Category Archives: Commentary

Opinions

Adding range to a Dakota Alert WMT-3000 wireless driveway alarm

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Inside of a wmt-3000 wireless driveway transmitter
This is a photo of the radio transmitter inside of a Dakota Alert WMT-3000 wireless driveway alarm system. The wire coming through the hole drilled in the bottom of the case and soldered to the base of the antenna extends out to a 27″ wire whip antenna. Note the jumper circled in yellow. This jumper has a “high” and “low” setting. It is set to the “low” setting by the factory, and the “high” pin has been cut off. I found that the range was extended by soldering the “high” (cut off) pin to the center pin.
wireless driveway alarm with wire whip antenna

Jameco potentiometer grab bag

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So, if you purchase a few Jameco grab bags of potentiometers, what exactly do you get?

  • 100 – 10 Ohms a good number, plus a few 20 ohms
  • 500 – 50 ohms, a good number
  • 101 – 100 ohms, a slightly smaller amount
  • 201 – 200 ohms, a good number
  • 501 – 500 ohms, a metric boatload (filled up 2 squares in my organizer)
  • 102 – 1K ohm, a large number
  • 202 – 2K ohm, a large number
  • 502 – 5K ohm, two
  • 103 – 10K ohm, three
  • 203 – 20K ohm, eight
  • 503 – 50K ohm, two
  • 104 – 100K ohm, two
  • 204 – 200K ohm, one
  • 304 – 300K ohm, five screw pots, plus six larger slider pots
  • 504 – 500K ohm, a large number
  • 105 – 1 M Ohm, five
  • 205 – 2 M Ohm, seven

Of course, if you wait a few months, Jameco’s overstock may be completely different and their grab bags may have completely different distribution of potentiometers.

Flashy Guy at Dragon*Con

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Update: His name is Marc DeVidts and more info about his costume can be found at his site.
The coolest technical “costume” I saw at Dragon*Con was a guy with a hundred or so individually addressable RGB LEDs under a white outfit. He had them under wifi control from his cell phone. He could select colors, speed, intensity and many different patterns of flashing. The video shows a “random” effect, but I also saw things such as a “line” moving up and down that made it obvious that each cluster was individually addressable. Unless he was supposed to be the guy from Quantum Leap, I think it was just a cool technical effect and not a specific costume. Download Video

Motorola Backflip (MB300) Review

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Motorola Backflip (folded open, ready to use keyboard)
I have been using a Motorola BACKFLIP as my primary phone on AT&T for the last month. It is my first experience with the Android OS and smart-phones in general (my previous phone was a Motorola Razor V3xx “feature” phone), as well as my first full QWERTY keyboard on a phone. Overall it has been a positive experience. For the rest of my review, keep reading…
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Android Phones on AT&T

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If you are looking for a 3G phone running Android on AT&T, the pickings are slim. (Mostly because AT&T’s 3G bands are not compatible with many other carriers, and most Android GSM phones work with T-Mobile’s 3G bands. If you are willing to drop down to quad-band EDGE data most GSM Android phones will “work” with AT&T, they just suffer from slow networking.) Continue reading →

IBM Think pad X31 Radeon M6 – Suspend Screen Fix

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My Thinkpad X31 laptop with a Radeon M6 graphics chip had a problem with ACPI Suspend/Resume. About every five resumes, the graphics card would get messed up, making the screen unusable.
The computer would suspend/resume fine otherwise, but I’d be forced to reboot just to get X working again. (Just shutting down X and re-starting it wasn’t enough.)

The easy solution is to pass a “nomodeset” option to the kernal upon boot, but to do this on different versions of Ubuntu you need to do modify files in different places.

9.04: Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, and look for the defoptions= line. Add nomodeset to the end. Run sudo update-grub afterwards to save your changes.

9.10: Edit the /etc/grub.d/10_linux file to add a line such as:
GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA = "$GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA nomodeset"
or just add “nomodeset” to the end of a previous GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA entry. After this, run sudo update-grub.

10.04: Edit the /etc/defaults/grub file and change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset"
(You may have to run sudo update-grub again, or it may be taken care of for you)

Commentary: I find it funny that in each of the last three version’s of UBUNTU the name and location of the grub configuration file has changed…

Directions for inspecting a home

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The following are directions for how to do a quick home-inspection. These directions are intended to be completed in about two hours with a Realtor before you decide to make an offer. I have included the plain text in this blog post, as well as the Open Office .odt and .pdf export.
house_inspection.odt
house_inspection_checklist.pdf

Click through for the plain text of the checklist:
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Brittney sayings from Glee

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Brittney is a blond cheerleader played by Heather Morris on the FOX musical TV show Glee. Below are a list of her sayings, help me add more:

Wheels (#1.9): I find recipes…confusing.

Hell-O (#1.14): Sometimes I forget my middle name.

Hell-O (#1.14): Did you know that dolphins are just gay sharks?

Home (#1.16) I’m pretty sure my cat is reading my diary.

Bad Reputation(#1.19):
I’ve been here since first period. I had a cold and I took all my antibiotics at the same time, and now I can’t remember how to leave.

Laryngitis (#1.20): So you’re pretty much the only guy in this school I haven’t made out with because I thought you were capital G gay, but now that you’re not, having a perfect record would mean a lot to me.

Other Episodes:
When I pulled my hamstring, I went to a misogynist.

She’s the one they made me talk to when they found out I was keeping that bird in my locker.

Reference: Glee Episode List