123-reg For almost 15 years I have used 123-reg to host my website. I started off with a simple static html website which I hand-coded in 2004. Then I moved to a wordpress website with a 123-reg virtual server. After that I moved to a 123-reg dedicated server, and this is the solution that I […]
Introduction At home I am on LINUX pretty much full-time. I only run Windows inside a VM in some special circumstances. But at work I have to use Windows due to corporate policy, so I regularly face the challenge of finding cross-platform software which I can use both at home and at work. One of […]
Introduction Recently I have had cause for complaint with our Samsung LE40M86BD LCD Television. It had been working just fine, and then all of a sudden it developed a power-cycling problem. The symptom is as follows: From power-on, the TV works perfectly for around 10 minutes. After a while the TV switches itself to standby, […]
Last Christmas I bought a Velleman MK170 Christmas Star project for my Wife to build. She often shows interest in my various electronics projects and I thought it would be a good way for her to build something that she could show off to friends and family, whilst at the same time teaching her a […]
Pre-Requsites Install Heimdall Visit the Heimdall home page, select “Linux”, and download the package for your distribution. On Ubuntu variants you want the latest ‘.deb’ package. e.g.: ubuntu13.04-heimdall_1.4.0-0_amd64.deb Note that the “Frontend” packages are not required. Everything can be done easily from the command line. Install Heimdall using dpkg: sudo dpkg -i ubuntu13.04-heimdall_1.4.0-0_amd64.deb Install adb […]
Diagnosis and Repair of a Commodore CDTV unit which has a strange ‘3FFF’ problem. In the first part, below, I diagnose. In the next part (coming soon, will be added here) I repair.
Recently I was asked to produce a circuit to create a variable ‘dim’ control for an existing LED based exhibition. I decided to go with a simple 555-timer based design which provides control of the pulse width of an output, whilst keeping the oscillation frequency fixed. The circuit is shown below. It’s an unusual design, […]
Introduction If you’re away from home it’s very important to have a pin or password lock on your phone, just in case you misplace it or it is stolen. Typically the modern mobile phone is a gateway to a multitude of private services and data, such as personal photos and videos, cloud based data, social […]
Introduction Freerouting was a web application created and maintained by Alfons Wirtz at his website, here. It allowed us to import a design file from kicad and then auto-route the project based on some design preferences. It was basically a free auto-router for kicad. Hence the name! For “various reasons” the author has decided to […]
Introduction Sometimes you’ll end up having to deal with a DVD which has video recorded on it but the author neglected to finalize the disc. This can be a bit troublesome, because until the disc is finalized it doesn’t contain the necessary data to make it compatible with the DVD standard. Most consumer DVD players […]
rarcrack I stumbled across a little program called rarcrack yesterday, which provides brute-force cracking of password protected archives. I decided to give it a try and make some general observations about it. An example To set up an example, I created a .rar with a 5 character password. The password consists of upper-case letters, lower-case […]
It was the dreaded MOT time this weekend and my runabout Fiesta was not giving me promising signs. So I decided to take a look for something else. This MG TF caught my eye and I fell in love! So I snapped her up 🙂
Happy Valentines Day! A few years ago I created a little valentines day project, shown in the video at the end of this post. It’s basically just a multi-vibrator circuit with two groups of LEDs, arranged as an inner and outer heart: The full schematic is shown here, click on it for a full enlarged […]
Adding USB Devices in a Windows Virtual Machine with VirtualBox One of the most confusing things for me when I first experimented with VirtualBox was the question of how to add USB devices. I run Linux (Ubuntu) as my main OS now, but sometimes I need to dig around in Windows (e.g. work related stuff) […]
In the tinkering cave this week we have a Panasonic AE700 HD Projector. These units are pretty old now, but they come highly recommended in many online reviews and the HDMI support means they remain a useful home cinema option. The unit was first presented to me by a work colleague who complained that the […]