Category: General
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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…
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Beer!
I’m contemplating picking up some homebrewing equipment this week. Anyone else interested in making (+ drinking) some homebrew beer?
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[meme] The Omnivore’s Hundred
The Omnivore’s Hundred is a list of foods the gastronomic Andrew Wheeler thinks everyone should try at least once in their lives. The rules of the meme: 1) Bold those you have tried 2) Strikethrough those you wouldn’t eat on a bet. 3) Italicize any item you’ll never eat again. 4) Asterisk any items you’d…