500px / Flickr

Posted on April 6, 2013 by kristian

I’ve been a user of Flickr since I got my first digital camera (2008-something). However, recently I grew more and more fond of 500px for the discoverability of great content through their popular and upcoming photo streams. It seems to have evolved to a higher-quality place for presenting a portfolio, and I have since posted a number of my older photos there instead of flickr. The notion of quality over quantity also seems to be more prevalent there. I have since started using it more actively, and also submitted a number of my favourite (older) shots.

Here goes. If anyone is on 500px, please say Hi on 500px.com/kristianhentschel!

Amazon’s Glasgow Hackathon 2012

Posted on June 24, 2012 by kristian

Amazon held their first UK Hackathon for students at our University this weekend ¹. After being encouraged by our lecturers to attend this event, we actually turned up (I think we were the only second-year group there, competing against other undergraduates from Glasgow University, University of Strathclyde, and a team of PhD students).
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Notes:

This post was meant to be published in April, I just never got round to finish it. The event took place during the spring break, on March 30-31. ↩

Arduino controlled 16 x 16 LED Matrix

Posted on December 27, 2011 by kristian

Almost two years ago now I started planning and building a custom LED matrix to be controlled by my Arduino Duemilanove which sports an ATMega328 microprocessor. I used four Max7221 chips that I knew from a previous project and daisy-chained them to control the four 8×8 sections of my 16×16 matrix.

Arduino is an awesome rapid development and prototyping platform for learning to use and appreciate microcontrollers. Their boards contain a USB controller for power supply and programming from a PC, some status LEDs and pin sockets for interfacing to external hardware, all at a very affordable price. They have recently moved to the Arduino Uno (different USB controller, but still based on the ATMega 328) and version 1.0 of the software. Once I package my code as a library I’ll also check that it’s compatible with the new version.
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Hello world!

Posted on December 19, 2011 by kristian

The year is coming to a close and I’ve yet to make good on one of my new year’s resolutions: To finally do something to my website to free it from the limbo that is the eternal “coming soon” page that existed since I bought my domain name.

I often thought, “Hey, I should write that down” or “Hey, I could put this on my website”, and I experimented with quite a few more or less complicated, more or less home grown approaches to a website but never got around to something I could just use. I’ve been convinced to trust in the plugin-enhanced out-of-the-box power of WordPress after I hacked together the new Glasgow University Student Television website this summer. So, in stark contrast to what I did there, this shall be a simple way for me to publish content, without so much hacking, for now. So yes, once again I’ve joined yet another “Dark Side” (After Twitter, Facebook, et al) and set up yet another WordPress blog.

Now I hope I’ve finally arrived at a solution that I can just use. Maybe that will help in bringing me to actually use it, but I don’t promise anything.

Let’s go.