Skip to content

Category Archives: Technology

Posts that relate to technology. Reviews, HOWTO’s, problems & solutions.

Phillips Webcam with Linux

Thursday, March 20, 2008

I bought 30 Phillips SPC  900 NC webcams because they claim to support up to 90fps and I have had good luck using linux with the PWC drivers in the past.  Plugged into a generic Ubuntu 7.10 install, I found that 640×480 resolution was automatic, with 15fps. 320×240 worked at 30fps. (I tried 160×120 resolution, [...]

Also filed in Linux, Useful Links | | Comments (2)

Hacking the iPod Touch - Jailbreak to 1.1.3 w/ extra apps

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

General info:
How to put an ipod touch into restore mode: Plug it into your computer, and turn on iTunes, then: hold the power and home buttons down until it resets. Release the power button, but keep the home button held until it enters recovery mode.
How to restore to a specific version of the firmware [...]

Also filed in Commentary, Projects | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Fixing Program Guide data on MythTV after Daylight Savings Time switch

Sunday, March 9, 2008

I'm running MythTV (Subversion Trunk) on a Ubuntu 7.10 box. After the daylight savings time changeover, my mythtv box had the correct time, but the Program Guide data was still off by an hour.  Manually running a mythfilldatabase didn't fix it. After checking to make sure that my timezone xmltv settings were set to Auto, [...]

Also filed in Linux | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Human powered generator

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Lots of people have built human powered generators. I like this one for two reasons:
1. It's designed to harvest waste energy. (It helps your body stop your knee from swinging at the end of the forward swing, something your body uses energy to do anyways.)
2. The evaluation included serious medical [...]

Also filed in Commentary | | Comments (0)

Mythtv gotchas when upgrading from Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) to 7.10 (Gutsy)

Saturday, February 2, 2008

I upgraded my Mythtv server from Feisty to Gutsy for no good reason (other than I like the pain).
Gotchas I ran into when trying to get MythTV working again:
1. The upgrade lost/removed the libqt3-mysql support from my computer. This resulted in the MythTV applications (frontend and backend) giving "unable to connect to database" errors. As [...]

Also filed in Linux, Projects | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Riced Dynamo flashlight

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

On our van trip across the country my aunt and uncle gave us two hand crank (dynamo) LED flashlights which are really useful to keep in the van. The self-charging nature of the flashlights are very nice, in that we can leave them in the van and just wind them up when we need light. [...]

Also filed in Projects | | Comments (0)

On the fly external monitor support (mirroring / spanning) on Ubuntu 7.10

Thursday, January 24, 2008

My IBM X31 laptop has the capability to drive an external VGA monitor in addition to it's built in XGA (1024×768) Laptop Video Display Screen (LVDS). The new xrandr extension allows non-privlidged users to change monitor layouts on-the-fly. And now, thanks to my friend Tracy, I know the "extra magic" to make it all work.

Also filed in Linux | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Failing power supply

Monday, January 21, 2008

For my MythTV media computer I use a network based HD-TV tuner from SiliconDust . I've been very pleased with how it works, the form factor and feature set. However, over christmas it suddenly went dead due to no fault of it's own. The 5V 2A power supply had failed. (It is plugged into [...]

Also filed in Commentary | | Comments (3)

My Reading Habits: Korean

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Google Reader (a web based RSS reader that I use to track and read various sites and blogs) has a recommendation system that will give you recommended blogs to subscribe to. It uses the RSS feeds that you are currently subscribed to, and then looks to see who else is also subscribed to those [...]

Also filed in Commentary | | Comments (0)

St. Moritz SMX Diver battery

Sunday, November 25, 2007

The St. Moritz SMX Diver (a discontinued watch) uses a Silver Oxide Cell battery, Maxell SR927SW (generic 395 button cell) which is a 1.55v battery.

Also filed in | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)