This has been sitting in my closet for some time. Several years ago a friend of mine built a low power silent computer with an Epia M10000 board to use as his email server. It ran great for several years, but suddenly crapped out when he was away. When he returned he brought it over and I showed him that it was toast because of the counterfeit capacitors that had all swollen and burst. What was amazing was even though the computer was several years old he was able to go over to Fry's and...

I recently dug out my Apple IIgs which had been in storage for many years. For the most part it worked fine, but the eject mechanism on the 3.5" floppy drives had siezed up. Unfortunately I found this out the hard way. After trying to eject the floppy a couple of times, the motor just completely stopped working. I took the floppy drive apart to find that the sliding metal pieces were very sticky. I dug into the eject motor only to discover this: I disassembled the other floppy and...

From the same post on Reddit as the other one I found out about these IBoard Arduino compatibles . They were the same price as the previous two that I got, $29, but these are a little bigger and have more built-ins. In addition to the Ethernet port and XBee ports, they also include a MicroSD slot. These boards are about the same size as a real Arduino, a little larger than the XBoard. They are 3.3v based which I'm not sure yet how difficult will be to work with. They also have used up all...

Thanks to a post on Reddit I found out about these Arduino compatible boards with built-in Ethernet. They are called the XBoard V2 and they are made by DFRobot. These boards are 5V based which in theory will make it easier to interface with them than a 3.3V based board. They are very tiny! I was expecting a board the same size as the original Arduino which is already pretty small. (The arcade tokens in the picture are just there for scale, they are the size of a US quarter, 24mm.) I've...

As a web application developer I build a lot of web sites. Generally when getting input from a user a form is used. When I build the form I use standard "old school" techniques and after every form submit a new page is sent back to the browser. It works but it's not considered user friendly because there are too many pages involved and it steers the user away from whatever it they were on. This is especially true of posting comments. On many sites adding AJAX functionality has...