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Porsche 996 911 – Essential Accessories

After having my 996 for a few years I have a few accessories that I like. Many of them are just cool accessories and some of them are track focused.

General Accessories:

I’ve become a fan of the A/C vent cell phone holders for three reasons: 1. It puts the phone very close to you sight lines making maps easier to see. 2. They seem to hold the phone in place really well, and 3. They are high enough that anything coming from the cup holder (in the 996 it’s right over the center console) isn’t going to land on the phone.

I go to a lot of events and always want my car to be presentable. Along those lines, there are a few products that stay in my car all the time.

Finally, for the track there are a few things I like to use to prep the car as well as using at the track.  Note: Your first helmet is something you need to try on in person, so check out windingroadracing.com for locations where you can go and test fit and pick your helmet.

If you have any other good accessory suggestion, please just leave a comment and I’ll add to the list.

Happy Driving!

-Scott

 

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Health Hack – Eating Keto/Low Carb – One Year In

I’ve been living and eating based on Ketogenic principles for about the last year. I started this lifestyle because over the years I’ve heard the Dr say things like “your blood sugar is borderline high”, “your blood sugar is high” , “You are pre-diabetic”. After following the comments to their logical conclusion: High Blood Sugar to Pre-Diabetes to Diabetes, I did some research into what health researchers seem to recommend for people with Diabetes. As you can see from some of the first videos below, the research seems to be very positive for using the Keto diet to correct blood sugar issues with the interesting side effect of weight loss. After doing a lot of watching and reading I decided that Keto was going to be something for me to try to beat diabetes before I actually had it.

So a year ago I started and wanted to share my “Keto Notes” on how I’m living Keto. The results for me have been really good, results I wasn’t able to get using other methods. I went from 217lbs to about 190lbs, which at 6′ with a large frame is a pretty good weight for me. I did it without starving and still being able to enjoy going out, having a beer and eating tasty foods. Going Keto really breaks down to three things. Continue reading “Health Hack – Eating Keto/Low Carb – One Year In”

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Reinvention v3

My blog has been dormant for a very long time. After leaving my last role a couple of years ago I decided it was time to take some much needed rest, relaxation and re-invigoration time. As I’m getting to the end of this time off and getting re-focused, it seems like a great time to re-invent my online presence for the 4th time. While I’ve been mildly blogging since 2007, I feel like it’s time to start putting pen to paper across a lot of topics. I’ve been gradually writing longer and more thoughtful content but have quickly come to the conclusion that posting to Social Media like Facebook and Twitter, where there are too many people acting a fool, was not going to be the best option for me. Continue reading “Reinvention v3”

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Complete Mt. Sac Fire Sensing Vex Robot Challenge

We spent about 5 days using all of the knowledge that we acquired building our Vex robot to compete in the robot challenge on the last day. We had most of the core code done by Tuesday afternoon and were able to optimize on Wednesday and a little Thursday morning. The robot was very consistent and even with the air conditioner vent messing with the flame most of the time, it was about to find it’s way out of the maze, find the flame, move to it, blow it out and then give control to Norman to go and get the ball.I’m going to leave the code for the very end of this post because it’s pretty long.  Scroll down to the bottom to see the video of the robot going through the contest.

Here is the full front view of our robot.

Continue reading “Complete Mt. Sac Fire Sensing Vex Robot Challenge”

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Part 14 – Building Sensors for your robot

Part 14 had us building a simple circuit to test for flame/heat/fire using a phototransistor. Before building the final phototransistor I put together a test using the breadboard. In addition to the breadboard test, I built a little IR emitter circuit that I would be able to use to test since I knew I was going to use this with my hack-a-toy. Here is my phototransistor test circuit. As well as the circuit reading working displaying values using the Arduino.

Continue reading “Part 14 – Building Sensors for your robot”

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Part 13 – Distance Sensing with Ultrasonic Sensor and Arduino

Part 13 was a variation of some of the work we had done in some of the previous labs. In this lab we got to use a good bit of pre-formatted code to test the operation of an Ultra Sonic or sound wave based sensor. The lab was just getting the sensor to work with some pre-created code. Here is the code I used to test …

Continue reading “Part 13 – Distance Sensing with Ultrasonic Sensor and Arduino”