Archive for April 2013

Robot week in USA

EDN magazine reported just few days ago that National Robotics Week has started. There are many robotics events arranged around USA. EDN magazine page from last Friday has a list of links to interesting articles on robotics. There are for example articles on Roomba sensors for hackers and building a power supply for your robot.

CSS3 used for video effects

I just accidentally found my way to Super cool video hack: DIY Olympics virtual lane markers page that looked interesting. It says that a student, Xiaoyang Kao, recently figured out how to make his own Olympics-style lane markers. The virtual lane graphics for swimming with css3 page tells how this video effect was done. Instead

Twisted pair RCA cables again

I wrote few years ago blog article Unshielded RCA cable is bad design. I just received yesterday a comment on it: “It’s not always that simple. There are equipment combinations which REQUIRE twisted pair RCA. Here’s explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOagVDZLQnA” So I watched this Truth about RCA signal cables video mentioned on this comment: The video was

Sparkpen to discharge capacitors safely

A suitable tool to safely discharge capacitors is needed when you want to work with circuits that have dangerous voltages inside them. Typical examples of such devices mains powered switch mode power supplies (you need to safely discharge main capacitor) and different cameras (the flash unit has a large capacitor charged to 400-500V voltage). Those

Free and Open—and Their Opposites

Free and Open—and Their Opposites article gives a a linguistic look at some tenets of Linux. I found it interesting reading because I have written articles to magazines on open source software to magazines and I have needed to think about the right words to use for writing. Here are some information picked from that

Friday fun: Overly attached girlfriend spy device

Do you still remember Overly Attached Girlfriend meme? Hacking a radio controlled spy device for overly attached girlfriend page has yet another update to this theme: a special DIY spy device. Hacking a radio controlled spy device for overly attached girlfriend article has also information how it was built.

Web Framework Benchmarks

How much does your web framework choice affect performance? The answer at Framework Benchmarks page may surprise you. Netty, Vert.x, and Java servlets are fast, but the researchers were surprised how much faster they are than Ruby, Django, and friends. Here is one graph from Framework Benchmarks page that shows you the results. If you

Ethernet in sensing

In the modern world sensors are used for recording everything from exhaust gas temperatures to the electrical activity in a human heart. Direct wiring methods are commonly used for simple on-off device control, where a circuit is either open or closed. Likewise, digital sensors are usually wired directly to monitoring panels in the world of

Web as a Platform for Gaming

Mozilla is Unlocking the Power of the Web as a Platform for Gaming blog posting tells that Mozilla is advancing the Web as the platform for high-end game development. Mozilla was able to recently worked hard to prove that the Web is capable of being a compelling gaming platform. With Mozilla’s latest innovations in JavaScript,