Category: General
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Toward an open-source Pick and Place machine
So, there’s some really cool, empowering stuff going down these days with regard to manufacturing. Cartesian machines (i.e. CNC mills) are relatively simple to build from off-the-shelf parts; there are a bajillion people doing this and plenty of ready-made open-source designs available. More recently, hobbyists have gotten in on designing open-source rapid prototypers (3D printers);…
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I quit, I win, final, no talkbalks
It’s like third grade all over again, except that I could theoretically have ice cream for breakfast if I wanted to.
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Windows 2000/XP Driver for (some) Veo Stingray and IBM PC Camera V5000 webcams
UPDATE: For Veo Stingray drivers, try these first. In case they disappear… Stingray 300V (Win98/ME/2000/XP) and Stingray 323V (Win2k/XP only). The one sold by AllElectronics uses the 323V driver. I picked up an old “Veo Stingray” camera from surplus dealer AllElectronics. These things are pretty junk by modern standards (320×240 resolution, unsightly rounded “looking through…
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Tubthumping (or, Sears/Kenmore washers are shit, do not buy them)
So there we are, minding our own business, when an angry demon springs to life in the basement. He is on a rampage, pounding against the walls with all his might, THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP BANG BANG BANG. We race downstairs. Turns out it is only the Sears Kenmore front-loading washing machine’s internals beating themselves…
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No, she cannot has cheezburger. Laser pointer, yes!
We got a kitty last weekend. Like many new additions of the human kind, we hadn’t really planned on it*, but now we are in love with her. Her name is Spirit (she comes pre-named). She had no trouble settling into the new house, except for spooking out at the noise from the radiators at…
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Banned from Google (or, How I Became A Dirty Rotten Spammer)
An update, 1/28/2011: It turns out there was a legitimate problem on the site after all! Specifically, hacked by spammers at some point and filled with invisible links & keywords. Skip down to the comments for the details, and be aware that the rant that follows is based on a fairly complete lack of information!…
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My quickie guide for setting up mspgcc for ez430-cc2500
Mostly for my own reference for the next time I have to set it up on a new machine, but may help others on their first time install. Valid as of Feb. or so this year. Software ‘shopping’ list (all free/OSS tools) Set up the toolchain (mspgcc). There seem to be several important tools missing…
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DIY-Spy: a homebrew 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum analyzer
I was reading the Thinkgeek catalog a while back and an interesting gadget caught my eye: “Wi-Spy”, a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer on a USB stick. Coming from the world where “spectrum analyzer” refers to a big benchtop box with a name like Le Croyright, we can’t afford those Agilent on it, my first thought was,…
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Protected: A decade of thoughts… // Two’s complement (one’s a crowd)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Steppin’ Razor: Yet Another Cheap DIY, Homebrew CNC
After about an entire year of the parts sitting around, next-week, next-month, ya-I-been-meanin-ta, tonight I managed to get my homebrew CNC router* assembled into a usable (or at least testable) state. The entire design (if you can call it that! – it was really kind of ad-hoc) consists, as much as possible, of parts commonly…
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Stupid Excel Trick – amuse your friends & bore your enemies
What’s 1-2? Today, MS Excel tells me it’s +39815. (Tomorrow it will tell me something different.) Some while back a signup sheet went around the office for our annual lamb roast. Since every problem (nail) in an office environment has a preinstalled office-suite hammer, the signup list was an Excel spreadsheet. Once everyone has entered…
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Firefox 3, SSL and self-signed certificates
First off, for those who know what I’m talking about and are just as pissed…the fix! (sorta) Open about:config and set the follwing settings: browser.xul.error_pages.expert_bad_cert: true browser.ssl_override_behavior: 2 This brings you down from five clicks to “only” two. :-/ So, a while back I got sick of the nag dialogs, caved and updated to Firefox…
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Creepy government project…
Title: Virtual Dialogue Application for Families of Deployed Service Members Objective: To develop a highly interactive PC or web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with “virtual” renditions of deployed Service Members. This RFP from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD09-H03) floated across my desk the other day. After reading the…
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Hiking in the Middlesex Fells
Some pictures from our hiking trip a couple weeks ago (Krista, myself, Jane, and Matt). Holy crap, is it fall already? How did that happen?
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Fun with High Voltage & Plasma
The other night I picked back up playing with insulated gas discharge tubes (IGDT), better known as plasma globes. The basic idea is to pump a sealed chamber filled with a noble gas (or air, in a pinch) down to low pressure (1s to 10s of Torr), and apply electricity at high voltage (a few…
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Railway Supply Institute expo 2008, Chicago
I was there to demo my self-powered wireless brake health monitoring system at the FRA’s Advanced Concept Train booth. Despite the final assembly of this and the other 29 units occurring only a couple days before (and passing through the TSA’s loving hands), everything went perfectly! (Murrphy’s Law might have a surprise or two for…
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Worst User Agreement, Evar
And the winner goes to… The Terms & Conditions for use of the Hampton Inn’s complimentary WiFi. Weighing in at 47.4KBytes* and a whopping 90 screens (scrunching it all into a tiny browser text box did not help in this regard), this is quite possibly the longest, and most unilaterally evil, user agreement I have…
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Beer! (pt. 2)
So, a week-and-change ago Kr* and I picked up some basic homebrewing stuff and started a batch of English brown ale. Since this is our first ever beermaking attempt, we purchased a ready-made ingredient kit with all the stuff pre-selected and measured into labeled baggies, idiot-proofing the process as much as possible. This Sunday we…
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Deep Session Control – proposed browser feature to increase privacy
As you probably know, a Web cookie is a small bit of information (typically a server-generated ID number) a Web site can store on your computer to read back on any subsequent visits, even years later. Currently, the major browsers support making all cookies “session-only” (even if the site sends them with an expiration date…
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NorrisolideFacts.com
Ok, so apparently this is pants-pissingly funny to chemists* :-) NORRISOLIDE FACTS Norrisolide does not dissolve in water. It pounds the water into a pulp and bathes in where its blood would be if water had blood. Norrisolide does not get metabolized. It gets even. Norrisolide consists of x carbon, x hydrogen, x oxygen and…