Batiquitos Lagoon Hiking Review

The Batiquitos Lagoon is a coastal wetland located in northern San Diego County.  For those familiar with the area, it is located just off the 5 freeway in Carlsbad.  If you'd like to learn more about the site you can visit the lagoon's website here, but I'd recommend just taking a visit one morning.

The trail is about 1.6 miles from the entrance to the end. While 3.2 miles may sound a little long for the beginner, the trail is flat with a good combination of sun and shade.  The foundation has also installed several new benches throughout the trail, so it's also quite easy to stop and rest.  There are many other walkers, joggers and folks with dogs- but all of the dogs I observed were well behaved and on leashes, which is the local law.

Overall the trail is in excellent condition and gives many opportunities to enjoy the wetlands without going into the mud or climbing any steep grades.  Many fellow walkers may also be chatting with one another or even talking on the phone, but in between you'll find a wonderful assortment of birds to listen to.  The trail starts out sandy but becomes compacted dirt by the end of the trail.  You can find this hike and others in the book "Best Easy Day Hikes San Diego" (Amazon Link).  I'll be posting a brief review as I hike each of the trails in this book, one at a time- so stay tuned for more trail reviews.

GPS Clock using an Arduino Micro

I've posted a new video of the small GPS clock project I have been working on this past week.  It's pretty easy to do, and only needs soldering on the GPS and LED units.  You can mount everything to a breadboard, so you don't need to commit the parts to the project permanently.  

You can see the video here.

Code is on Github here.

The parts for this build are:

• (1) Breadboard
• (1) GPS breakout board
• (1) 4-Digit 7-Segment LED backpack (I picked yellow, but there are other colors too)
• (1) Arduino Micro
• (1) Pack of jumper wires (this project used 10 wires)
• (1) Micro-USB Cable

Polyideas Flickr Pool

I've started adding photos to the Flickr Pool named "Polyideas" here.  That is the best place to keep track of the projects I'm up to.

Disable Driver Signing in Windows 8

As you may know, Windows 8 ships with the requirement that drivers be signed digitally.  You can turn it off with a series of safe-boot menu selections, but the downside is that Bitlocker-encrypted machines require the full recovery key. That's a pain, and thanks to RadiatorTwo from the Dangerous Prototypes forums have a simpler workaround:

Open a command prompt as Administrator run these commands.

bcdedit -set loadoptions DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS

bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING ON

This should avoid the need to enter your recovery key, but we all know you should have those numbers handy anyway.  This feature is handy for Arduinos or any other homebrew drivers that don't go through Microsoft's driver qualification process. The original post is here.

Lego Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT)

Legos can be used to build all kinds of things.  As a kid I managed to build a two speed transmission, but this is great - a CVT.

YouTube