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All about electronics and circuit design

Do LEDs cause blindness?

Do LEDs cause blindness? article tells that According to a study led by Dr. Celia Sánchez-Ramos, of Complutense University in Madrid, prolonged and continuous exposure to LED light might be sufficient to damage the retina. Her study, published in the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology in 2012 found that LED radiation caused significant damage to human

Contact cleaner repairs remote controls

Last weekend I repaired two unreliable radio remote controllers with contact spray. One of the remotes was for Nikko RC car and other was for mains outlet remote controlling (bought from Clas Ohlson). In the Nikko remote has small joystick like controls, but underneath them there was just small cheap buttons on the circuit board.

Linux for School Exams in Finland

Slashdot informs (and I have seen it also on other news) that the Matriculation Examination Board of Finland (Upper Secondary School Exams) has opened an international hacking contest to find flaws and exploits in Digabi Live. Digabi Live is a Live Debian based operating system to be used in the all-digital final exams by the

Friday fun: Floppy drive music

Star Wars Imperial March Played by Dual Floppy Drives Join the Dark Side, we have floppy disks! Ghostbuster’s Theme on eight floppy drives Somethin strange in your floppy drive. Who you gonna call? Tech support! I ain’t afraid of no DOS. Building a six-channel floppy drive synth from start to finish

Shields are your friend, except when…

Shields are your friend, except when… article tells that engineers just love to put shields on circuits, mostly as a defensive measure against signals on the outside getting into and disturbing our circuits, but they also keep signals inside from getting out and this really makes the folks responsible for EMI compliance happy. Even on

Assembly summer 2013

Assembly Summer 2013 computer festival was held last weekend. Many earlier years I have been actively participating in it (even been on organizers team), but for last few years I have skipped that event (I am getting too old for this?). In assembly Assembly event there has been interesting computer demos on the competitions. Something

Are You Sure This Is the Source Code?

Software freedom is an interesting concept, but being able to study the source code is useless unless you are certain that the binary you are running corresponds to the alleged source code. It should be possible to recreate the exact binary from the source code, but a simple analysis shows that this is very hard

Afraid of hackers?

Are you afraid of hackers? If not yet check out the scariest new tricks at this year’s twin computer crime conferences, Black Hat and Def Con. The top 10 new reasons to be afraid of hackers article tells that it’s traditional for these skilled programmers to unveil their greatest exploits at the conventions, prompting a

HTML5 security issues

HTML5 has opened many new possibilities for developers. Now you can use web technologies to build full mobile applications, not just web pages. When you are building those application you need to know The Security Risks of HTML5 Development, because HTML5 includes a number of useful features that pose as double-edged swords from a security

EEWeb interview

I was interviewed by EEWeb Electrical Engineering Community. The interview is published now with title Featured Engineer: Tomi Engdahl – ePanorama.net webmaster. This is not my first interview for this reason. Years ago Elektor Electronics magazine interview me Tomi Engdahl – the man behind epanorama.net