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