Les – Annals of the Buddha with the 'Tude

May 19, 2025 Les

Wiz-War – the Wizards

I cut the wizards out of different color acrylic. The basic design was a wizard, the base, and a holder. The holder is for a place to keep the treasure with the wizard. I found someone’s design on the net

May 19, 2025 Les

Wiz-War – acrylic boards

I wanted to add some more boards to my game, and seein’ as how the acrylic I was pulling out of flat-screens was piling up, I decided to give it a try. The first one I just cut out of

May 19, 2025 Les

Slide Scanner Light

I was going through some old electronics and found a slide scanner that plugged into an HP scanner and took it apart. The insides look like a fluorescent shop light with only one bulb. I found out it ran on

May 19, 2025 Les

Office Rear View Mirror

Unfortunately, Mike flipped his truck on a slippery on ramp during a snow storm. Fortunately, he was not injured. Unfortunately, the truck was a loss. Luckily, the weather was bad enough so I had a snow day and I could

February 6, 2024 Les

Tech Menorah

Having a Christmas tree, I got requests for a menorah. I realized that programming it would be the easy part, and the only idea I had for the candles were transfer rollers. Transfer rollers are used in laser printers to

February 6, 2024 Les

Making My Wiz-War Boards

I made seven of the ‘official’ Wiz-War boards out of birch plywood. I used 1/4″ for the base, 1/8″ for the walls, and 1/16″ for the doors. I settled on making the boards eight inches across. I made laser cutter

February 6, 2024 Les

Playing with Alpha Channels – part 2

In part 1, we learned that splitting a gray scale image into a background and a transparent foreground, we need to do is solve $T=B(1-\alpha )+F\alpha $ with variables T (target gray), B (background gray), F, (foreground gray) and the

July 24, 2023 Les

Printing Your Own Game Cards

Part of the Wiz-War project. The idea hit me when I found out you can buy blank playing cards. Terry had made his own Wiz-War game a while back that was pretty good (the game first came out in ’85)

July 24, 2023 Les

Kilroy Was Here

(fun with the vinyl cutter printer – making stickers) and here… and here… You can get refrigerator magnet sheets and attach the stickers so they can go on refrigerators, whiteboards, and laser cutters. They’ll even stick to vehicles. This one

May 24, 2023 Les

Playing with Alpha Channels – part 1

While writing my program for visual cryptography, I noticed that each pixel in a picture could gets it’s own value of an alpha transparency. While I couldn’t find a way to make it useful, I recently returned to the project