Just got the latest Comcast TOS patch with my bill (an adhesion contract officially titled, “Notice From Comcast Regarding Changes To Your Comcast Agreement For Residential Service” (try saying that three times fast)), stuffed inside of a cheerful note about their commitment to happy cheerful customers. What it actually entails is left ( Read more... )

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More playing:
Castlevania end credits
Tetris
Mario Bros. theme

Update: I fixed up the script to pull (usually) proper timing from the MIDI, threw together some minimal documentation and released it to the public (see link below).

Downloads
mid2cnc.py, sparse documentation and samples

Basically, it’s possible to compute a combination of (distance, ( Read more... )

In the last post, I made the unspeakable blargger mistake of linking to an article on a news site, which means in 7 days or so, instead of said article this link will return absolute crap and/or a “Buy membership now!” nag screen. Trying to keep up with such link rot (if anyone bothered) is a problem that grows linearly with the number of posts/ ( Read more... )

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, nobody who uses this ( Read more... )

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, typically at a very ( Read more... )

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 tweaking around with it…

Video: ( Read more... )

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 levels. Still others ( Read more... )

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, so some parts ( Read more... )

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 available from any ( Read more... )

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 their ( Read more... )