http://www.doctort.org/adam Maker of Finest Quality Digital Things Tue, 12 May 2009 13:01:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en One of the little rules in our house is that kids are not allowed to watch TV before school in the morning. But these two are so addicted to the glow of a screen, they watch my screen saver and pretend it is a movie! Sometimes they are quite amusing to watch, ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/tv-addiction.html I've never done a good 'ol consumer rant on this site so here we go. I'll put my grumpy old man hat on... A couple of months ago, it so happened that I bought a Toshiba laptop and a Dell screen in the same week. Both products offered a $100 cash-back ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/toshiba-vs-dell-cashback-deals-and-customer-service.html There are so many guides out there on how to make a Linux kernel and so many of them are out of date, I thought I should write down a simple step-by-step of the current way to do it as of early 2009. My goal here was to compile a new ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/creating-a-debian-kernel-package-for-v2626.html Just say you want to input a single key from your user such as asking "Would you like to continue [y/n] ?" without requiring the user to press ENTER. You'd think you could do it like this: char c; cin >> c; cout http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/reading-single-keystroke-on-linux.html I've taken that old Simple Slide Show program I wrote years ago and given it a bit of a brush-up. I also changed the licensing so it is open source. As a bonus, I have added a new feature to allow you to customise the colour and font used in the ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/simple-slide-show-is-now-open-source.html It's incredible the things you can do in Linux. Here's two amazing things I've done today: Amazing thing #1 I had a corrupted disk and I wanted to run some recovery tools on it but to be safe, I wanted work with a copy of the corrupted disk. So I created a ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/linux-is-amazingly-useful.html This is a guest post contributed by Richard Geoffrion. Thanks for sending this Richard, I hope others will find it useful! First off, thank you so much, Adam, for the primer on getting Warcraft II working under DOSBOX. The “-t cdrom” option was the piece I was missing to get my ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/networked-warcraft-ii-under-dosbox.html I've just upgraded my HTPC to the new Mythbuntu 8.10. I must say that setup is a helluva lot easier than previous versions of Myth although I found my ATI card did not work at all and I had to exhume an ancient nVidia card from my parts box. And ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/update-on-twinhan-remote-for-mythbuntu-810.html I've set up a simple website to hawk my RS232 Rate Converter. The product is now ready to sell. Hooray! The address is http://serialgadget.com/ http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/baud-rate-converter-website-is-up.html Thanks to some help from Stack Overflow, the new and excellent Q&A site for programmers, I have put together a PHP class which can perform a currency conversion using up to date exchange rates pulled live from Yahoo. Here is the code for y'all to share: <?php // fx.php - PHP Code ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/currency-calculation-in-php.html Massimo Sanna is a reader of this blog and has designed a PCB for the MIDI Sync Box for all of us to share. Thanks very much Massimo!. Click here to download the PCB layout in TIFF format. http://www.doctort.org/adam/midisync/pcb-design-for-the-midi-sync-box.html I've just been playing with the Elastic Tabstops plugin by Nick Gravgaard. I really like it. I like my code to look neat so when I write a block of code like this: $custFirstName = $_REQUEST['cust_first_name']; $custLastName = $_REQUEST['cust_last_name']; $custEmail = $_REQUEST['cust_email']; $custAddr1 ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/elastic-tabstops-by-nick-gravgaard.html Well, here's an interesting little tidbit. My home box is dual boot with Windows XP SP2 and Linux Ubuntu 8.04. My motherboard has been playing up recently so I got myself a new one, a Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L. This is a budget board with a pretty plain-vanilla collection of peripherals. After installing ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/windows-vs-linux-when-changing-motherboards.html I want a web page which displays a single image. The image is to be scaled so it is as large as possible within the browser but without losing it's aspect ratio. I also want it to be centred (or centered if you are American). After spending literally hours trying to do ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/centering-and-scaling-an-image-on-a-web-page.html Finally I have a fully built unit of production quality. It has the revised board and a neato sticker on top which I designed myself using The Gimp. As you can see, my graphic design skills are not the best but at least it looks like a real product now ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/myproduct/first-production-unit-is-built.html I'm not my best first thing in the morning. Some evil person has been taking pictures... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/bed-hair.html It is amazing me how much more effort it is to produce a product for sale than to just build something for fun. So far I've done all these things, none of which I would bother with for a hobby project: Draw up schematic in Protel Design PCB to fit the box Find ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/myproduct/more-on-commercializing-my-hobby.html I finally got my lazy arse into gear and assembled the PCB. I got the parts from DigiKey - it still amazes me that it is easier and cheaper to get electronic parts that were manufactured in China or somewhere shipped halfway around the world from the USA than it ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/myproduct/new-board-is-populated.html Woohoo! My boards have arrived from China. It cost US$99 for a minimum run of boards from Golden Phoenix, by far the cheapest price I found. That price included Fedexing them to my door. I ordered 16 boards but they sent me 22 and they were in my hand 8 ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/myproduct/the-boards-are-here.html 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/myproduct/working-prototype-of-rs232-rate-converter.html