We’ve been using Compact Fluorescent Lamps for many years. They use less power for the light output and our supply voltage is on the high side and incandescent lamps don’t last long. Compact Fluorescent Lamps seem to fail more often than they should. Usually the electronics fizz and go bang […]
I wanted to set up a Dell GX-270 with 1G ram and 40G hard drive as a basic web-browser, email, open-office machine that is simple to use. I like KDE, at least the version that came with KUbuntu 10.04, and I’m not interested in the new Unity desktop. Having heard […]
I think I’m beginning to find the bugs in WordPress. Maybe not bugs, but undesirable side effects of being plug-in based and very versatile. I guess it’s impossible for every plug-in creator to know what all the others are doing. It may be possible to choose a set of plug-ins […]
The other day I was deleting some old bookmarks from Firefox and wondered why my site link had a little empty box rather than a fancy little icon. A bit of research explained that this icon was a favicon. So I used Gimp to make a little 16×16 graphic then […]
68HC11 and 68HC05 During the later 1980s I started using the Motorola MC68HC11E9 single chip micro. Problem back then was that you couldn’t get Flash memory, so the single chip micros were one time programmable (OTP). That was a real pain because the OTP chips cost about $40 each and […]
I had a cheap IP camera running to check out the weather from the TV (computer). It’s getting a bit unreliable and the picture is now crap. So I decided to revamp with either a cheap 4 channel DVR from China for about $100 or a re-purposed older PC and […]
Down the Western side of the Hutt River from Moonshine to Avalon Park and back up the Eastern side through Trentham Memorial Park. [map maptype=satellite kml=”http://rcbeacon.com/blog/ftp-shared/upload/Track-011712-42219.kml”]
A while ago I commented on my first Flytron SimpleOSD that I managed to damage by connecting the current sensor incorrectly. I have taken the Atmega328 micro off the board, fitted a new one and swapped the crystal to a 3-pin 16MHz ceramic resonator. I’m not a Atmel fan so […]