Unflushed Buffers - Scriptforge
Miscellaneous IT and Engineering notes.
Arduino Ultrasonic Transducer (Interrupt Driven)
0So I got my first few Arduino pieces and I’m very impressed with how easy it is to get started. Placing everything in a sketch, removing most of the low level chip functions and adding easy to use libraries for things like LCD and serial connections makes heaps of sense. The first job I’m going to get the Arduino to do is monitor the water level of my tanks and dams on my property, so I got some cheap ultrasonic range finders. When all the parts arrived I put the ultrasonic transducer on a protoshield and wired it up to the Arduino Mega ADK (eventually it will use either an Arduino Nano or Seeeduino Stalker which have not arrived yet).
Very quickly I got the transducer reporting back the distance to a nearby wall fairly accurately using a trigger, wait/block method. Since More >
Exploring some Adobe products
03 months ago
I usually don’t have the time to explore Adobe products beyond my immediate requirement – astro image processing, PDF creation, video editiing. Normally I’ve been too poor to own Adobe apps, but I thought I should invest while I am a full time student and save a few thousand dollars on the CS5 premium. More recently I’ve added Lightroom 3 to that list, only going so far to use the lighten and darken paintbrush tools to develop my photos of the Milky Way.
I have not, in the past been a very creative person, normally relegating myself to tinkering with the back-end of applications, but I am slowly finding that Adobe products do help even non-creative people create reasonably well.
Today I found on the Adobe website reference to a new family of applications called TouchApps for Android More >
Variations on Putty
0
If you’re a Sysadmin you probably use Putty when on Windows. It’s the most useful SSH client around, but new versions only come out every few years. The session interface hasn’t changed. Unlike Gnome or KDE terminal programs you can’t click on hyperlinks (useful for those checking mail or using IRC). So, procrastinating, I went on a sidetrip to find solutions.
There have been some Putty mods around, with varying degrees of success. I will list some of those below. To solve my immediate problems, I settled on the Putty Connection Manager, and Nutty.
- Nutty is a patch to Putty that allows clicking on hyperlinks. However it has not been updated since Putty 0.55.
- Putty Connection Manager is a .NET wrapper for Putty that wraps all your putty sessions in a tabbable interface.
- You can organise all your
Time Lapse Video
03 months ago
by faulteh
in Photography
I’m moving to a place with a backyard – a REALLY BIG BACKYARD – soon, and I hope to grow a kitchen garden. With all the DSLR shots I’ve been taking of the stars and the city, I’ve turned a few of them into nice time lapse videos. So when I found a garden time lapse camera from one of those group-buy daily deals sites, I grabbed one, as I thought it could prove useful.
The product I got was the Brinno TLC100 Time Lapse Camera. The underside looks like it could connect to any tripod or even some setup with a stake in the ground. It runs on 4xAA batteries, and it comes with a 2Gb USB-stick, with control software on it ready to go. Underneath the USB-stick is a simple dial to turn between More >
You Can’t Always Get [a Tablet that does] what you want, but it will do what you need….
1I have been waiting patiently, and then impatiently for a decent 10in tablet. I find it difficult to believe that crApple comes out with two versions of their iPad [with wings] and all the Android /otherOS vendors can’t seem to get a product out the door!
Last year I bought myself a really really bad aPad from EBay just to see what this tablet fuss was about. It had a horrible 7in resistive touch screen and just as bad battery life. Worse still it only ran Android 1.6. I only use it for video playback on flights since I got the decent Samsung Galaxy S Android 2.x phone (see other posts). I didn’t feel that the 7in Samsung Galaxy Tab was worth the money for essentially an oversized phone. I had an equally horrible experience deploying some iPads for a client More >
FU Samsung – Telstra 850MHz not really supported on the Galaxy S I-9000!!
4I like Android, but in the past week I’m starting to hate the Samsung Galaxy S I-9000 that I have.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent phone (1GHz ARM, shiny 4in touchscreen etc), and I’ve been able to tinker with it and make it my own. The problem lies with the fact that Samsung decided not to make the phone work with Telstra’s 850MHz NextG network.
What does this mean?
Firstly, for new customers, if you want a decent Android device like the Galaxy S, you need to buy the Galaxy S I-9000T , and you are stuck with Telstra’s 2.1 Eclair ROM since they haven’t updated to Froyo 2.2 yet!
More importantly, for myself, I bought my phone outright via a good deal on EBay. It was the I-9000… and several months later, Telstra release the Galaxy S I-9000T More >
Cheap Surface Mount Soldering Builds
1Time for a new post. It has been a long time but this year has just flown by.
Recently I’ve had to build a prototype board with over 350 components, most of them surface mount, with components to be placed on both sides of the board. Despite being told I should have just gotten the whole thing prefabbed in China, this is still a prototype, and I am very interested in the manufacturing process, identifying possible problems along the way. I have to build 5 of these boards at some point but this month I just got started on the first one.
Just to let you know, up until now I haven’t done much surface mount soldering, apart from minor fixing and modding of phones, PCs and game consoles. So the prospect of building such a complex board was quite daunting, and More >
Rooting the Aussie Froyo ROM on the Galaxy S (with Lag Fix)
0The new Froyo ROM (Android 2.2) you can update your Galaxy S with via the Samsung Kies App uses some 3e bootloader which originally meant you couldn’t use the 2e recovery methods to root the device. However there are now apps in the market that will get your Galaxy screaming along, and I thought I would summarise applying these updates here which I sourced from various web pages but mainly from the XDA Developer’s forum. I have a custom ROM based on the European Froyo on my Galaxy but this is the method I used to update my friend’s Galaxy S after he updated to the Froyo ROM from Kies.
Warning
Although this does not wipe your Android OS, you will be operating as the root user which gives you the possibility of causing harm to your files and if you really screw More >
GuruPlug Server Plus Heatsink Mod (3…2…1… warranty:void)
3Got my new Guruplug server box this week, and yes the fan is annoying and noisy. Here I replicate what has already been done to make the Guruplug fanless again.
I did some shopping online but there was pitiful local stock for heatsinks, but fortunately the local Jaycar had some decent products that could do the trick.
Quick/Dirty MySQL Replication and DNS Load Balancing
3This week I got a second VPS as a backup host for my websites, so as an exercise I could set up MySQL replication and then load balance requests to my servers. Actually this post is a test to see if it’s working.
Step 1 – Move The Data
On the new VPS I rsync’d the data to the new VPS with the same directory layout. I also copied across the apache configuration files, although the new VPS has multiple IP addresses and I went into each VirtualHost site file and made the ServerName w2.scriptforge.org instead of www.scriptforge.org, and set up the ServerAlias as www.scriptforge.org. The new VPS has the same Apache modules and config loaded as the current VPS.
I also set up an hourly cron job to rsync the website files after setting up SSH key exchange between the two More >