http://www.doctort.org/adam Maker of Finest Quality Digital Things Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:33:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I am making some progress toward a manufacturable design of my RS232 baud rate converter. I now have the prototype working. As you can see from the photo, I had to add a couple of wires to the PCB but only a couple and I am very pleased about that! I am ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/working-prototype-of-rs232-rate-converter.html I enjoy designing little electronic devices in my spare time. I like working with circuit boards and digital chips, I've posted a few of my projects here on my blog in the past. And some people have been reading those blog entries and have been asking me to make stuff for ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/commercializing-my-hobby.html GetTickCount() is a real handy function in Windows but does not exist in Linux. This code will give a similar result: #include <sys/time.h> unsigned GetTickCount() { struct timeval tv; if(gettimeofday(&tv, NULL) != 0) ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/linux-equivalent-of-the-windows-gettickcount-function.html Just a quick note that this site now supports Gravatars. So if you make a comment here and are registered over at www.gravatar.com, your picture will appear next to your comment like magic! http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/gravatar-support.html After doing a dist-upgrade on a Debian Etch system, it would no longer boot! It loads the kernel and then stops displaying the following message: Waiting for root filesystem I've just spent a few torturous hours trying to get it back up again. It took me a while to figure out what ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/udev-swapped-my-drives.html Well folks, I just got saddled with this Adaptec/Marvel piece of poo and now I have to make it work on a Debian server. The server belongs to my employer and is running Debian "Etch". The Etch release of Debian does not have a driver for this card built-in and even ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/adaptec-1430sa-on-debian-linux-etch.html I have this video camera, a Sony DVD201E which records straight to a mini-DVD disc. I want to copy the recorded video onto my PC but the software which comes with the camera is pretty awful. Besides it is Windows-only and I do prefer to use Linux. So I have made ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/myproduct/extract-chapters-from-a-dvd.html As you can see, I have removed all the Google ads from this blog. This blog gets around 1000 page views per day and I've been running the ads for about a year and a half now. In all that time Google have not paid me anything. Not a cent! So ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/no-more-ads.html I'm astonished how quickly CDs and DVDs are going the way of the Fondue Fork. Seems that everyone is downloading stuff these days and USB devices have exceeded DVDs in capacity already. I can see it won't be long before DVD drives will be an optional extra on new PCs (especially ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/installing-debian-from-a-usb-key.html My last few articles have been very technical, so to slow the pace down a little, here's an Apple Crumble I made the other day. I was kind of winging it but it turned out pretty good. I'll write it here so I can remember the recipe. Before you start, preheat ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/homemade/apple-crumble.html This article contains my notes for setting up a m68k cross-compiler using Cygwin. It's all free software and gives me a way to create binary images for a 68000 CPU from C code on Windows. Here's the step-by-step to set it up: Step 1. Install Cygwin Go to http://www.cygwin.com/ and download setup.exe. ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/cross-compile-for-68000-in-c-under-windows.html I have here a server (Debian Linux of course) which is storing its data on a 1TB hard drive. I want to upgrade the storage to a RAID5 using 4x 1TB drives. I'd like the existing drive to be a part of the RAID array so I only need to ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/setup-of-raid5-without-losing-data.html Its nice to know that while I was obsessing over my circuit board, the kids were busy making stuff too. A wonderful Mudistrone Soup! They are so proud of it. http://www.doctort.org/adam/homemade/mud-soup.html I have a machine with about 8 SATA hard drives in it some of which are connected to a PCI controller card and some are on the motherboard. I have an issue with Debian that it keeps swapping the device nodes around on reboot. Sometimes the first drive will be ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/uuids-in-the-fstab.html I've got a Debian machine here which is set up for TV recording. It is fully stacked with 2 x cx88 DTV cards and 3 x PVR150 cards using the IVTV driver. I'm running Debian Etch which comes with version 0.8.2 of the ivtv driver at the time of writing. The ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/ivtv-device-node-problems-solved.html Now that my pan is ready, it is time to do this. First I needed a board. I got one of my designs prototyped by Batch PCB who are cheap and did a good job but I had to wait about six weeks which is OK for hobbyists but I ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/solder-reflow-with-a-frying-pan-part-2.html I've been dying to have a go at this ever since I read some hobbyist websites on how to do solder reflow at home. I never even thought this was possible to do on a hobbyist budget. The idea is to use a frying pan or toaster oven to perform solder ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/solder-reflow-with-a-frying-pan-part-1.html Warcraft II - Tides of Darkness. I used to love this old DOS game way back when. But now I want to run it on Windows XP. Yes, it is possible. Here's how. DOS Emulation First you need the very excellent DOSBOX which is a DOS emulator. You can download it ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/warcraft-ii-on-windows-xp-a-step-by-step-guide.html Hey, Multicomp runs pretty good under Ubuntu using WINE! http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/multicomp-on-linux.html I've been using the excellent Wordpress blogging software for a year and a half now and it has been good - except for the comment spam. By the end of 2007 I was getting more than 100 comment spams every day and I was mighty tired of manually deleting them. Then ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/spambam-anti-spam-for-wordpress.html