EDIT: The setup described below worked fine for me for six months, with only the annoyances described below (mostly not being able to traverse DHCP requests across the bridge.) However, I recently upgraded to OpenWRT Backfire and took the opportunity to replace my proprietary ADSL router with a Fonera. This …
In Australia, a 3G mobile data plan can cost you thousands
I believe that anyone with the right information can cost a user on the Virgin Mobile cellular network around $575 an hour in excess usage charges. The unlucky user might not find out that this is happening for up to two days. That's almost $28000 in possible excess usage. This …
Fixing Microsoft Office 2004 with Snow Leopard
If you upgrade OS X to Snow Leopard, and Word 2004 starts locking up, freezing, not responding when you try to open a document, forcing you to force quit, then it's probably a font cache issue.
The easy way to clear the cache is to reboot with the "Shift" key …
Marking a file read-only in emacs and vim
I had some automatically code generated files that I wanted to mark as read-only. I knew it was possible to flag a file as read-only in both emacs and vim. However, I found it really hard to Google for the exact syntax.
In Vim, the flags go in the file's …
Computer-powered lottery tickets : The Engineyard programming contest
I first read about the Engineyard Programming Contest yesterday and I thought it was a silly contest, winnable only through the application of raw brute force.
For some reason, I woke up this morning obsessed with it. This is despite the fact that this "competition" is basically a lottery, in …
Servo pulse width range with Arduino
I recently bought a couple of cheap MG996R high-torque servos on ebay, and I want to use them with my Arduino.
These have the "JR" servo pinout, so orange = signal, red = V+, brown = V-.
You control these servos by sending a 50Hz pulse width modulated signal. The pulse width determines …