-
Cloud Computing…cirrusly? (same trash, different bag)
So, apparently I’m not the only one to notice the mid-level marketing types in IT having a big collective nut lately about “Cloud Computing”. This week even the Wall Street Journal ragged about this nonsense on the front page. For those who don’t spend their time around mid-level IT marketing types, cloud computing is… well,
-
Optical Mouse Hacks: 2D Micropositioning using cheap mouse cameras
Optical mice work by pointing a tiny cheap camera at the surface of your desktop, tracking the motion of ‘interesting’ points in the surface texture (woodgrain, imperfections, highlight/shadow) as the mouse slides around over it, and converting this to an X and Y motion. An LED is used to light the surface beneath the sensor,
-
NinBendo (cont’d): Zero-knowledge, realtime music tweaking example
This is a followup to this post. Quick video example of finding and bending the music data that plays during Super Mario Bros. 3’s World 1 map, using the FCEUX emulator’s advanced 6502 debugging features. Full-screen if you’ve got it – the video did not survive compression well, and I don’t feel like investing hours
-
NinBendo – circuit bending by corrupting 8-bit game code.
Yeah, back in junior high I had not enough friends and too much time, and discovered that keying in random Game Genie codes would sometimes cause a NES game to (harmlessly) glitch out in interesting ways. :-p Some codes just locked up the game (drat!), while others caused screen glitches, messed with colors, and rearranged
-
Better Better DXF Output for Inkscape (layers!)
I started using Inkscape, a sweet open-source vector graphics program, to produce (and/or steal from the internet and convert) designs suitable for carving on the CNC as Inkscape has a plugin to export the file as a .DXF. Converting some files, I discovered the current export script does not correctly handle all types of transforms,
-
Protected: A decade of thoughts… // Two’s complement (one’s a crowd)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
-
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
-
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
-
Cypherpunk’s Wet Dream meta-entry
I once said that this blog would eventually reach a point where any possible entry could be expressed as a sum of references to previous entries. In this case, it’s this one, this one and this one. I have maintained that a point will be reached where plain old ordinary Web sites will be forced
-
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
-
Trance vibe vs. Windows Vista x64
So I have started getting support emails – “Hey, how do I get your hardware to work in Vista?” Seeming invariably to be the 64-bit version. That’s weird, as far as I know there is a 64-bit build of the drivers included… Of course, you may have correctly guessed that as an IT semi-professional, I
-
VMWare Player Network driver (and video, SCSI, etc.)
Problem: After installing some operating systems such as Vista* in a virtual machine (i.e. as a ‘guest’ OS) under VMWare Player, they cannot access the internet because they don’t have a driver for VMWare’s virtual network card. Solutions: This driver (and many others such as SVGA, SCSI, sound) are available in the ‘VMWare Tools’ package.
-
Tease…
It’s not quite finished yet, but here are some pictures of what I’ve been working on this week, when not making you-know-whats in my basement dildonics facility.
-
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
-
Petty Joule Thief
You might be familiar with the original Joule Thief, a simple, homebrewable step-up converter often used to drive LEDs (with Vf of several volts) from a single 1.5V battery, or extract the last remaining juice from a battery that’s too dead for use in most real-world gadgets. The basic Joule Thief can suck power from
-
Weatherball
Last night I finished throwing together a workable version of the Weatherball, currently displaying a color code at the end of my flagpole to indicate whether tomorrow holds any interesting weather. Apparently cities and radio stations have been doing it since the 1950s, but now I have my own! The data is grabbed from the
-
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?
-
Some stuff on Paypal
I’ve been using Paypal as the payment-handling service for my trance vibe project, and overall it’s not too bad. I can even print my own postage for domestic shipments, sticky on a label and not have to drive to the post office to send out an order anymore. But there are a few things about…
-
Assembler Interpreter for microcontrollers – sane?
I’m thinking of how much work it would be to write an assembler interpreter in PIC assembler. Probably sounds like the dumbest idea in the world, right ;-) I’ve been toying with this idea lately for sort of futureproofing microcontroller-based designs, and adding some new possibilities for specific applications (polymorphic / self-modifying code, security applications,
-
Fixing Dell Precision T3400 USB not working
This is an update to a previous rant about the mysterious Windows XP “Dee-Dunk” error (and the novel concept of presenting an “error message” when an error condition exists), possibly in conjunction with broken or intermittent USB functionality. This post is mainly for Googlers – my friends are more than welcome to skip it. I
Find stuff…
Pages
- Das Blinkenlichten – wearable lighting
- Goldmine Electronics LCD pinout (mini-teardown)
- Mosquino: an Arduino-based energy harvesting development board
- Pick and Place Project
Categories
Tags
3dprinting ai blinkenlichten broken brokenbydesign circuit bending cnc codebending comcast corporates crashes dell error evil foodz gadget garden glitch music groan humor idiocy led lirc machine meme NES norrisolide pickplace precision python recipe reprap rgb salesdouche serial stupidity sucks t3400 teardown ticket timtearsitapart usb webcam windows xp