Die Fly: Designing a better fly swatter

I was looking through some of my old stuff for something and ran across this gem. If you need to put together a quick flyswatter, try this one I designed for a class in college (the famous Rube Goldberg project).

Here are a few excerpts from the attached PDF. If this doesn't convince you to build one (perhaps with several improvements as noted in the document), I don't know what will.

This design performed many efficient and labor saving operations. The large number of these events combined with the effort each one saves demonstrates that the fortunate user will gain much leisure time by using this device....

This Apparatus was built on three pallets for modularization and convenient setup.

The Fly Swatting Machine was product tested with the above listed events. The Machine was immediately praised by local authorities and nominated for the “Protector of Human Kind From Flies” award.

Schematic of Sequence Diagram of Setup Drew Keller and Ethan Cooper set up the fly swatter

Project members Drew Keller and Phil Harms demonstrate the fly swatter. Live demonstration of the fly swatter. Incineration of the fly also melted the final stage

Traffic Quiz 5: Potholes...

Traffic Question 5:

What do you do when your car falls into a pothole?

Traffic Quiz 4: If you turn down the wrong street, what do you do?

Traffic Quiz 3: Where do you execute a three point turn?

Traffic Quiz 2: What do you do when you get a text on your phone?

Traffic Quiz 1: Where is the best place to turn around (near a T intersection)?

Detecting MouseEnter and MouseLeave in a control that has lots of children controls (.Net)

Seems like I have been through this before. What I want to do is hide and show something, depending on whether the mouse is inside of a certain area. For instance, I have a container of some sort with lots of controls on it. When the mouse is anywhere inside of the container, I want a link to be visible. I can't simply use the MouseEnter/MouseLeave events on the container, because MouseLeave is triggered when the mouse enters a child control and the MouseEventArgs don't say anything about what control is being entered.

Reading and Writing Disk Images for Raspberry Pi

(What is a Raspberry Pi? It's an inexpensive minicomputer, popular with hobbyists and educators.)

After doing several saving and restoring several images, I have found tools and a method that I'm happy with. I am using these with Raspbian, but they would work with other flavors, too.

How to Run Different PiPresents Shows on Different Days of the Week

A PiPresents pipresents.wordpress.com/ show (we're talking about a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian) can be set to end at a time of day, but it does not have a way to set a day of the week. I have created a workaround for this using the standard Linux cron scheduler and some bash scripts.

Say Goodbye to Windows 8's Start Screen

All of the people I've talked to who don't like Windows 8, don't like it because of the new start screen. You know, the tiled "apps" screen. A.K.A. "Metro" screen.

Maybe that sort of thing makes sense on a touchscreen device. Not on a desktop computer or standard laptop.

This free software brings back your start menu, like in Windows 7: ClassicShell. If you set it to start in desktop mode, you can say goodbye to the start screen! Here's how.