I updated my thermostat to one of these. It’s made by Homewerks (Home depot sells a filtrete branded version.) It’s not as cool as the NEST, but it’ll do the job of controlling a furnace/AC. The interesting part of this device is that the wifi interface can be cloud managed, making it possible to control [...]
I’m working on a new car controller. It’s based on aftermarket remote start, a jailbroken iphone and some open source hardware. This post covers setting up the iPhone for that use. It’s really just a nice, cheap (if you have it) script-able serial telemetry platform. iPhone jailbreak notes: I used an iPhone 3g, downloaded 4.2.1 [...]
I finally picked up one of the SUMP project based Open Source Logic Analyzers that Ian worked on. It’s a pretty good deal from Seeed Studio. I wanted it to work on my Mac, which wasn’t too horrible, but it was a little annoying to dig through forum posts to figure it out. Even then, [...]
I’ve been too busy to sort out my workshop for a while, but thanks to the delivery of a small Dell machine (thanks to Eric’s basement!) I’ve got a dedicated box assigned to run XP and Mach3 on my mill. I did a quick test cut and it looks like I’ll have no problem producing [...]
I’m lucky to have a very nice lab to test and support my network at work. Just a few things that I’ve got at my (groups) disposal: Juniper MX960 Routers: This is the latest addition to the network. I have a pair in production with 10Gb uplinks receiving full BPG routes from I1, I2 and [...]
I put up a cheap whiteboard in my home office earlier this year. I couldn’t find a decent solution at the time. Today I ran across this. It’s whiteboard paint by rustoleum. Apparently, it can be found at home depot… Guess what my garage will will be getting sometime soon. This whiteboard has magnet grabbing [...]
I tried out USAA’s check deposit via iPhone last night. It wasn’t too surprising that they did this, they’ve been letting people deposit checks with scanners for quite a while. What surprised me was that the application actually appears to work better than the computer version. I had to retake the photo a couple of [...]
Netscreens are fun. Allright, actually they’re just really, really flexible. I’ve been very impressed with netscreen firewalls, the SSG5 is a fantistic device – just keep in mind that you’ll spend some time learning the ropes if you delve into a screenOS based device. Dynamic DNS is pretty standard these days, but netscreens actually make [...]
Before my last ski trip I wanted a helmet-cam. I bought an Oregon Scientific ATC3K digital video camera, but the mount was just too bulky for a helmet rig. It’s great for mounting on a kayak or mountain bike, but totally unsuitable for a real helmet mount. (It’s just too big.) Obviously, it was time [...]
Just thought I’d throw in a view of the server that’s running things at home now. It’s a poweredge 2650 – you can get them dirt cheap despite having dual 2.8ghz cpus, 2GB of ram and onboard remote access. This one once served the military – they removed all the drives, but left an IP [...]