When Nokia bought Symbian in 2008, nobody had any reason to believe their thoughts were anywhere near Open Source. Parts of the Symbian platform have been Open Source for quite some time and other portions have slowly been released. Symbian, maker of the the world’s most popular mobile operating system, has just completed the transition →
Everyone knows that movie popcorn is one of the biggest ripoffs, right? It turns out that movie popcorn carries a 600 percent markup. The biggest ripoff: text message beats movie popcorn article tells that the text messaging has a much bigger markup. Text messages themselves, are just tiny blips of data being transferred to and →
The normal way to drive a stepper motor is to use switched-dc voltages to energize the stepper motor coils one by one after each other. But a stepper motor will run off ac lines if you introduce a 90° phase shift between the voltages applied to the motor’s two windings. The extremely simple circuit in →
A Sound/Show Control Guy’s Take On the grandMA2 blog posting tells about MA Lighting grandMA2 system. The article describes a very modern control system for audio, lighting and many other things needed to run a show. Interesting text and lots of pictures. A funny thing in the keyboard is that instead of ENTER key there →
A Brief History of the Computer is a picture report by TIME magazine. It is worth to look at. There are 17 photos that tell the history of computers starting from year 1946. →
The original idea of http/html was to make it easier to share information between academics, especially report. The idea on the web was that the information is presented in the way that it can be viewed in many ways and using many different devices. On the old days there were both text based and graphical →
Luke’s Weblog shows how LEGO blocks can be used to build the case for a WRT54GL wireless router and a PC. Lot’s of normal LEGO blocks and lots of work is needed to build those projects. The postings are is filled with goof pictures and videos how those fun projects were built. →
I have maintained three FAQ lists for many years. Those FAQs are VGA to workstation monitor FAQ, sfnet.harrastus.audio+video usein kysytyt kysymykset (FAQ) and sfnet.harrastus.elektroniikka usein kysytyt kysymykset. VGA to workstation monitor FAQ tells how to interface different RGB monitors to to PC VGA output and a little bit about connecting other RGB signal sources than →
Differential amplifier approach uses an operational Amplifier. Operational Amplifiers only amplify the difference between the two input lines. This method eliminates common mode noise between the incoming signals by making A-B=C, as only the difference between A & B are amplified. Operational amplifiers is maintain wide bandwidth signals throughout your system while eliminating ground loop →
The days when you can fix your own car may be coming to an end. New vehicles have complex on-board computerized systems densely packed under the hood. Mechanics face an ever climbing learning curve to keep up with advancing automotive technology. We need some technology to solve this problem. Columbia University’s Computer Graphics and User →