Ladyada and PT have kicked off the first episode of their Citizen Engineer video series in style. This episode explores GSM SIM card technology and the more retro tech found inside a retired Bell payphone. Ladyada shows how to create a SIM reader which you can use to do things like read deleted SMS messages […]
Click To Play Brian Chan figured out how to make this origami Wall-E from a single uncut square of paper. It looks like a 2 hour project for someone with decent folding skill. My mind is officially blown. Images and the Wall-E folding pattern are available on Brian’s site. I found the above time-lapse video […]
Check out Daniel Andrade’s binary LED clock built using the Arduino. It’s well thought out, including controls for setting the time and hibernating with the LEDs off. Each hour and minute digit is represented in binary form, so it’s actually fairly easy to read once you get accustomed to it. The circuit and source are […]
One of the most power-hungry components in a traditional laptop is its hard disk, and time between charges can be greatly improved by keeping the disk in sleep mode. On machines like the OLPC that have solid-state disks, keeping disk writes to a minimum improves the life of the drive, minimizing unwritable sectors. Depending on […]
There’s been a bit of a database religious war on Dare Obasanjo and Jeff Atwood’s blogs, all on the subject of database normalization: when to normalize, when not to, and the performance and data integrity issues that underly the decision. Here’s the root of the argument. What we’ve all been taught regarding database design is […]
NXT Mindstorms hacker BlueToothKiwi created a working Wall-E trash collector robot and uploaded build instructions to the NXTLog. To mark the release of the film, the official web site has a ‘Build your own robot’ section where you get to choose the looks / behavior / mobility etc. And of course, if you got a […]
Find and Grep are perhaps the most used command line tools for the Linux user or administrator. Terse but powerful, these two commands will allow you to search through files and their contents by almost any imaginable attribute or filter criteria: file name, date modified, occurrence of the some specific word in a file, etc. […]
