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Monthly Archives: December 2008

Angle-Iron bearings and Z-axis

I decided that a full set of 3 bearings at 120 degree intervals would take too much alignment and precision so I fell back to the tried and true home-brew DIY pipe and bearing system that uses 90 degree angle iron with skate bearings bolted to it. I used steel angle iron that is 1/8 [...]

Canon S410 viewfinder problem

Our Canon S410 camera recently exhibited some strange behavior. When using the LCD display on the back as a viewfinder, it would display a shimmering curtain of pink and purple pixels instead of the correct view. The problem was not with the image sensor, because pictures could be taken normally, and it was not with [...]

Motofone F3 working with AT&T Voicemail

A reader has reported that he purchased a Motofone F3 from “Monster-Cellular-Store” on ebay that came with a Cingular branded pleather case and it is set up to work correctly with the AT&T voicemail indicator system. The one I purchased however is still not working, so it appears that some setting or configuration is needed [...]

Redbox Movie Recommendations

Within the last few months I have been making use of the two RedBox “automated retail systems” within the lobby of a nearby Wall-Mart. (And mostly being successful in resisting the urge to venture into Wall-Mart on each visit and get trapped behind a lady talking on her cell phone while trying to write a [...]

Global search and replace in multiple files

Searching and replacing a bit of text in a lot of files is a very common problem. Lots of tools exist to get it done. On unix systems, awk is one favorite, and I found this webpage with a simple search and replace example.
Unfortunately, I wanted to search for \prob and replace it with %\prob. [...]