I’ve started to accumulate quite a heap of old smartphones, and would really like them to either get useful or get gone. It was my initial intent to “simply” hook one up as a networked webcam, and have it serve images via HTTP, not unlike the units sold by everyone from Axis to Panasonic.  Sadly, [...]

In a previous post, I’d discussed the Energizer batteries and charger I’d purchased, only to be disapointed by the chargers’ lack of 220v capability.  At Patrick from OMG’s recommendation, I ordered a set of NiZn AAs from PowerGenix, and am pretty pleased overall. In addition to better flash-charging performance (Which is amazingly hard to quantify, so you’ll [...]

For a while now, I’ve been searching for a way to integrate all of the various content I’m generating (including Google Reader [shared items], YouTube, and whatever else) into a single webpage and RSS feed.  A few months back, I’d “solved” the Twitter problem with a WordPress plugin that tweets when I post here.  With my recent [...]

One of the features of the Makery (now the defacto name for the Omaha Maker Group’s space) is a standing webcam that publishes live photos of the space to the Internet.  We have a few USB webcams hooked up to a PC running YawCam, which is a free (as in beer) webcam package written in [...]

This weekend was a mix of projects; Cleaning the house, working on car stuff and some time down at the Makery (which seems to now be the official unofficial name of the Omaha Maker Group’s space). I won’t rehash all the details here, but you can check them out on the OMG website. My [not [...]

Tonight found me in a debate about OSS firewall platforms for about the 5th time this week. It’s generally my position that BSD-based firewalls (like pfsense or m0n0wall) are superior to Linux-based ones (like DD-WRT).  Anyhow, it got me wondering just how old my own M0n0wall install was. Turns out, the answer was “too old [...]

A while back, I found myself annoyed when I accidently alt-tabbed to my desktop, minimizing a half-dozen windows that I’d positioned “just-so” over the last few hours.  I started searching for a way to remove “Desktop” from the new Windows 7 alt-tab menu, but found that this wasn’t directly possible. What IS possible, however, is [...]

Today is Pi Day (3/14) again, a day on which math nerds everywhere celebrate the ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference.   Head over to Piday.org for more info, games, and other interesting stuff.  (Disclaimer: This is a totally shameless plug; A friend and I have operated Piday.org since 2001 ).  Before anyone has [...]

I’m finally fed up with the crappy performance and battery life of my Samsung Moment.   I decided that I was going to flash to an alternate ROM (and kernel);   The guys at the office are both on Epics and have root and recovery but not much else.  I’m not after Froyo here, though [...]

Since I started my document-scanning project, I’ve been backing the scanned data up to my local file server, manually at first, and then with Xcopy.  That lead to a few problems when documents would get moved, so I started purging the backup copy each time and doing a full copy instead.  That worked fine (gigabit [...]