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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,…
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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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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…
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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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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…
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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.…
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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.
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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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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…
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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…
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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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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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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- Das Blinkenlichten – wearable lighting
- Goldmine Electronics LCD pinout (mini-teardown)
- Mosquino: an Arduino-based energy harvesting development board
- Pick and Place Project
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