robert's blog

I listen to KEXP a lot. It’s on in the background while I’m working, making coffee, cooking dinner, whatever. However, I no longer live in Seattle and wanted to bring KEXP into my life even more…Enter: the KEXP now playing display. A Raspberry Pi-powered RGB LED matrix shows whatever’s currently playing on KEXP in real time, even when I’m not listening. The Hardware Setup A few years ago, my holiday project was setting up an LED matrix to display what flights were passing by our house based on the great project from Collen Waddell: FlightTracker.

Sound Homebrew Supply often does a yearly sale of fresh-pressed cider for fermenting, but it’s typically a blend of eating or baking apples (e.g. Jonagold, Gravenstein, etc). Nothing wrong with that, but I’ve long wanted to try my hand at fermenting with true cider apples. This year, they (unfortunately, due to a cidery closure), got access to a couple of blends made true cider apples, and put them up for sale.

An oft-mentioned shortcoming of the Gaggia Classic is the crappy steam knob. It’s not ergonomic, can break, and is just not that good looking: Modified from image by Guy Sie I was working on my 2014 Gaggia Classic last week and cracked the knob trying to remove it. Instead of paying 20 bucks for a equally-crappy replacement, I decided I wanted to try and build a replacement. There are a few mods floating around out there, but they either don’t appeal to my aesthetics, or there are no instructions on replicating what they’ve done.