Tuesday, January 30, 2007
While exploring alternate energy sources, I decided to try generating electricity by using the latent heat (or lack thereof) in Dry Ice, or solid CO2. The most direct (and solid state) way to generate electricity from a temperature differential is a peltier junction, which a 12V car cooler/heater unit happens to have. The pre-built cooler [...]
The Samsung Blackjack is a nice piece of hardware. The screen is beautiful, it is well proportioned and fits well in my hand, the scroll-wheel makes it easy to select from menus, and it's thin enough to be carried in a hip pocket despite the factthat it's wider than most phones. The camera is [...]
Saturday, January 27, 2007
The key to teathering your linux laptop to your Cingular Blackjack phone is enabling the Bluetooth DUN profile on the blackjack. Although it shows up by default, it won't work unless you are running the Internet Sharing application. (Which, Cingular has hidden from you, yay carriers!)
For some reason, Mandriva has moved the default bluetooth link key location from /var/lib/bluetooth to /var/lib/lib/bluetooth. So, if you are looking for link keys (to delete to force a new pairing, etc) add an extra lib.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
When running linux, you sometimes want to connect to a cell phone (using it as a modem) over bluetooth.
Different cell phones use different RFCOMM channels to export their Dial-up Networking service on.
Here are the commands to use to find which channel you should use:
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks (USB) is the USB web-cam I use. I like the small size and the clip on mounting system works great with the IBM X31 Thinkpad. Mandrake 10.1 includes PWC (Philips Web Cam, the chipset that is used) support out of the box, but it only supports QCIF images (176×144, [...]
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
SyncML saves your data
I have been looking at the SyncML standard as a solution to keep the calendar on my palm pilot in sync with the calendar on a Nokia 9500 on the off chance that I don't want to carry two devices at once. SyncML was first developed for synchronizing cell phones, so the [...]
Ever get carded buying candy?
Have you ever been asked for ID when buying candy? I did… (Note that this also means that my lab has Hershey's mini Reeses cups in white and milk chocolate.)