Lee.org

Dear Lazyweb,
I’m working on an project where we will have 5-10 robots moving around a large field… 100-1,000 yards. Right now we’re planning on using a mix of differential GPS, accelerometers and and a kalman filter so the robots can determine their position to within 1 meter or less. This may or may not be the best way to go about this.

Do you have some ideas as to some other solutions we might go with?
Take a peek at our main webpage…. http://www.orbswarm.com/

Here’s 2 good ways to keep spam at bay:

Route your email through Google Mail
1- forward all your mail to a Gmail account that you set up
2- Tell Gmail to forward all your mail to a private email address of yours

Or
I pay $1.95/month for the Cloudmark Desktop service (http://www.cloudmark.com/) and it works very well. I think it costs $4/month for new subscribers or you can use my referal code to get it cheaper (http://www.cloudmark.com/?rc=hze4hl). It’s only for MS Outlook or Outlook Express.

Good luck.

If you have TestTrack Pro 4 from Seapine Software, you might find the following useful. Change the email notifications as such and the emails will be in a much more readable format.
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"SebastianBassi" from Rentacoder.com and Bioinformatica.info just finished pulling some 400 old posts from my pre-Wordpress journal into Wordpress. I’ve now got 803 posts in WP. :-) It involved him doing a lot of manual file renaming, slight modification of HTML by hand and moving files around. It would have been a big bother for me. He did it for less than $200. I still had to do like 2 hours of review work and pointing out things he missed. But I'd recommend him. 

Here is how to set your RSS news reader to read Protected (Friends-Only) posts.
I mention this because I had some trouble getting this to work with the available instructions out there.

This is tested on RSS Bandit.

Create a new feed entry with a URL like this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace “YourFriend’sUsername” with… I’ll let you guess)
Go to the Authentication tab and type in your Livejournal username and password.
Done :-) You can now use that feed entry to read your friend’s posts.

I read in several places that you should do this:
http://Username:Password@www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace Username, Password and YourFriend’sUsername)
I haven’t found this to work.

When you are at a public access terminal, it’s very possible that a keylogger is sniffing your keyboard. But sometimes it’s just so convenient that you have to use one of these machines anyway. To try and beat it, do the following:

1 Open notepad
2 Type part of your password in the password window
3 Using the mouse, go to the notepad window
4 Type some nonsense characters
5 Using the mouse, return to the password window

Repeat steps 2-5 a few times.

Make sure that the password window doesn’t show your password on the screen because bad people might have put a program on your computer that takes screenshots every few seconds.

(tip from Security Now Podcast, Episode 17)

I fixed that terribly annoying bug that IE users were seeing when trying to leave comments on my site. It was that the comment text-box would extend all the way to the right, underneath the right column such that you couldn’t see what you typed… terribly annoying.

Fixed.

So now everybody comment like moon-struck werewolves.

You know that my blog must be getting popular… I got 118 comment spams last week. Thank goodness for Spam Karma and Bad Behavior. Not a single spam got through. I don’t know how much e-mail spam I get these days, Spamassassin takes care of most of it while Cloudmark Desktop takes care of about 10 a day. I had one false-negative last week, but that’s about it.

…and yes Holly, I totally realize that this is another product review in a long string… Nya on you! ;-)

update 10-9-05: BITE MY TONGUE! It seems a very odd coincidence that just a few hours after I wrote this, I got my first next-generation comment spam.

It was a comment from one Ryan M. Parr. He’s got an email address, a web site filled with all sorts of semi-authentic sounding crap and he even writes semi-coherently. The spam was deposited in a very low key manner. He didn’t even mention the name of the product! Instead, he google-bombed on a keyword, “Eye[nocommentspam]Q”. That takes you to a website called in[nocommentspam]fmind.com where they are selling (of all things) a speed reading course.

I thought the spam mail sounded stupid too; so I downloaded it off bearshare; unfortunately now that I checked it out, it turned out to be in an Asian character set and unable to extract from .rar format. If you want a program along this line, a good program is Eye[nocommentspam]Q.

Fuckers.

update 10-11-05: 71 comment spams received in the past 3 days. 0 made it to the site. I just sent $25 to Dr Dave and Michael Hampton, authors of Spam Karma and Bad Behavior.

Here is how to set up an SSHD service on your Windows XP Cygwin machine. This comes from a great guide from Pigtail.net on how to turn an old PC into a Linux Router… aptly named the Linux Router Project (LRP)

Local version of how to install SSHD. And how to install SSH

And yes, this works.

I bought an HP Laserjet 1020 a few days ago. It sat outside my room gathering dust for a few days; I was worried. I’ve had an HP Laserjet 6MP for the last 8 years and it has performed flawlessly. Would this new printer be any good or has HP lost it. “They don’t build ‘em like they used to.” This new printer looks like a toy compared to the 6MP. Heck, that’s the main reason I didn’t bring it. The 6MP weighs in at roughly 25 lbs; this new printer is barely 5, consuming 1/2 the desk space. How could it possibly print 3 times as fast at twice the resolution, printing envelopes and full size images with it’s wimpy 2 MB of RAM?

Well, it does.

The first thing that got my attention was how well planned out the setting up procedure was. From the pretty language-free notes to the amazing ease at which the toner slips into it.

• Driver software: excellent. It clearly walked me through printing double-sided… and it didn’t speak! Those speaking printers still freak me out.
• Speed: remarkable. The first text page comes out in 8 seconds, then 6 seconds per page. Full page photos come out just about as fast.
• Print quality: excellent. Not as good as a photo, or as a color photo but terribly sharp black and white. Better paper might help this.
• Envelopes: Fine. Since it doesn’t have an alternate paper path port, I worried that my envelopes would be all crinkled. It comes out only a tiny bit crinkled and the paper fully recovers after a few minutes. (better than my 6MP!)
• Footprint: tiny! When you’re not using it, you can fold up the front door and it takes up about 8″x15″x8″. Otherwise, it’s 15″x15″x8″, smaller than some inkjets.
• Aesthetic: Nice. Smooth, slightly curvy lines, respectable two-tone traditional beige and dark beige.
• Cost: A bit more than some other printers. I paid $179. Some other stores had a $30 rebate but I was lazy. Some other low-end laser printers are as cheap as $89 but buying the HP name seems to still be worth something. :-)
• Toner life and replacement cost: I think I remember reading that I’ll get 2,000 pages out of the $80 print cartridge. Probably more if I refill it.