Category Archives: Technology

Tom give Christian a big copper block for his undergraduate research

Day 664 of 1000 Our good friend Tom of Douglas Fabrication and Machine machined and donated a big ol’ chunk of copper for Christian’s undergraduate research project at the NCSU Optical Sensing Laboratory.  Most of the electronics and micro-controller have … Continue reading

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Assembly language programming is different

Day 659 of 1000 Christian wrote a post titled Programming a 68HCS12 in Assembly on his NerdHow blog yesterday.  It does quite a good job of describing some of the challenges of developing in assembly language with a microcontroller.

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What does a Statistician do?

Day 651 of 1000 When Kelly tells people she is a Statistics major, people often ask if it is possible to get a job with that degree.  Beside the tactlessness of the question we are amazed that people know so … Continue reading

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3D Systems to sell cheap 3D printer for $1,299 at Staples – Can it print a gun?

Day 621 of 1000 Here is an amazing story over on ZDNet about a personal 3D printer from 3D systems that will be available from Staples at the end of June.  The 3D printer can only print within a 5½” … Continue reading

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Rules for a great career (even if it is accidental) Part 1 of 3 – Stay in touch

Day 620 of 1000 This is the first in a series of three posts about things that have helped me develop and sustain a career I love.  The first post is about how to stay in close touch with people … Continue reading

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How to teach computer programming to kids (Part 5) Projects in C, GaugeCam, and PHP

Day 608 of 1000 This is the fifth in a series of posts on how we taught our children to program, what we did wrong and how we think we could have done better.  You can see the introductory post … Continue reading

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How to teach computer programming to kids (Part 4) C#

Day 605 of 1000 This is the fourth in a series of posts on how we taught our children to program, what we did wrong and how we think we could have done better.  You can see the introductory post … Continue reading

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How to teach computer programming to kids (Part 3) Dillo (Compiling and Linking)

Day 602 of 1000 This is the third in a series of posts on how we taught our children to program, what we did wrong and how we think we could have done better.  You can see the introductory post … Continue reading

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How to teach computer programming to kids (Part 2) Working with Linux – Compiling and Linking

Day 601 of 1000 This is the second in a series of posts on how we taught our children to program, what we did wrong and how we think we could have done better.  You can see the introductory post … Continue reading

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How to teach computer programming to kids (Part 1) Introduction

Day 598 of 1000 This is the first in a series of posts on how we taught our children to program, what we did wrong and how we think we could have done better.  You can see the introductory post … Continue reading

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Christian at the Spring 2013 NCSU Undergraduate Research Symposium

Day 597 of 1000 Christian dressed up today to go to the McKimmon Center at NCSU to show off a poster he made for the Spring 2013 Undergraduate Research Symposium. He made the poster for his work at NCSU’s Optical … Continue reading

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Christian’s first undergraduate research poster

Day 593 of 1000 Christian created the poster in the image to the right to describe his undergraduate research.  This is first of the two semester he will spend working on the project.  A poster is required for each semesters.  … Continue reading

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Figuring out how to program Android phones

Day 584 of 1000 Yesterday I wrote about a series I plan to write on how Christian learned to program during homeschool.  My buddy, Conrad wrote a comment about how he was interested in programming Android phones.  That very same … Continue reading

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Computer programming for kids – a new series of posts

Day 583 of 1000 It is my daughter, Kelly’s, birthday today.  She is now a 19 year old Statistics major at North Carolina State University and is taking her first two formal programming classes, Statistical programming with SAS and Java.  … Continue reading

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Do I need a “smart watch?” The Pebble, Samsung, and Apple

Day 577 of 1000 My buddy, Brad, at Bioptigen signed up to get one of the first E-Paper smart watches on Kickstarter. He wears it all the time, probably to the make the rest of us envious, but mostly because … Continue reading

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Working with Ubuntu again

Day 417 of 1000 Christian has been stressed out about a test he took about a week ago.  He was pretty sure he was going to get a score of about 70%, but was hoping for 80%.  He messaged me … Continue reading

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Electrical Engineering 200 – Signals, Circuits, and Systems

Day 390 of 1000 The UPS guy brought a box of very cool stuff to the house yesterday.  It is all the stuff Christian will use in his first Electrical Engineering lab class.  The capstone project in the class is … Continue reading

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Christian’s Hovercraft YouTube Video

Christian’s YouTube video on how to make a hovercraft is now up to 65,638 hits.  We are amazed it has been going.  He put it up on YouTube when he was 12, so he has been getting over 15,000 hits … Continue reading

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Christian’s undergraduate research

Day 376 of 1000 Christian asked his Electrical Engineering professor what he could do to get some undergraduate research in the EE department.  His professor told him to get in touch with the EE head of graduate programs who got … Continue reading

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License plate reading: The template to find the plate works great, but needs some refinement

Well, I got the template matching going this evening.  It works great.  It is very forgiving for size and angle as can be seen by the images below.  The thing I really need to do next is get a somewhat … Continue reading

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