “The Computer’s First Christmas Card”

November 2022

  1. MicroPython on the Seeed Studio Wio Terminal: it works!

September 2022

  1. broken box is crying

August 2022

  1. MicroPython MIDI mayhem (kinda)
  2. INA219 Current Sensor and MicroPython

July 2022

  1. Kennedy Station roads are open to bikes again!
  2. It works! It works!
  3. Mystery lockdown phone message
  4. The Quite Rubbish Clock, mk.2

May 2022

  1. Hydraulic Tiles

March 2022

  1. Canada’s longest running radio program is wrong!
  2. Adding RGB LEDs to an illuminated arcade button
  3. you can colour this in if you want to

February 2022

  1. More Magic Designer Nonsense
  2. Slightly imperfect Hoot-Nanny/Magic Designer simulation

December 2021

  1. A new old calendar
  2. looks like your dodgy uncle
  3. I (U+1F494, BROKEN HEART) UTF-8

November 2021

  1. I spent all of yesterday calculating circular key grids …
  2. one perfect cayenne
  3. Autumn in Canada: PicoMite version
  4. p-touch Pico pin labels
  5. Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: slides and thermals

October 2021

  1. Neep Lantern 2021
  2. Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: initial performance
  3. Modding an Adafruit PIR for 3.3 volts
  4. Lentil Soup

September 2021

  1. Another Raspberry Pi Pico language: MMBasic

August 2021

  1. gecko at the watering hole, forever
  2. Some okay CMYK results from DrawingBot, finally …
  3. Snowy, after Paul Carter
  4. for Paul Carter, after 15 years

July 2021

  1. detail from a million step random walk
  2. Tetris for Applesoft BASIC
  3. Raspberry Pi Meetup: Touch Sensors
  4. digging the BlueSCSI
  5. GTALUG Lightning Talk: Pages → Searchable PDF (→ archive.org)
  6. Powering a Cambridge Z88 with a MT3068 module
  7. niche 68K Mac emulation needs

June 2021

  1. I think I remember this music video
  2. Colourful Alligator Clips
  3. Pied Beauty, ya pie
  4. NO SIGNAL
  5. Raspberry Pi Pico with TTP223 Touch Sensor
  6. Directing, 2003-08-14 Toronto
  7. CardKB mini keyboard with MicroPython

May 2021

  1. An hour of Pink Noise
  2. The cheapest Micro SD card interface in the world
  3. cp2up.sh — fits the important part of Canada Post print labels two per sheet
  4. Endless screaming in URL
  5. Happy Birthday Alvin Lucier
  6. Applied Futility: Re-creating RAND’s ‘A Million Random Digits’

April 2021

  1. Delicate tracings from a terrible PRNG
  2. as I lait me down to sleep

March 2021

  1. Niche Knowledge: Z80 parallel port SD card on Zeta2
  2. ZX81 40th Anniversary
  3. Seeeduino XIAO simple USB volume control with CircuitPython

February 2021

  1. Nyan Cat, except it gets faster — RTTTL on the Raspberry Pi Pico
  2. Visualizing PWM
  3. Raspberry Pi Pico: DS18x20 in MicroPython
  4. Quick labelled Fritzing Raspberry Pi Pico layout
  5. Presentation: Getting Started with MicroPython on the Raspberry Pi Pico
  6. SeeedStudio Wio Terminal

January 2021

  1. Thursday Morning Gravity Wells
  2. Osculating Circles
  3. Book: Fortran techniques with special reference to non-numerical applications (1972)

December 2020

  1. CMHC model house designs, 1947–1978
  2. TIMTOWTDI ’70
  3. making Apple II cassette audio using the Epple-II emulator
  4. bench64: a new BASIC benchmark index for 8-bit computers
  5. Raspberry Pi Meetup tonight: the SeedStudio Wio Terminal

November 2020

  1. Winnipeg & The Forks

October 2020

  1. micro:bit croc clip keeper
  2. IKEA TERTIAL tripod mount
  3. Absurdly prescriptive but helpful Dupont connector instructable …
  4. memo to self: trivial HP-GL → GCode converter
  5. Three-colour Penrose P2 tiles

September 2020

  1. card for my mother-in-law, who is feeling a bit isolated right now #glint
  2. Arduino Nano “Dead Bug” Case

August 2020

  1. Stand for PROTODOME’s 4000AD chiptune album
  2. Glint
  3. calculator for engineering nerds

July 2020

  1. speech on Raspberry Pi: espeak-ng
  2. The Mandelbrot Set, before Mandelbrot

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