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Annual Review News

Review of 2018

This year has been overwhelming and exciting and it’s probably been the most varied one so far. The stand-out experience was at The Albert Hall for Space Shambles where I shared the stage with an actual Apollo astronaut who played a massive version of Lunar Lander, laser projected onto a 25m wide screen.  But there have been […]

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Lasers News Projects

Lightning projects take home TWO awards!

After 5 years of working with lasers, it seems that I have now been accepted by the wider laserist community! The International Laser Display Association (ILDA) have honoured me in their awards ceremony in Montreal, as part of their annual conference. My awards are in their Innovative and Art category, second prize for Lightning Catchers […]

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News

Astronauts, lasers, and music at the Royal Albert Hall

I still can’t quite believe it, but last week I shared the stage at the Royal Albert Hall with astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Commander Chris Hadfield. You might know Chris from his popular twitter stream during his stint as commander of the International Space Station, including his performance of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. And you […]

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General

Installing LaserShow Xpress on Windows 10

I thought I’d give LSX a try – it’s pretty cheap and seems like fun laser software. I had some trouble installing it on Windows 10 – kept getting the message “Code execution cannot proceed because msvcp100.dll was not found”. It seems to be a problem with Visual C++ apps, and I found the solution […]

Categories
Annual Review News

Review of 2017

I can hardly believe it but this is now the tenth anniversary of my annual review, and therefore I’ve been blogging for over ten years – how the internet has changed since 2007! Back then it was all about open APIs, personal websites and blogging. Facebook was a tidy and uncluttered alternative to MySpace, the […]

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General

Calling all speakers! A hardware button to toggle display mirroring

I’ve been really frustrated that my favourite keyboard shortcut to toggle display mirroring doesn’t work on TouchBar MacBooks so I’ve made a button that can emulate it! Of course since I’ve got this working I’ve discovered there’s a weird work-around to get it working on the TouchBar, but it’s still quite a fun device, and […]

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General

Keyboard shortcut for “Mirror Displays” on Touchbar MacBook

It’s kind of a niche requirement but very important for someone like me who runs presentations with keynote split on two screens to running demos that need to be mirrored. It was always Cmd-F1 on any non-touchbar equipped Mac, but sadly that stopped working on the new Macs, even if you hit the fn key […]

Categories
Annual Review News

Review of 2016

It’s been quite a year, that’s for sure. Politics in both the UK and the US have been increasingly chaotic, and I can’t help leaving this year in a high state of anxiety. It’s certainly had an effect on my productivity and in many ways has left me questioning myself; am I really doing the […]

Categories
Electronics

Fading LEDs with PWM on all pins with Pi Zero & Node.js

I’ve been converting my ST4i workshop from Arduino to Node.js/Raspberry Pi and one of limitations is a lack of built-in PWM pins. PWM or Pulse Width Modulation can be used to fade LEDs up and down rather than just turn them on and off. If you’re new to PWM, here’s a full explanation at Sparkfun. […]

Categories
Electronics

Controlling 7 segment LED displays on Raspberry Pi with Node.js

As part of the preparation for my upcoming workshops (last two tickets left!) , I’ve been working on writing Node.js code to drive various bits of hardware that are included in the free kit that comes with the course. So I’ve made my first ever npm package! And it drives cute LED displays running on […]