Comments (0)

By Dave, September 5, 2006 9:35 am

Google Code – Updates: Announcing Tesseract OCR

Good show Google!   Now for the community to get this sucker ready for prime time.

Comments (0)

By Dave, September 4, 2006 11:56 pm

Guess it’s about time to get back to work. Got the end room about ready to work in.  Fixed a couple or 5 things today.

Started with a power strip with a cord which had had the grounding pin removed.  That’s a no-no around me so I cut the female end off an old computer cord and took the strip apart and after a bit of stripping of wires and soldering of the same had a useable power strip again.  20 minutes and maybe 5 cents in solder and electricity.  I figure it was a cost effective repair.

Next was my power control, isolation, and limiting station.  Put a couple of side boards on it and plugged it in.  Relabled the outlets and it was ready to go.

Then spent a couple of hours on a Hitachi 36 inch tv.  No joy.   Someone has already been the distance and I am about to the point of taking it to the landfill.

Came back over here and got a computer and monitor and took them back over and hooked up for a bit of hard drive repair.

After spending a half hour or so on repairing the laptop to standard drive adaptors, I started on Steves 80 gb laptop drive with the overly stressed plug.  Repaired 6 pins that had cracked loose from the print and tried it.  Nothing.  Checked continuity on all of the MANY pins.  Everything checked ok.  Tried again.  Nothing.  Check for 5 volts.  Got it at the plug and to one side of a SMD that is marked N.  After looking at the circuit I decided that it was most likely either a fuse or 0 ohm resister and since this one is not covered by warrenty that translates to nothing ventured nothing gained.  So got a small piece of copper wire and bridged it.  Put it back together and tried it again and the sucker came up!

Tried to install pclos on it but due to a flakey power supply and close to 800 feet of power wire just from the building I am working in to the meter which is another 350/400 from the transformer (all this means that I have a LOT of power fluctuations) I couldn’t get it to stay up long enough to get the install done.

Steve’s son Aaron came by and went to get some old power supplies he had.

While waiting for the install to finish or quit again I decided since things were going fairly well I would tear into a Zip drive that Steve had sent my way to fix.  Checked the usb cable and connection and both were fine.  Seperated the transport and board and after futzing with it for a while resoldered the USB connections just to make sure they weren’t broken loose on top.  I also noted that at the points where the board connections contacted the film the film was indented.  Some of the connections were also not quite as far out as others so I repositioned all of them to the same distance from the base.  Reassembled and tried it and it worked, so some of the above corrected the problem.  One to remember.

When Aaron got back with the power supplies I tried one and after it stinking and getting hot, tried another that Steve (thanks Steve!) had given him to bring over, and it worked and didn’t smoke so used it. And started the reinstall again.

Went to eat and when I came back it was still going.  Not sure if it is a drive problem or a cd problem.  Gave up after another 2 tries.  Downloaded the newest version of pclos on this machine and am going to burn it to cd and try again tomorrow.

While I was waiting for it to install the last two times, started to check out the power supply board for Mark H’s pinball machine.  Found a transistor and 4 diodes bad so far.  Suspect that there is other stuff bad in the machine. Since the damaged parts are all in the floriscan display high voltage circuitry I suspect that one or more of the score displays are damage also.  Will get back on that one tomorrow.
So all in all a good day of repairs.

More in the pipe already for tomorrow so will close for the nonce… 😉

Comments (0)

By Dave, September 3, 2006 12:49 pm

Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com » News

Cory’s personal site. Books, stories, podcasts of books and stories, blog, and more. Good stuff!

Comments (0)

By Dave, September 1, 2006 10:13 pm

DRM Smackdown Day is October 3. You In? – Gizmodo

I’m in but not just on October 3. I don’t buy ANY media/music/movies that I can’t use when/where ever. I probably miss out on a lot that way but I feel better about myself… 😉

Comments (0)

By Dave, September 1, 2006 1:26 am

MicroShop – Red Alt

This looks quite interesting. MicroShop is a shopping cart for WordPress with a paypal gateway built in.  Been looking for something like this for over a year and just stumbled on it tonight.   Wasn’t even looking for a shopping cart!  Have downloaded it and will try it later today. If it works like I think it will then guess I get to redo several sites that I thought were finished… Mainly cause WordPress will be easier to use for small sales sites, both to setup and to maintain than ANY of the ecommerce programs I have used and tried to use. They are just too complacated for anyone but a geek to setup and run and they want way to much info on each item. /rant

More after I try it… [Does a happy dance when no one is looking]

Comments (0)

By Dave, September 1, 2006 1:15 am

Andy Ihnatko’s YellowText
Okey-doke…it’s the last day of the month, so it’s probably a good idea to get going on that “Sorry I haven’t been blogging much, but I was completely consumed with finishing my next book” post, Viz:

Sorry that I haven’t been blogging much, but I was completely consumed with finishing my next book.

…Which morphed into “Really, now that the book is done, the very last thing I want to do is attempt to string coherent sentences together if an editor isn’t forcing me at gunpoint,” and then to “I was focusing so totally on finishing the book that I had to back-burner a lot of deadline-less projects, but now I’ve no excuses left.”

He’s Baaaaaaccccckkkk!  Looks like Andy has another book coming out.  About the iPod from what he says later in the article.  But he isn’t dead.  I’d been wondering what was up.    Now we know.

Yessss I am still making lots of rather unnecesary posts so maybe Technorati will see the damn things.  😉

And it’s late so…

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 31, 2006 11:08 pm

Silent Convective Water Cooled PC – Pumpless and Fanless

This dude has made a REAL homebrew water cooled computer using mostly parts from Home Depot for the water cooling. Really neat stuff!

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 31, 2006 4:55 pm

Street Tech Feature: Awesome Twin-Engine Solarroller Robot :: Street Tech :: hardware beyond the hype

Strange little robot(?) using 2 hard disk platters as wheels.  Interesting to hardware hackers and geeks.  Cool!

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 31, 2006 4:50 pm

Techdirt: California Taking Steps To Outlaw WiFi Piggybacking?
The California legislature has passed a law requiring the manufacturers of WiFi products to put warning labels reminding users to password-protect their networks, and the state’s governor is expected to sign it. While the bill doesn’t outlaw piggybacking — the practice of simply using an available, open access point — some are wondering if this is the first step towards making it illegal, since it notes “there is disagreement as to whether it is legal for someone to use another person’s WiFi connection to browse the Internet if the owner of the WiFi connection has not put a password on it”.

I don’t have my WiFi password protected and don’t plan to.  No particular reason in the area I live in as my nearest neighbors live between 600 and 800 feet away and I don’t think any of them use wireless connections anyway.  Also as long as I leave it open I can honestly say that I have no idea who might have downloaded whatever from this ip address.

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 31, 2006 4:36 pm

Free Software Magazine
Free Software Magazine is the free online magazine about free software. It is free to subscribe, free to download and free to read online. Please, feel free to read all of our issues, book reviews, newsletters, and blog entries.

Lotta good articles.  So far I haven’t found a RSS feed so link is above.

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 31, 2006 2:17 pm

Make PDFs for free under the GPL | Free Software Magazine
Now that the new versions of Ghostscript are available under the free software GPL license other projects relying on Ghostscript can be fully GPL software as well. One of these projects, PDFCreator, I recently tested and I must admit I’m impressed.

PDFCreator allows you to make a PDF of anything you can print, documents, spreadsheet, presentations, anything with a print function. PDFCreator even has encryption and security features that would make it perfect for a corporate environment.

Glad to see this.  Have in the past fought for hours trying to get a pdf to work right.  Will have to check it out.

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 30, 2006 10:38 pm

Body Language v 0.03

Not safe for work. Not porn just nudes making letters with their bodys. Wild stuff.

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 29, 2006 11:13 pm

Technorati Blog Info: TechnoPrimitive

As of now Technorati is still showing my last post to be 45 days ago. I have made more than 45 posts in the last week, so I get the feeling that they are just majorily screwed up. But maybe it’s just my site. Who knows…

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 29, 2006 8:05 pm

neurALC KDE-Apps.org

This is neat. Looks like software for medical enviroments is going GPL too. About time!

From the site:

Description:
neurALC is an open-source cross-platform software for the analysis of multi-electrode recordings. In the current version it supports experimental data files in the Neural Event Format (NEV 1.x, 2.0, 2.1), and offers functionality to reveal and analyze some of the information contained in such recordings. It is further intended as a kind of “catalyst” for the development of a free available cross-platform program for the analysis of electrophysiological recordings.

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 29, 2006 8:01 pm

BackTrack: The gotta-have free security tool you’ve never heard of

The only network I am admin to is the one here at home but this looks too good to not get and try. Live-CD and Slackware based, GUI driven and loads of security tools.

Get it at:
BackTrack Downloads – Remote-exploit.org

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 29, 2006 2:25 pm

Linux.com | How to recover lost files after you accidentally wipe your hard drive

This should be a must read article for everyone in the IT industry!

I don’t currently have any need for it but still plan to bookmark and print it out just in case.

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 29, 2006 12:56 pm

UNEASYsilence » iTunes 6 DRM cracked

No iTunes crippleware here either, but if you got any, go over and get QTFariUse6.py and free your media.

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 28, 2006 2:31 pm

Technorati Blog Info: TechnoPrimitive

Get the feeling I am doing something wrong. Technorati seems to think that my last post was either 41 or 44 days ago. I have signed up and done the ping thing, even put the ping url in the setup on wordpress but still no go. Maybe it takes a while to filter in. But with the number of posts I have made in the last 41/44 days I’d a thought that they would have showed up by now… 🙁

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 28, 2006 2:27 pm

Linux.com | Minimalist tools for writers

Suggests vi, the app I love to hate. As for emacs, I have never had any luck with getting my unwiilling brain to wrap around the command structure and thus never used it more than a day or two at a time. Sorry RMS.

Fairly good article. Most writers aren’t gonna want to take the weeks that it takes to learn Vi though. Though gVim is usable it still has weird hangups or did the last time I tried it. My fallback is Kedit, which is part of the KDE desktop package. It just works… 😉

Comments (0)

By Dave, August 28, 2006 2:17 pm

Google Apps for Your Domain

Google continues on their path to world domination(or is it just MicroSloth domination) with the addition of new web apps.