Lee.org

At the Subzero event I ran into Gaspo and his Chakratron. Man, I love that thing.

Sitting on the table was his source-book. All the manuals for all the parts that went into the Chakratron. The part that intrigues me the most is the rotating electrical connector. That’s the thing that lets the top part with lights spin at a gazillion RPM while the bottom part… well the bottom part sits safely on the ground.

If you haven’t seen the Chakratron, you’ve really got to check it out. Video simply doesn’t do it justice though.

Here’s the source of Gaspo’s rotating electrical connectors, Mercotac. I simply must build something that uses these marvels.

I’m 5 lessons into a 400 lesson set from Video-Tutorials.net. And dang it if SolidWorks isn’t totally cool.

I like the lessons. It’s a woman speaking with a live screen capture of her driving SolidWorks 2007. The presenter has a nice voice, she’s mostly all about business but there are a few tiny flubs to prove that she’s human, it’s well edited and it’s of course nice that I can either do what she does or just watch what she’s doing and replay the video.

I bought the 3 CD tutorial on eBay or Amazon or someplace for $50.

I needed to download the reference section of the  Arduino website so I could teach a class without needing to have all the computers live on the internet. Here’s how I did it:

C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin>wget -r --convert-links --page-requisites --html-extension --no-parent -R '*action=diff*,*action=edit*' http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/HomePage

Here’s how that parses out:

-r recursive
--convert-links
--page-requisites
--html-extension
--no-parent
-R '*action=diff*,*action=edit*'       don't get wiki tidbits

This post was originally named “Phoey on Atmel” because I had emailed and submitted sample parts requests from Atmel and got no response for over a week. And Digikey was unable to help (see below) but I just (2pm 5-26-09) got a call back from Mac Wilson at Centaur Corporation. He is representing for Atmel. He’s going to get me some samples and help me move forward with the Tap Pen.

Chat start time May 24, 2009 5:41:26 AM EST
Edith ext 1601: Welcome to Digi-Key Live-Help. How may I assist you?
Lee Sonko: I’m trying to get a hold of a few of this IC ATTINY43U-SU-ND to test. It looks like I can only get it in quantities of 1,000 or so. Can you help me get just a few units?
Edith ext 1601: I’ll check on this, one moment please.
Lee Sonko: Thanks very much. :-)
Edith ext 1601: This is a part that we don’t stock; we can order it from the mfg but we have to go by their mins
Edith ext 1601: which is 1,036 pcs
Edith ext 1601: We could ask a technician if there’s a sub
Lee Sonko: hurumph. This is a new part, released in March or so from Atmel. You’re the only folks I see it even listed with so far. I’ve tried contacting Atmel but no response in a week. :-(
Lee Sonko: I doubt there’s a sub. It’s a new class of part… a microcontroller with a built-in voltage converter.
Edith ext 1601: I’m sorry; I don’t understand why new parts are advertised if they aren’t available.
Lee Sonko: Me neither! Thanks for looking.
Lee Sonko: Have a great night.
Edith ext 1601: Thanks.  You too.
Lee Sonko: G’night.
Edith ext 1601: bye.

Of course I wonder how it was he came to contact me. Was it one of my emails, my sample parts request, or the “squeaky wheel” post you are looking at now? I’ve heard it can be hard to get samples from Atmel.

You’ve installed the fancy new Windows Desktop Search. You can find things fast and easy on your computer. You’ve got that nice little “Search Desktop” thingie next to your system tray. All is well. But there are some things Desktop Search doesn’t index. There are some things you don’t want Desktop Search to index.

The trouble is, every time you open Windows Explorer and type “ctrl-f”, Windows Search begs to search for you. Every time you have to scroll down to where it says “This folder is not indexed. To search this directory please use Search Companion or add this directory to your index via Options.” You click on “Search Companion” and all is well again.

Here is how to disable Windows Search. I found this from from John’s Adventures.

Simply open RegEdit (hit Start > Run then type ‘regedit’). Go to the following node:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS

Then double-click on ‘ShowStartSearchBand’ and set the value to ‘0′. Close that and you’re done, the next time you click ‘Search’ in explorer, the old, reliable search companion will appear. This applies to operating systems before Windows Vista

In this video, one of the creators of Wuala gives a pretty good explanation of reed-solomon error correction and erasure codes.

I got my HD44780 LCD screen working without the use of the Phanderson serial board. :-)

I’ve graduated from using the Arduino Language Reference to using the Extended Reference page. :-)

Ah, sweet relief!

Filemon tells me that Mozy and/or Google Desktop was thrashing while watching parts of Google Chrome’s Safe Browsing stuff so I set it so that Mozy doesn’t watch that stuff. I also disabled Chrome’s Phishing and Malware protection. Now my computer has stopped its insessent disk thrashing (at least for now)

I’m using Chrome 1.0.154.48 and Mozy 1.10.4.2.

(original)

Google Chrome will thrash to disk a lot to disk, at least in version 0.2.149.27, build 1583 (the first publically available beta) in Windows XP. It is so bad that my entire computer locks up a bit and becomes unresponsive. Disabling phishing and malware protection seems to stop the thrashing:

1. Click on the monkey-wrench icon to the right of the address bar.
2. Choose “Options” from the menu.
3. Click the “Under the Hood” tab
4. Disable the “Enable phishing and malware protection” check-box

If you are a friend of mine and want to use the service mentioned below via my website, give me a buzz. You won’t have to install anything on your computer. You’ll be able to read your friends’ “Friends-only” posts on Google Reader :-)

Google Reader can’t read Livejournal Friends-only posts. That is a bother. It means that you have to log in to Livejournal when you want to read your friends’ “private” posts. I hate having to log in to different RSS readers which means I rarely read my friend’s private posts on Livejournal :-( ….. until now :-)

Scatmania wrote a proxy tool that makes it so your Friends-only posts can be seen by Google Reader. He released the tool as open source. Thank you Scatman Dan!

Here is the Google Reader Livejournal Feed Fetcher source code with some easy notes from me on getting it to work.

The LCD on my Arduino works now :-)

Including the backlight (it took me wayyyy to long to figure out that I had forgotten to install one resistor on the LCD interface PCB)

Noisebridge is a good place to hang out and work on electronics :-)

A friend wrote to me today about his failed hard drive:

This weekend my laptop HD, a hitachi 250GB. suddenly stopped.
While running disk warrior on it, it failed into the famed click of death.
Would be very interested in recovering some of the data from it if you have any brilliant ideas.

Here is my response:

Spinrite might help
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

————————————————–

If the data is very important, you can try using Drive Savers. It’s an expensive service where they open your hard drive up in a clean room. It might cost $500-2000.

If you go with Drive Savers, I’m a reseller (not that I’ve ever resold any) and I might be able to get you a discount on their (very expensive) service. Try giving them my reseller code: DS14221.

The deal they gave me with the reseller code is:
* 10% discount on our services to my customers.
* 10% commission paid on the net invoice after customer discount.
* No up-front charges to my customers.
* No “Attempt Fee” if data is not recoverable, there is no charge (a $200 savings).
* No charge for return shipping, if data is not recoverable.

————————————————–

And you really should set up an automatic online backup. This service I use costs $100 per year for unlimited backups. I backup about 100 gig and it would be a bother to backup too much more than that since it takes so long to do the backup over my internet connection. The service is called Mozy

If you try Mozy, use my referral fee and we’ll both get some money. Look here: http://lee.org/blog/2007/06/19/mozy-offsite-backup-discount/

I have a few terrific bookmarks that I use all the time. They are javascript code. I put them all in a text file so you are assured of getting the formatting just right. Take a look. They work equally well in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

View my terrific bookmarks

including

• Use this to put a link on your browser to the next level of the HTML hierarchy
• Open Selected Links in your browser
• Open the “next” link in a series
• Open the “previous” link in a series
• view cookies for a site
• Mouseover DOM

Why is my disk drive light flickering?

Why is my hard drive so slow?

Filemon will tell you! :-)

Download and run filemon from Sysinternals (local copy). You don’t have to install it, just run it. It’s easy to use, just watch the file accesses in real time.

:-)

I made my arduino blink! and flash and pulsate in a spooky, lifelike way. And it was eeeeasy! I’m very excited!

You might notice the new “Newer / Older” navigational aid on the site. See right. I tried for a frigging hour to get them to “Float:right” properly with CSS and look similar to the “Page 1 of 79″ page-nav thing. Friggin frickin frick! CSS is supposed to make things easier.

The current (working but ugly) implementation just uses a Center tag.

4 days ago I wrote some prose about not upgrading to Wordpress 2.7

Now Dreamhost says

Versions [of Wordpress] older than 2.6.5 are known to have vulnerabilities
…
we will begin sending out emails to customers with outdated WordPress installations, asking them to upgrade
…
we may eventually require the upgrades

Grrrrr

I got an iPhone 3G for Christmas (thanks mom & dad!)

Why must things be hard?

I had to google for 15 minutes to find instructions on putting my own ringtones on my phone. Most of the instructions started out, “Apple doesn’t allow changing your ringtone so you’ll have to jailbreak your phone. Just follow these 20 geeky steps and you’ll be playing ringtones in a few hours (until Apple cracks down on this method)”. So much for Apple being “clearly superior”. Well, in any case, here’s how to put your own ringtones on your iPhone 3G EASILY. I have iTunes 8.0.2.20 and this procedure worked fine:

Video on CNet: Make iPhone ringtones with iTunes 8.0

Short form:

1. Make an AAC sound file with iTunes “Advanced | Create AAC Version”
2. Drag the new file out of iTunes onto your desktop
3. Remove the sound file from iTunes (but don’t delete it)
4. Rename the sound file from *.m4a to *.m4r
5. Drag the file into iTunes and it will appear in a new “Ringtones” folder. 
6. Sync your iPhone, go to your iPhone and you’ll see it as a ringtone choice.

Update 5-26-09: And see below, modelwhisperer’s comment may help you get this working

I just placed my first order for a microcontroller… an Arduino-clone called RBBB (Really Bare Bones Board)

I’ve written about this before. Here is the latest installment…

Astra32 - comprehensive information about the configuration of your system…. to help you get rid of driver problems for Windows

Combined Community Codec Pack: This lets Windows Media Player play pretty much any video format including DVDs. You install it and it JUST WORKS :-)

HOW TO – Put DVDs on the iPhone – the super simple way. Use Handbrake

How to archive your DVD collection. Use DVD Decrypter v 3.5.4.0 by Lightning UK! (find it at your favorite warez site) The author’s original site doesn’t work anymore.

When you are logged onto a computer via VNC, it can be hard to tell if the hard drive is busy since you can’t hear it remotely. Run DiskMon and you can see it!

Here’s the full list of disk tools:

AccessChk: This tool shows you the accesses the user or group you specify has to files, Registry keys or Windows services. Continue reading ‘Lee Recommends Computer Programs’ »