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Tonight I learned
that if you ask the debian installer to keep the data you have on a partition that you then want mounted, it will helpfully protect every gigabyte of it from the installation process by placing the files in the trash ( Read more... ) -
Eureka
Finally got one %#%# project to work, only a few months after it nominally went like. Replaced the solenoid in the remote-control door buzzer thingy with a servo, and now it all works. I am less and less patient with the analog world. -
Above my pay grade
I have been doing so much stupid hardware hacking lately that I am starting to want to get back to writing. Too bad stupid hardware hacking is most of what I get paid to write about. But today was pretty maximally annoying.
It started out pretty well, finally hooking up the radio-controlled solenoid that lets people sit on their asses an press a ( Read more... ) -
When faced with an intractable software problem, check your hardware
My cupcake CNC is getting to be like George Washington's hatchet. I replaced the old DC extruder motor with a stepper motor, then replaced the whole extruder with home built. Assembled the automated build platform, replaced the plastic assembly surface with steel, then cannibalised its parts for a plain heated platform with a copper surface. ( Read more... ) -
Batman, The Musical
Let me unpack that. We sometimes sedate B in the afternoon by letting ( Read more... ) -
Adapting to the Digital Age
Here is (most of) the text of a notice sent to me by the Copyright Clearance Center:
New Grant Alert: $1,500 Conference Travel Grant
[...]
To view this email as a web page, go here [opaque url elided]
Copyright Clearence Center
Title Goes Here on One or
Two Lines in Bold Font
Subhead Goes Here in Regular Font at 16pt.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, ( Read more... ) -
Data is code.
Or is that data are code? I'm grumpy about this simple image-processing project I've been doing for so long because there are so many ^&#^%#$^ points in it. There are the corners for warping the image, a dozen different display blocks -- each a different size -- to have their numbers and letters recognized ( Read more... ) -
$59.99 saved is a penny earned
You know those projects that end up taking much more work than they should, and really ought never have needed doing in the first place ( Read more... ) -
Sometimes it really is that easy
OK, so there's this shuttle box in the basement that I tried to build about three or four years ago and couldn't get to boot noway nohow or even show a splash screen, and then there's the other el cheapo refurb computer that just died one day. And there's its replacement, the $279 linux box from the place down the road. And there's J's G5 imac, ( Read more... ) -
Something I should have done a couple years ago.
This morning I took apart my mac mini (yep, with a putty knife) and swapped in 8 gig of RAM for the 4 that were in there. Wow. It's gone from "careful what you open" to "not a problem". I've got the Activity Monitor open, and free RAM appears to have stabilized at about 3 gig. Swap and pageouts are still firmly at 0 ( Read more... )