The concept of “cut copy and paste” goes back to a time when people hand wrote all of their documents.  The modern concept was introduced to the computing world by Xerox PARC and Apple’s Lisa / Macintosh    Now nearly every piece of software offers some level of copying and pasting, including CadSoft’s EAGLE  Schematic and PCB software.

Editing video has been something I enjoyed doing since High School.  There I used my first tape-based NLE video system to make a Jeopardy episode where I played both a contestant and the host. In the skit I got into an argument with myself.  Of course that was long before tools like Final Cut, After Effects, or even digital video cameras existed.  Now anyone can do cheap effects for fun.

Speaking of cheap effects, using a little bit of Final Cut Pro X magic and a piece of green paper, I was able to achieve this effect:

Why am I working on this?  Stay tuned… (you can probably guess where that’s going.)

Users of the ATmega328 based Arduino boards will recognize that the analogWrite() function doesn’t actually do anything analog.  It just sets the duty cycle of a pulse width modulated (PWM) signal.  The (new) Arduino Due board, which I have had limited time to play with, actually sports two Analog DAC channels.

Using a very simple for() loop, it is possible to generate a sawtooth waveform using these channels.

Update 03/24/2015: I (finally) got mine after a couple of years. In fact, I completely forgot about it. The watch is crap. I threw it away before ever wearing it out of the house.

There’s a Kickstarter project that Andrew Plumb (@clothbot) backed and caught my attention.  It is a wrist-band watched based on an e-ink display.  The battery cell looks like it can provide about a month worth of charge.  A very unique looking watch and for an (apparently) limited time, there is a $100 reward level.  As Andrew said, it might be worth it to just take the watch apart!