This is part three of the focus series.
I wanted something with fun colors and loved the quote I found here. I’m usually quite the optimist, but I have felt that part of my personality weakening. I am working on flexing that muscle.
Adam and I saw this tree while driving down a country road. He is the one that took this picture.
See the first in the focus series here and the second here.
This is number two in the focus series. The original inspiration was here.
It is too easy to get caught up in what other people want, or what you think other people want. As a wife and teacher, I am used to putting other people first. I have good ideas that will remain simply that if I do not focus on making them a reality. That does not make me selfish. Focusing on my ideas will benefit others. (Repeat to self.)
I was feeding this raft of ducks and although they were individually focused, they remained a team.
Checkout my first in the focus series here.
I feel like my life can take a million different directions and I want to be open to every single one. Realistically, I want the journeys I take to be purposeful and the best ones possible. With that, I have my word for 2014.
Focus.
I loved this quote, so I used it to create my own word art. This is the first in a series of 5.
I spent the day with my dad and Adam at a local lake and took this picture. For me, it is the epitome of focusing on what makes me happy.
In about 2006, Atari sold some key chain games that connected to your TV via RCA jacks. I am a huge lover of retro games due to the hardware challenges of the time and what clever people were able to build. For a while now, I’ve wanted to get a tiny CRT screen from an old video camera viewfinder and pair it with these super tiny games. Finally, I decided to do it (check out the video below!!!).
I went on ebay and grabbed a VF-129 display module board. This is the Black and white display from an old Sony Handicam. I looked up the repair manual for that camcorder to see what info I could find out about the module. They have everything described from adjusting the alignment of the screen to the full-on schematic and PCB art.
The B&W displays connect with 4 wires: Power (4.7 volts) Ground, Composite video input (Y) and there’s a line to turn on an LED to show that the board is turned on. I got mine for $20-ish on ebay, but you can find them other places likely cheaper. The color viewfinder screens actually take composite video input (RGB inputs) from what I’ve read so those might be cool for other projects.
I opened up the battery pack and soldered half of a USE cable to the outputs. I used a USB cable because it had 4 wires. I am using 3 (power, ground and composite video) for the screen and one more for the audio. The battery pack looks funny because I had previously added a vacuum-formed topper and added screws and a switch to make it look like a real Atari game console years ago. It was on an old blahrg of mine somewhere, but I’ll never remember which one, even if I can it is likely down. Here are a few pics of the build of that if you are interested.
I ripped a tiny speaker from a greeting card and attached it to the CRT with foam tape and wired it to share the ground of the PCB. I put it on the bottom because those tiny speakers are meant to vibrate some object to help the noise be louder. In a greeting card, the paper works, but I like just sitting it on the table (especially those cheap $7 Ikea tables which are basically hollow paper mache’). Being on the bottom allows for full contact with the surface. Not to mention, this is the best place I could find to put it such that the tiny magnet doesn’t interfere with the CRT image much.
Enough talk, Just watch the video.
I got tired of going to the dropbox website to find the public link for files I put in the Public folder. On Windows you can simply right click–>get Public link, but I’m running LinuxMint with Dropbox version 2.0.22 which doesn’t support this (among many other things like Pausing a sync…)
Anyway I wrote a script that you can just drag your files onto and it’ll pop up a box showing you the public link. In Linux, a script alone can’t do this, but a script and a .desktop file can call a script to do it. Here’s what I got:
Save the following in a text file called “getPublicLink.sh” inside your Dropbox/Public folder. Make sure it has permission to run (right-click the file–> properties –>permission and check the box to allow it to run)
#!/bin/bash publicLink=$(dropbox puburl $1) zenity --info --text $publicLink
Now create a new text file named “Get Public Dropbox Link”. Paste the following there, be sure to change your username, mine says “adam” yours does not and this will make it not work. Save it in the Dropbox/Public folder and give it permission to execute as well. Here’s the file:
[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=1.0 Type=Application Terminal=false Exec=/home/adam/Dropbox/Public/getPublicLink.sh Name=My Application Icon=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/status/aptdaemon-update-cache.png #Required for double-click running and Drag-andDrop files into this icon. #reference: http://linuxcritic.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/anatomy-of-a-desktop-file/ Name[en_US]=Get Public Dropbox Link
Now you can simply drag files from your public folder on top of the “Get Public Dropbox Link” file and a window will pop up showing you the public link. from here, simply copy and paste that link to where ever you need.
