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Homebrew Party!
We still have beer! Lots of beer! Help us drink it on Saturday, October 25. Starting 6pm?
42 Marion Street
Medford MA 02155
Bring your favorite meatz/foodz, the grill will be going! -
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, ( Read more... ) -
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 haz solved the mystery ( Read more... ) -
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 kV) and frequency (a few kHz) to ionize the gas. Depending ( Read more... ) -
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 me on back-order ( Read more... ) -
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 ever read.
(I would start here with a ( Read more... ) -
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 cracked the ( Read more... ) -
Daily Windows Rant
Error messages, people. Error messages. When an “error” occurs, it should be accompanied by an “error message”, which informs the user a) that an error did occur; b) what that error was. It does not even necessarily have to be understandable to mere mortals (although this would be really nice), because understanding it is the job of your IT Guy and ( Read more... ) -
And these points of data make a beautiful line…
(and we’re out of beta, we’re releasing on time… Err… deliverable code freeze will happen monday morning, or wednesday afternoon (due date), or before 50% of the devices are sealed up for delivery with the code already on them, whichever comes before the last bug is found. [Especially if the bugs are discovered in hardware, third-party hardware or ( Read more... ) -
Meat Monday evening the 15th?
I'm planning to round up a posse Monday evening and head over to Midwest Grill churrascaria to celebrate the anniversary of my freedom from the womb. Anyone want to come?