A few months back, now, I traded in my Samsung Moment for my first keyboardless smartphone, the Motorola Photon.  The Photon (as with most keyboardless phones) is substantially thinner than my Moment, and a whole heck of a lot faster. I’m not going to bore you with specs, but it’s very comparable to my Viewsonic [...]

I’ve been screwing with custom ROMs on my Viewsonic gTablet for a while now, but so far have settled on Froyo as I found the Gingerbread ROMs to be lacking in terms of stability and performance.  I’d heard rumors that they’d gotten Honeycomb going on the gTablet, but had been putting off playing with it [...]

Tonight, I did some prep work on a new EasyDriver (on breadboard) that I ordered for an upcoming project. I mounted a 4-pin Molex Floppy connector for the motor output, and pin-headers reversed for breadboard mounting. I also milled the gear off of a scrap stepper motor and built a coupler to a fancy leadscrew I [...]

People I meet via the Omaha Maker Group often ask me what it is that I make.  I try to avoid the “Everything” answer, popularized by Jason Uher, but it seems to be sort of the truth.  Due to a renewed  interest [by people who aren't me] in things that I’m making, I’m trying to do [...]

For a while now, I’ve been using KVM on my Ubuntu server for all sorts of things.  Once I got it running, it was really quite slick.  This post, however, isn’t about the merits of KVM as a virtualization platform. One of my virtual PCs is a Windows XP Home instance which I use when [...]

Sorry for the pun; I was just goin’ with the flow…  Anyhow, I was looking at some online hydrograph charts to see how deep the River was getting, and noticed that the URL of the graphic itself had some interesting parameters in the title, including the name of the Omaha Gage (OMHN1) and also a [...]

On Tuesday, Becky was out on a training ride when she came upon something in the road.  After saving the mystery object from being run over by an oncoming car, she discovered it to be an already-roadkilled IPad 2.  We (Becky and I) have kind of an ongoing “game” where we see who can find the most [...]

Today, I took advantage of some free time and put together a quick-and-dirty stand for my gTablet.  The tablet has a smooth, rounded back that doesn’t lend itself well to leaning up against things, and the viewable angle of the LCD (not to mention ergonomics) dictate that laying it flat on a table isn’t ideal [...]

Becky and I pack pretty lightly when we travel, but we certainly carry our fair share of stuff. This entire post might sound a bit over-thought and pedantic, but when you carry the entirety of your luggage for two weeks on your back, every cubic inch has value and each ounce matters.  Our strategy revolves [...]

Last week, I picked up a new Android tablet to supplement my smartphone and hopefully replace some of the functionality of my aging laptop.  I chose the Viewsonic gTablet for its feature set, and very reasonable price.  The two main tradeoffs were a lack of Honeycomb (Android 3.x) and a limited screen resolution (it’s a [...]