Category Archives: Link of the Day

DIY Wifi Radio courtesy of mightyOhm

Last weekend, I fought off my head cold and drug my body off to the Maker Faire to get inspired by the projects. I saw some good stuff this year, but didn’t really have a lot of time to talk to people and get in any deep discussions. One of the neater projects was courtesy of Jeff, Tony and Kylie at the mightyOhm blog. They built a very stylish looking Wifi Radio, using an Asus WL-520UG router as its core. I surfed over to their blog, and they have a really excellent 10 part series on how they did it. Awesome.

mightyOhm » Blog Archive » We rocked the Maker Faire!.

I’ve goofed around quite a bit with the Linksys WRT54GL and related routers, using alternative firmware, and I highly recommend them. The nifty thing about the WL-520UG that they used is that it has a USB port, which can be used to add all sorts of peripherals, like sound cards (for their projects) but also webcams and the like. Looking on newegg’s website, I see them available for $44.99, but also with a $10.00 mail in rebate. Verah nice.

Addendum: Jeff has a nice little writeup with lots of pictures on why and how you might want to hack one of these routers. Nifty.

Gordon Bell: Computers, Projects, Patents, Books, and Papers

I was trying to hunt down Gordon Bell’s description of the PDP-8 architecture (don’t ask) which I heard was available in his 1971 book, Computer Structures: Readings and Examples. A bit of googling found that this book is available from his website at Microsoft, along with many other interesting papers and books. Bookmarked for future reading material.

Gordon Bell: Computers, Projects, Patents, Books, and Papers

K450 PVC Rocket Engine Design & Construction

K450 PVC Rocket Engine Design & Construction

In just a few hours, anyone can build a powerful K450 engine that will send a rocket soaring over 5000 feet! Easy to follow step by step instructions and 137 color illustrations demonstrate the exceptionally simple construction process. Best of all, only common materials are used and no special tools are required.

I’d order your copy before the DHS gets wind of this publication.

Addendum: I wish I still had my copy of this book. I had one years ago, but seem to have misplaced it in the various moves since then. The zinc/sulfur formulation that it recommends has fallen from favor in recent years, but it was still an awesome book to have on the shelf.

NavSpaSur Lunar Imaging by DF6NM

While recovering from my brief outpatient procedure yesterday, I was surfing around, looking for the ChirpHell and ChirpPix programs that some people mentioned in the context of creating the Hellschreiber IDs that I saw yesterday. A bit of Googling revealed that they were written by DF6NM, so I did some more websearching, and as soon as I found this page:

NavSpaSur Lunar Imaging by DF6NM

I forgot entirely about ChirpPix. This page is all about using the reflections from the NavSpaSpur radar fence to generate actual pictures of the moon. Very, very neat. I should think about this, it seems like a very nifty project.

He also seems to have done some interesting work in the LF spectrum.

Cycle America

A friend of mine from the Chabot Space and Science Center, Don Saito, was recently laid off from his IT job in Berkeley, and decided to celebrate by embarking on a circumnavigation of these continental United States on a recumbent tricycle. He’s got a blog called Cycle America, and seems to be equipped with all the gadgets that will make following his trek fascinating. Good luck, Don! Stay safe!

Don Mitchell’s Blog

Today I found out that Don Mitchell has a blog. While I’ve only briefly met Don a couple of times, I’ve been aware of his computer graphics work for quite some time, so it was good to see his writing on other interesting topics. I wish my blogroll had more crazy smart people writing about whatever they are interested and passionate about.

He’s on my daily blogroll now.

Don Mitchell’s Blog

Dan Piponi is one hoopy frood…

Recently it may be hard to believe that I’ve read anything except for ham radio crap. I still read other stuff, I just haven’t been paying too much attention lately. While my random surfing today, I was reminded of Dan Piponi’s awesome blog and webpages about some of the really cool projects he’s done. Dan presented a really neat idea at this years Renderman User’s Group meeting during SIGGRAPH this year: namely compiling expressions into Renderman implicit surfaces. Don’t know what that is? Check out some of the other cool projects on his page. Robots. Detecting cosmic rays. Automatic differentiation. It’s enough to make bush league hackers like myself feel, well, bush league.

Great stuff.

Tallyho! ICFP Contest Underway

Well, I am still on vacation, but took time out this morning to skim the problem description for the 2007 ICFP programming contest. It involves finding modifications to the DNA of a crashlanded alien named Endo, who will surely perish without our help. Wish I had brought my laptop: looks like fun, and I need a break from buffets. I will undoubtably play with it when I get back.

The Fountain of all Programming Fonts

Keith Devens has a nice collection of  Programming Fonts with links on his website.  I must admit to liking the new Microsoft Consolas font, but I mostly use Bistream Vera Mono, since it’s free and widely available on the systems I use.  Dina looks okay to me.   When I used Windows more, I used Andale Mono quite a bit.  If you’d like to try a font which makes me clutch my eyes in pain, check out http://www.arcavia.com/Software/ProgFont/.  Ouch!

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