μblog: engineering from the trenches

The WorldeBookFair allowing free downloads (normally ~8$/month) until the 4th of August to celebrate Project Gutenberg’s 35th year. Get up and read!

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It looks like another company created a one-step GUI implementation of what I described in another post. I guess the easier the better?

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Very good read that deals with the non-ideal properties of various circuit components with an emphasis on switch mode power supply design. Has pretty good coverage of various transformer characteristics as well.

(TI copy) (local copy)

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Sometimes it is useful to generate various hashes for a string as well a do encryption/decryption using primitive ciphers and do some base64 encoding. Well, you can now do it all in one place without having to write a line of code: lwang.org.

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HP’s press release shows that they are working on a replacement technology for RFID. The specs are: 2mmx4mm chip (possibly bare die) with integrated antenna, 256Kbit-4Mbit storage and 10Mbit/s transfer speed. There isn’t much more information available on this, so it may be a technology that might be seen again in a few years.

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In the recent days, Microsoft has made its Virtual PC free for download. Current work on Virtual PC 2007 should also yield a downloadable product. Although you can use this to run Linux of FreeBSD, Virtual PC certainly lacks the VMWare tools that you can install into the target operating system. With that aside, can’t beat the price!

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Found this one on College Humor. (original link)

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Some time ago, I bought a 15$ webcam from Microcenter and tossed it in a box somewhere for a few years. I have recently found it again and decided to put it to good use. The camera comes up as a CIF Single Chip webcam when you try to plug it in, however, it is actually a SC-120 from ORITE (website no longer works.) After some work I was able to locate the driver with their own capture utility. If you have the camera and want to save yourself some time, the drivers are below.

( SC120.zip )

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There have been a few times when I needed to get to some files or run some jobs on a windows (NT/2000/2003/XP) machine and had administrative access on the domain but VNC/Remote Desktop enabled on the machine, these times would often result in me driving to the site to do some tinkering for a short period of time followed by another drive back. After some time, I learned to use the built-in NT network services to my advantage. (more…)

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My apologies to the few people that tried to access this article in the past week, I overlooked the linking in the article but now it works fine. You can go back and check the source code as well as a sample configuration file.

original post 

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