Category: gEEk
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A peek inside the Trancevibe “factory”
…mostly in photo album form. Click on the thumbnails for a larger image with description… Trance Vibe Assembly pics Not pictured: us Fluxing-off our actual panels, or screwing the depaneled boards into the finished product, or QA testing (with a pluggable test jig and motor…get yer minds out of the gutter). It turns out these…
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09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Scenes a faire, or, the first digits of pi as expressed in various non-integer radices and rounded to the nearest integer. Any real or perceived resemblance to certain secret codes (yeah, yeah, generate your own damn volume key) are purely coincidental. 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56…
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Yeah, any excuse to build a new machine…
Today’s entry, involving cool things that blink at VNV concerts, will not be seen at this time, because all the pictures are on the computer that just bit the dust. Ok, the computer’s fine (or as well as it was for the last several years), but one of the drives took to making this loud…
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One step closer to my own robot army…
Councillor Hamann: Have you ever been to the engineering level? I love to walk there at night, it’s quite amazing. Would you like to see it? Neo: Sure. Councillor Hamann: Almost no one comes down here, unless, of course, there’s a problem. That’s how it is with people – nobody cares how it works as…
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RezVibe l’arnins, pt. 1
Ok, so I now have a Dildonics tag for all the trancevibe stuff. It’s an exciting informative journey through the no-man’s land of small volume electronics production. I’m going forward with this project (and documenting it) mostly for my own personal edification. I’ve never developed and commercialized something before (unless you count my childhood four-leaf-clover…
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Nintendo DS current consumption – hahd numbahs
Background story So I was busy homebrewing on my NDS, even bought myself a DSerial board to use it as an ultraportable serial/debug console. I had a few ideas for the much faster, native parallel interface too, so when we were sending out boards at work, I threw my own “DParallel” onto the layout. The…
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Ya, I was bored yesterday…
So I took stuff apart. Here is some more on my cry for help unusual fascination with small display devices – a teardown of a cheap, undocumented LCD to figure out how to make it work, and document it for everyone else out there on teh internets who wants to use this display in some…
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Ice cream the geek-fashioned way
My lab had this huge tank of liquid nitrogen left over from an experiment, with a little bit left in it, just kind of waiting for it to all boil off so we could return the tank (or so I presume). So instead I rounded up a posse and we used it to make ice…
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Reason #32768 why Myspace sucks: Paranoid session validation gone wild!
Ok, so I figured out (one of the reasons) for my long-held assertion that “MySpace.com doesn’t work in any browser”. Short story: On first visit, the site records your browser version and other information. If any of this information changes while you’re surfing, they kick your ass out! Naturally, due to some fun toys on…
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TranceVibe Take Two: So, what are they doing that I’m not doing?
After getting busy with all kinds of other stuff for…heh, a year…, I started thinking back on the Drmn’ TranceVibe project. My grandmaster plan was to “mass” (qty: 20 or so) produce them and see if they’d sell. Anyway, since the original design, a few small cost and manufacturability enhancements have been made: smaller SMD…
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Using a Peltier cooler to refrigerate a terrarium
Executive summary: Didn’t work as well as I had hoped. Lowered the temp in my tank by about 4 degrees F – and it’s a pretty small tank. As a long-overdue followup to my climate-controlled terrarium, i.e. the actual climate control part, I bonded heat sinks to both sides of a Peltier device (thermoelectric “heat…
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Methinks somebody wants grandkids…
www.sciconnect.com This is for picking up geek chicks, compliments of discover magazine! Give it a try. Dad
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Whither TrashAmp?
The TrashAmp, a project I started while living in Chicago (to give you some idea how long ago that was – late 2003), was to serve as a subtle testament to a disposable society by building a high-power car audio amp entirely out of trash (specifically, electronics waste scavenged from the curb). Things started out…
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Geek Christmas carols – answered
Noels[0]; “The First Noel” for k=[1:3]; it=snow; end; “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…” 0 0 12 25 * cd ~ “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” (Unix crontab entry) tree -i O ./xmess “O Xmess Tree” (okay, that was a bit of a stretch) nice@town# adduser -e 12/26/06 Santa “Santa Claus Is…
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The last few weeks in review
Woo, long-ish hiatus from blogging. Anyway, since last “real” entry (non roommate rant, geeking, meme, etc.) some or all of the following have happened: Did the company Christmas party thing; dragged LE out to it this time to meet these nut-jobs I work with. She humored me, even though we all got toasted and I…
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Doosh: Incremental database-backup script gets around PHP execution-time limits
The premise: You have a database full of many very important things. However, the server it’s on is owned by some goofus who doesn’t give a damn, on a dusty PII box under his bed. You don’t have shell access and can’t dump it that way. You can’t install utilities. Maybe phpMyAdmin doesn’t even work…
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mYpod : my CompactFlash-based, in-dash mp3 player
Yay…after all this being too busy, too lazy, or any number of other excuses, one more project finally off my stack. The “mYpod”* is a small CompactFlash-based mp3 player I built from leftover spare parts from a bottom-secret government project, free samples and a standalone mp3 decoder chip. (Click thumbnails for larger image) Features: Supports…
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One more thing finally off the project stack (for now)…
Terrarium for hot, humid, picky little plants Keeping my Boston-intolerant carnivores in cut-up 3-liter Coke bottles was a litte..um..ghetto, so I built this. The box It’s basically a regular off-the-shelf 10-gallon aquarium with a few extras thrown in. The lid is a seamless piece of Lexan from the hardware store. Lexan can be somewhat of…
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Staatsgevaarlijke
Yeah, I have one. Over 70% of people do, even though the vast majority of these despise them. It’s one of those discount cards from a major east-coast grocery chain. “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a MARK in their right hand, or in their…
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Why you can’t charge your Ipod* while downloading songs
Ever wondered why so few portable USB devices can be recharged from the USB port, even though it provides half an amp of relatively clean power at 5V? Here’s why. * Technically, now Ipods can be charged with USB power, avoiding the patent by using the docking cradle as sort of an electron-laundering middleman so…