Load Hangouts Messages into BigQuery

I use Google Hangouts to talk to my girlfriend. I like it because it's a part of the Google stack and it's cross platform. It also supports some decent voice and video calling. Just like with any data you have in Google's system, you can download it in bulk. I decided to take the JSON data you can get from Hangouts and put it into Bigquery to run some interesting analytics on it. Let's see what we can do!

Another Printer Partout

Welcome to another edition of "Taking Apart Printers!" Today, we're taking apart a HP Photosmart C4680. I'm kinda excited about this one because it has a scanner and a tiny LCD screen, so that's pretty exciting. This was my printer, so I'm glad I'm recycling it. It's nice to at least try in full faith to reuse some parts to make something else, even though I'm only learning how. It beats the hell out of buying parts, right? Also, taking things apart is fun.

Taking Apart Toy Video Cameras

Toy cameras. They're fun to give to kids so they can take pictures without ruining your camera. They're low quality and cheap. But what's powering them? Anything cool? Anything useful? Many of them at least have an LCD screen, but what other treasures are they hiding?

DJ Hard Drive Turn Table Part 3 - Playing Audio

So now the turn table is writing output to the serial connection off of the Arduino. This is very good. But what good is it if we can't play audio with it? That's what this part is all about: translating the signals from the turntable into audio modulations that we can hear. In this case, we're speeding up and slowing down a audio track. Let's get started!

State of the Blog

About one year ago, I started this blog as a place for interesting computer stuff I did so people could learn as I did about new and often undocumented things and how to break them. Even with the very well documented stuff, I still had to figure some implementation details out. I know I had a blast learning and writing about this stuff, but I'd like to address some of the more meta things about this blog in this post. I try to keep it to one meta post a year, and this is it for this year.

DJ Hard Drive Turn Table Part 2

Welcome back to this episode of "Why isn't this working?" This week, we have the DJ Hard Drive Turn Table. When we left off, we weren't getting accurate directional readings from the drive. Needless to say, that kinda sucked. So I took it to an oscilloscope to figure out what was going on with the output of the op amps. It turns out it was a really weird problem.

Virtual Reality Using Your Computer as a Controller

I've been playing around with ThreeJS more and more now and I'm still not getting the hang of it. But I still enjoy using it even though I'm struggling through the darkness. I wanted to do something with its VR capabilities, but I also didn't want to pay an arm and a leg to get a decent VR headset. So I did the next best thing. I broke out my cardboard and played around with it. The results weren't Vive quality for sure, but for $15, it's exceptional what you can do with it. Unfortunately, it's hard to control something like this without a controller like the Vive. So I did something like Oculus did - made the computer the controller - but I did it without wires.