Archive for the ‘Geekery’ Category.
I’m still working on this a project where I want to find and continue to know the location of 10 robots moving up to 10kph in a field about 100 yards square with 0.2-1.0 meter accuracy. RFID-Radar is -almost- a solution in a box except that it takes many seconds for it to do range-finding.
GPS isn’t accurate enough.
I’m now envisioning 2 sets of antennas using angle of arrival interferometry. I’ve been googling (and the library) my head off and not coming up with too much thus far. Do you know of an interferometry system that might detect 0.1 degree difference or so? I figure that with 2 sets, one on the X plane, one on the Y, we can get an accurate location. I’ll ping the RFID-Radar guy on this but I think he’s focused elsewhere.
(via)
Note: This procedure will only work with Windows XP Professional.
Click Start -> Run
Type “gpedit.msc” (no quotes) and hit Enter
(this opens the “Group Policy” editor.)
Under “User Configuration” double click “Administrative Templates”
After a few seconds you will see a list of items on the right.
Double click on “Windows Components”
Double click on “Windows Update”
Double click on “Do not display ‘Install Updates and Shutdown’ option in Shut Down Windows dialog box”
Select “Enabled” and click OK
Then close the Group Policy window.
Yer done.
Also there’s …
Official muBlinder Page, Easily Bypass Microsoft Update Genuine Windows Validation (I haven’t tried it)
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/
If you use the Safari web browser and wouldn’t mind giving me a little hand with something, could you email me? I’m trying to figure out what’s up with a problem on my site.
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.
Voltage Loss Tables: Calculate how many volts are eaten up over a given distance
voltage loss = amps * wire resistance * distance in feet * 2 wires (1 wire in each direction!)
Sources http://www.cirris.com/testing/resistance/wire.html http://www.paigewire.com/volt_loss_formulas.htm
Continue reading ‘Voltage Loss Table’ »
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.
Continue reading ‘TestTrack Pro 4’ »
VNC SingleClick is a program that lets a person run a small (166k) program in order to let another user see their computer screen and/or control their computer. It’s way useful.
Here are notes I took on how to set it up (these instructions were ripped from a doc I wrote for another purpose. Sorry if it’s slightly unintelligible)
Continue reading ‘VNC SingleClick’ »
"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.
So is there actually a good news reader out there? I tried switching from Firefox Sage to something snazzier and I’ve been scorned twice now.
RSS Bandit is very pretty and has really nice management but you can’t tell how many comments are in a post using the UI. (this seems related to shoddy support/implementation of <slash :comments>).
RSSReader… I forget why I dumped RSSReader.
I’m swiching back to Sage. It’s silly though. I pull up a feed and then middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click all the entries to open them up. That seems ineffient or something but it works.
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.
I submitted a T-Shirt idea to J!nx today. I’m just logging it here so archive.org picks it up if the idea ever sees the light of day. The abbreviation for the idea is: ISTOTI.
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)
If you have multiple computers with multiple monitors, Synergy is a great way to keep your hands on a single keyboard & mouse. It’s kind of like a KVM, but it’s not.
I have 2 monitors on 1 computer (my main desktop PC) and a laptop that I haul from home to work. Now, I can keep my hands on one keyboard and mouse while I slide my mouse from my big 19″ main screen, over to the right to my 17″ screen and then … magically to the right again onto my laptop!
You can slide from your PC to your Linux to your Mac. Keyboard input follows the mouse. You can copy/paste across boxen! It’s magic, and it’s FREEE!
Get Synergy
Read a good tutorial. (I thought it was overly verbose and then I needed to read it to figure out one concept)
I was up and running in < 5 minutes.
I took down the original post I made about Synergy a week ago because I wasn’t ready to recommend it; there were some crashing problems. I found out that the crashing issue was quickly fixed (1.2.5 was no good) and I had just come in at a bad time. I had written to the author when I saw the poor performance and he got right back to me, pointing out that he had very recently posted a fix.
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.
I was fiddling with my BIOS settings trying to get my Cybex Autoview Commander 4 port KVM to stop messing up my keyboard input. Avocent (who bought Cybex) said that I might want to change the BIOS keyboard input setting from “fast” to “normal”. Well, I couldn’t find that option in my BIOS but….
There is an option for hard drive performance. You can choose: bypass, quiet hard drive, or performance hard drive. It had been set to “bypass”. I switched it to “performance” and Yeeeh Haawww! The drive is now a bit louder, making those traditional hard drive clackity sounds, but some disk operations are now much more responsive. Several tasks have gone from “click, wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… done” to “click-done”.
Cool beans.
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.
I’ve been using FTP Voyager and SmartFTP for a long time. Today I was having some trouble getting them working on a new Windows MCE machine. Michie suggested I use Internet Explorer. “But IE FTP sucks.” “No it doesn’t.” She is right. Somewhere in the last couple years IE (6.0) upgraded their built-in FTP client. It has full drag & drop capabilities and it’s pretty and everything.
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 want to back up my Windows XP computer to another Windows XP computer using Rsync and SSH. Since Rsync only runs under *nix, I’m running it under Cygwin.
There are a couple hurdles to doing this. The one I got stuck on was getting SSH to work without a password.
It’s so freaking simple to do. You just have to know which instructions do not help accomplish your goal.
Continue reading ‘Using Cygwin, Rsync, SSH and the internet to backup my XP computer’ »
