The server may be down for a week due to Hurricane Irene. Just letting you know in advance. If only I had my own fusion reactor...

I wonder how much faster my server would be if I ran it off of a 64 GB SSD... It would only be a $115 upgrade. Though, site speed would still be limited by the 3 Mbps upload rate. I long for 25/25 FiOS...

Recently, I bought a Nikon D5100. It is the best camera I have ever owned. EVER. You have no idea how happy I am with my purchase of it (and I should be happy with it—at $840, it's nowhere near cheap). One of the awesome features it has is GPS input. It can take TTL serial GPS data and use it to geotag pictures. This is awesome, but it comes with a catch: Nikon's GPS is $250! It's also absurdly bulky. Wanting geotagging that I can easily disable (I don't want home pictures, etc. to be tagged), I built this simple GPS that will work in many of Nikon's newer cameras.

I was having EXACTLY the same errors as this guy—basically, none of the javascript elements in Wordpress were working, ex. Check All Checkboxes, multi-file uploader, text in the post editor was "invisible," etc.

How I fixed it:

1. Delete all the files & folders in your "wp-includes" folder.
2. Re-upload all the files & folders in the "wp-includes" folder.
3. If any of the files failed to transfer, put them back in the transfer queue and send them again.

SUCCESS!

I finally did it! The new server has all the parts that used to be in my old gaming machine, but it has the same HDDs as before (because I'm too lazy and cheap to get it a 1 TB SATA drive and image it from the old drives). For some reason, one of the NICs on the motherboard is present in the OS and activated in the BIOS but doesn't light up when a network cable is inserted. Oh, well; it has two, so it's no big deal. It also decided not to keep its network settings after a reboot, so I put the dhclient command in the /etc/init.d/rc.local file. Everything works now. There's a possibility that this will also be a TF2 server in the near future.

New-old server specs:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
• ROG Crosshair II Formula Motherboard
• 2 GB DDR2 667 RAM
• 10 GB 5400rpm OS drive
• 80 GB 7200rpm Data Drive
• 430W Antec Earthwatts 80 Plus PSU

I'll definitely be posting to the blog a lot more now that the server won't hang every time I publish a post!

Today, I hacked a multi-function audio player (commonly known as a "boom box") to add an external audio input. This hack isn't really done yet (I still have to solder everything up, drill a hole, add the 1/8" jack, etc.), but I have pictures of what I've done.

Essentially, I started out by poking around the live circuit with my oscilloscope. I didn't get very far with that, so I decided to look up the datasheet for the identical DIP chips that looked like they were the amp chips. After reading the bits I needed, I saw that the chips were indeed amplifiers (with one for each channel). After tracing some circuit paths, I managed to find a good point to input the signal. I connected some wires to those points, found a point for ground, and connected it to an 1/8" jack in my iPhone.

I was able to play Derezzed REALLY loud before it started getting distorted.

Sorry there's no video, but the music player I was using also happens to be my video camera, phone, calendar, and video player (among other things). Also, my normal video camera wasn't available. Click "Continue Reading" to see the pictures.

I've decided to print as many parts as I can to make a Prusa Mendel. Hopefully I can make enough parts so I can just ask some people to make the parts my CupCake can't make. Currently, every object I make has too much perimeter material—parts designed to interlock don't fit. I've tried to fix this in Skeinforge, but right now I'm adjusting my belt tension to see if that helps. My CupCake fails on large prints, so I'll need help on those.

The goal of getting my MakerBot was to get it to make a full set of working RepRap parts, but it never has. This has made me a bit sad. So, to remedy this, I'm going to calibrate my bot to the best of my ability (and maybe get some help from others in the 3D Printer Village) and print as many parts as I can. Wish me luck!

A major hurdle to the TV-B-Gone for iPhone project was getting a wav file with the remote data. Well, now I have one. I found it in a link posted in a comment on a Hackaday post. Cool! So, here's the link, I'll be adding the necessary code and the file to the Git repo soon.

As usual, feel free to help me in making this by forking the repo.

CAUTION: If you are easily offended, stop reading NOW. I'm about to go on a rant.

Sooooo... Apparently, AT&T is implementing 250 GB usage caps for all U-Verse subscribers. I'm mad. It's already $60/month for the highest speed Internet (around 24 Mbps). Why should I have a usage cap? Ironically, I have unlimited bandwidth on my Verizon iPhone...

Bandwidth caps are bad. Video streaming eats bandwidth. Downloading games on Steam eats bandwidth. Hosting a website eats bandwidth. Uploading photos eats bandwidth. The list goes on.

Now that there's a cap, what am I going to do? Use those services less.

Now, many people would say at this point, "get another ISP!" Ok, in my area, that's... Optimum? No, thanks. Slow Internet + no free DVR + bad support = Blergh. Those same people would say now, "cancel your internet plan/switch to the minimum!" Ok, cut myself off from the Internet entirely, that sounds good—I can go to the library for that! Yippee! We're going backwards!

Let's say you lease a car. You drive around 30,000 miles per month. The car lender, lacking funds, decides to add a new part to your lease that charges you $2000 if you drive over a limit of 50,000 miles and $2000 every extra 5,000 miles you drive over that. You may not be affected and think, "Well, I don't drive much, so I don't have to worry about that charge." But what if you want to take a road trip, touring the U.S.? Well, you can, but be prepared to pay $2000 or more purely because you drove a lot—and that's IN ADDITION to the money you'll spend on gas! Want to go on a road trip now? Now that you're not going on that road trip, the towns you were going to visit aren't going to get your money (or that of many others, for that matter). Eventually, those towns will become deserted and will die. Some would say at this point, "Why don't you take a plane?" Well, plane trips are expensive and there are often long delays, making them somewhat inconvenient.

To sum up that extended metaphor, the car lender is AT&T, the amount you drive in a month is your average bandwidth usage, the mile cap is the bandwidth cap, the towns you would visit are the Internet services you would use, and the plane is a box full of 50 DVDs—its capacity is almost 250GB (if you mailed it, you have effectively created a high-bandwidth, high-latency connection).

tl;dr:

I know it's fully within your right to do so, but really, AT&T, thanks for stifling innovation!

It took a few months working on this on and off, but I finally severed my Flickr ID "cyrozap" from my Yahoo! account!

I can now log in with my Google account and keep my screen name (cyrozap) and my custom URL! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!