I made a quick&dirty hack to connect to my entertainment center management daemon. It will let you send a message which will scroll across the front of my cable box. It'll also display the first 16 characters on my TV screen (if the TV is on). Click here to send a message It's actually not really a cable box anymore. I removed the face plate from the cable box and wired up the LED display to a ICM7218A which is plugged into the parallel port of my Linux computer. No other...

Finally slapped together a stand for my thickness planer today. I haven't been using the planer as much since it has been on the floor and it is so heavy I haven't wanted to move it where I can actually use it. I've been putting off making the stand for a little while after making my "fancy" utility cart. I kept thinking I would make the planer stand the same way, and the utility cart had a lot of half-lap joints and dados so it took a while to get it all cut and...

Right now in my entertainment center I've got a Sony Vega TV, Yamaha RXV-1000 receiver, GoVideo VCR, TiVo, Slink-e, and an HP Vectra VL400 computer with KnoppMyth installed. The receiver and the VCR both have serial ports and are hooked into the Linux computer, along with the Slink-e. The TiVo has an ethernet card in it, but currently does not run the web server since it tends to cause the TiVo to lock up and reboot. I wrote a daemon about 5 years ago to manage my entertainment center...

Ok, this is just a rant more than anything. I've been using VNC for years, and I just don't understand why over anything less than a 100baseT link it's so unusable. And even over 100baseT it's marginal. I connect via any client to a remote X11 VNC server, and bring up a terminal and start typing, and it LAGS by minutes! Why is it so hard to send the 10x10 pixel block of the last character I typed? What the heck is it sending back and forth during that entire time before it does...

Finally moved and in our new place and getting back to work. Got in a Depthcharge that was supposed to be working and only have power supply issues. Hooked up the game board on the bench and guess what? It doesn't work, it's got a short from +5 to GND. Nice! Started looking all over to see if something got bent or there's a lump of something where there shouldn't be. Looking at the back I see someone had to make a huge modification to the original design. The ground trace...