I thought it would be fun to setup a prop on my porch for Halloween that did more than just sit there. Of course I came up with the idea very late and so this whole thing was cobbled together in just an hour or two. Looking around my house at a ton of the gadgets I had the idea of putting a Jack-o-lantern on the porch that I could control the light in. Searching the internet for scary Halloween sounds caused things to quickly evolve into adding motion sensors, controlling a couple of lights,...

Last week after a meeting in Sunnyvale I took a trip over to WeirdStuff Warehouse . This place is great, they have all kinds of obsolete things to ogle, make fun of, and buy for cheap. One of the things they had was an old HP DesignJet 488CA that takes E size 36" wide paper, with the bonus roll feeder, cart, and paper catcher. They let me plug it in to see that it at least powers up and I bought it and took it home, hoping I could get it up and running. HP DesignJet 488CA After...

During the last week or so I've been having a lot of problems with my two security cameras. For a couple of years I've been using a Windows XP box running WebcamXP with 2 USB video capture devices and a couple of outdoor cameras. It's worked well enough, but now all of a sudden it will disconnect one camera or more commonly, switch one camera into a 320x240 picture. Sometimes rebooting helps, sometimes it takes a few reboots. Today however no matter what I do I can't get it to...

This is just a quick overview of how I setup my current HTPC. The computer is an older M2A-VM motherboard with an Athlon 64 X2 5000+. The onboard Radeon 1250 video wasn't quite good enough so I added a GT210 video card that I got at Fry's for $35. The GT210 uses HDMI to connect to the TV at 1080p and also carries audio. The TV has an optical out which relays all the audio from the computer to my receiver.  The computer is running Windows 7 so that I can have Netflix with a 10 foot...

If you've ever had a problem getting the tg3 driver to work, you've probably encountered something like this: [ 2.093513] tg3 0000:03:00.0: No PHY devices [ 2.093531] tg3 0000:03:00.0: Problem fetching invariants of chip, aborting After googling you found that you need to load the broadcom module before the tg3 module loads. That's great, but having to do it manually every time sucks. Since I'm building my own kernel and initramfs, a lot of the "fixes" are specific...