The other side of the Human Rights Watch story in Rwanda

I visited Rwanda in March of 2010.  More specifically, I visited my friends Alma and Richard Johnson who were living in Rwanda at the time.  I had a fantastic time and it is an amazing country.  Even more amazing considering the genocide that had occurred 15 years ago.   I've done a little bit of reading about the issues pre and post, but my friend Rich has done a lifetime's worth.  He has written a very well researched paper on the role of the organization Human Rights Watch and the country's healing process. Anyway, I would encourage you to give it a read if you find African politics interesting. The paper is titled: The Travesty of Human Rights Watch on Rwanda on his blog created specifically for this topic.  Hopefully he can share more insights on the issues in the future.

Renewed interest in Light Strike guns...

A few interesting things have cropped up lately.  One, Hackaday had a post about Hacking laser tag and building custom guns. Which takes us to Brad's blog and his cool stuff about hacking the Light Strike line of guns.  He's gone much further than I have.  He's taken a Teensy Arduino board and can now encode (shoot) and decode (be shot) with his unit.  Read more about it in his blog post, but it's a great start.

So now it seems I need to learn arduino and all the lingo that goes with that world.  Why the heck is it called a 'stamp'?  Dunno, but I'm going to find out.  Hopefully I can pick it up quickly.  Assuming I can duplicate, to some degree, the simple targets (change color when shot) I would like to try to get two targets to talk to each other, or saving that, have all the targets talk to a central score board.  Then you can have all kinds of senario battles, such as capture the flag, rescue the hostage, etc.

Anyway, we'll see how far I get, my history with following through on things like this isn't too good.

RSA Animate series

I just got turned onto the RSA Animate series by a co-worker.  Very interesting stuff. Similar to TED talks.  The first in the series is below.  If you're so inclined, I'd head on over to the YouTube page, so you can get the playlist of all talks.

Mountain Vista, er I mean Mountain Lion

So I've been running Mac OS 10.8 'Mountain Lion' for a little over a week now and I am not impressed at all.  Fortunately it's only $20, but So far I have yet to utilize a single new feature in it. Messages plain ol' doesn't work for me.  I still have an @mac.com email address for my apple ID so there is all kinds of no-joy for messages.  I use Outlook for work, so I don't need reminders, and I use Evernote, so Notes is superfluous for me (and rather crappy to boot).   So far this is the Windows Vista of upgrades for me.  It added security, which is annoyingly getting in my face, it seems slower on some things (I get more beach balls than pre-upgrade) and of all the claimed new features, I don't touch most of them.  Yup, it's vista.

Worst part of the upgrade to me is that my trusty old 2007 MacBook Pro isn't supported anymore.  It's had a reasonable run, but it's sad when a still viable device is left behind like this.  Oh well, I guess Apple can't hit it out of the park all the time.

Got back into LightStrike for a day...

We hadn't done much with LightStrike for a few months.  It had pretty much turned into a NERF battleground here instead.  I was modding out my nerf guns with voltage upgrades and upgrade kits from Orange Mod Works.  Then out of nowhere, I hear that familiar sound of a LightStrike Gun turn on from one of the cubes outside my office.  It quickly escalated into an impromptu battle in the office.

While I was on vacation I got an interesting comment posted and a google+ comment.  The post comment from Michael Kröhnert on my first light strike mod post is about replacing some blown capacitors on a non-functional gun, interesting read, check it out if your into the internals of the guns.  And Bernd Kammerer wants to try and make a Light Strike compatible gun. So I'm trying to reply to those today and probably fire up my guns again and start another skirmish.

Photos from Istanbul!

I've put up a few photos from my trip to Istanbul!

This is the view of the Blue Mosque from our hotel.

This is the Aya Sofya, an amazing building!

There are some more photos in the gallery here:

2012 Istanbul, Turkey

Another simple LightStrike gun Mod

Ok, I've been playing around a little bit more with my  D.C.R.-012. Basically it's turned into my practice gun. I'm trying all my hacks and mods on this LightStrike gun first to learn my mistakes in one sand box as it were. At any rate, this time I decided to put a SPST push-button-style switch in. It turned out great functionally. Turned out horrific visually. First I decided to cut the clipping bracket off the back. I decided to take my new Dremel 4000 out for a spin on this mod, so I used a cutting disk to cut the piece off.

And then used a sanding band disk and buffing paste and felt pad. Lesson learned: Don't do that. Basically the plastic is far too soft to dremel at most speeds. You basically end up melting the plastic. Further I nicked the plastic where the headphone jack goes making it look even worse. Anyway, I finished up the job with a Xacto knife, which is what I should have started with. I cut a notch in each half of the case to fit the round button. Lesson #2, it's pretty hard to get this even, so either cut it out with the gun screwed back together, or put it on one side or the other, not along the lateral line.

I cut the lead going to the weapon select and soldered it to my push button. Interesting note about the capacitance sensing of the guns, they don't look for a specific value, but a delta in that value. If, for instance, you want to take a gator clip and temporarily clip a switch on, you have to do it while the gun is off. Otherwise it interprets the change in capacitance as having the button pressed and it cycles through the weapon settings continuously (which makes sense, I've increased the electron holding capacity of the wire lead. Cutting the copper tape off and putting the button on changed the initial value of the capacitance on startup but that initial value isn't important, it's changes in that value. Ok, here's what I considered the interesting part. The switch itself isn't enough. You have to put a wire lead hanging off the other end of the switch to hit the threshold needed to evoke the change. I tried some simple test and basically I need at least 3 inches of the wire I was using to get it to flip. To ensure it would trip. I used a red piece of solid core wire that's hard to see in my picture, but I basically just coiled it up in the dead space between the trigger housing and reload switch.

The End result, I have a button on the back of the gun that is now weapons select.

So now I can change weapons with one hand. I've got to tidy up the fit and finish a bit, there's gap still where the two halves meet and I cut too much on one side and will need to patch/bondo that back. But it works. I think the next switch I want to add is something like these two switch types:

These are both pictures from the radioshack.com website. The toggle with safety cover would look the coolest, but it's not a SPST. The 2nd switch is a SPST and it's lighted, so presumably you could add some more cool lights to the gun over all with this one. Anyway, we'll see if I actually get around to it. I had also thought it would be cool to have the weapon select button be a rotary switch, but as LYNX pointed out in his comment, rotary switches aren't typically SPST. I guess I could make Cam with a lobe on it to push a SPST button, but that'd be too much effort for me at this point. In the photos above, you can also see my 'learning' attempts with Amaco's Rub 'N Buff product line. I didn't prime the gun first, I simply started smearing it on, and it seemed to work as expected. The copper looks like it will give me the look I want. The silver leaf (not show) didn't work out as well as I had hoped. My local A.C. Moore only had those two colors, but now that I know how they look/work I feel a bit more comfortable about buying them online. I'll probably go for Ruby and Spanish Copper. Most of what I'm figuring out I've learned/read in various NERF gun mod sites and forums.

Still have a lot more practicing to do. It'll be interesting to see if this gun even functions by the time I'm done with it.