Author Archives: gavan
Data recovery
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 … Continue reading
Camera repair
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 … Continue reading
Rearranging furniture
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 … Continue reading
Black box
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 … Continue reading
New website
After the best part of 10 years with a holding page, there’s now a site up at www.coolfactor.org. That is all.
More repairs
I thought it was about time to write here about my DVD player and my CD player.
Blinking Lights of Death
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 … Continue reading
IMAP, SMTP, TLS and certificates
A couple of years ago I had a good go at getting my Sony Ericsson phone to talk to my IMAP server over SSL. That much worked (although the IMAP client doesn’t support folders so I had to do a … Continue reading
Contactless payment card
My bank recently sent me a new debit card, which included the non-optional feature of contactless payment. This is based on NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, which utilises a loop antenna to allow a reader to communicate with the chip … Continue reading
Driving an LCD module from an FPGA
Some time ago I bought a Digilent Nexys 2 FPGA development board and a Digilent PmodCLS LCD module. I spent some time implementing a more or less trivial CPU in the FPGA, and various bits and pieces to aid with … Continue reading