I’ve been looking for a 3-axis gyroscope recently, and I came across the Wii Motion Plus. Fortunately, other people have done the hard work of reverse engineering the protocol and written this up elsewhere. In short, it’s a nice simple I2C interface.
So I bought one.
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My slug died. No, not the sort that shrivels up when it comes across salt, but my Linksys NSLU2.
As it turns out, the power supply is known to be a bit flaky. Again, dodgy electrolytic capacitors. Who’d have thought it, eh?
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I wanted to revisit writing code in Haskell, and in doing so try to understand the I/O model a bit better. I spent quite some time reading texts and tutorials on monads, and discovered that most of them are utterly inaccessible unless you already understand monads.
Fortunately for me, I came across this blog post which gave a very good introduction to the concepts involved, while being down to earth enough that it didn’t require prior comprehension of monads.
Armed with this new level of understanding, I thought the best way to apply it would be to attempt an implementation of the UNIX sort program.
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Earlier this year, my home file-and-everything-else server suffered a failure of both case fans which went unnoticed because it’s sitting in a hard to get to part of a cupboard and NetBSD doesn’t (yet) have drivers for the environmental monitoring hardware on the motherboard.
The constantly increased temperature in the case rapidly caused the failure of a head in the hard drive. Unfortunately, I only had a partial backup of the data so I was quite keen to recover as much as possible from the failed device.
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I’ve had a Canon PowerShot S60 for several years now, but earlier this year it started exhibiting a purple banding across the top of images. It gradually got worse and worse until the banding was across enough of the picture to screw up the auto-exposure. The width of the purple band depended on what the camera was doing, and made me suspect a power supply / decoupling issue.
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I recently rearranged the furniture in my home work area in order to make better use of space, and, because I fancied a change.
When I have done this kind of thing in the past, I have used a simple vector drawing program to draw simple objects in plan form, and drag them around the room until I find an arrangement which works. This is OK, and much better than just moving furniture and hoping it will fit, but nowadays there’s a better way.
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A while back, you may remember that I had to put together an RS-232 level shifter for my NSLU2’s serial console. It’s been working reliably so far, despite hanging loose as a bare piece of stripboard dangling from the other end of the cable that comes out of the NSLU2. Read the rest of this entry »
After the best part of 10 years with a holding page, there’s now a site up at www.coolfactor.org.
That is all.
I thought it was about time to write here about my DVD player and my CD player.
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I have a Netgear GS108 8-port gigabit ethernet switch, which died the other day. I found it working normally for a few seconds, and slowly flashing all of its lights for a few seconds, over and over again. During the flashing lights period, no packets were being passed. Naturally, this was playing havoc with my network.
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