WD5GNR rambles about microcontrollers, ham radio, electronics, the Internet, science fiction, and other oddball things.
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Welcome Well, as if I don't have enough stuff on the Web,
I've decided to post an electronics-oriented "blog" to replace the defunct Al's Electronic Workshop program.
What can you expect? Who knows? My random thoughts and finds on electronics, microcontrollers, ham radio, the Internet,
and who knows what else? I've been blogging for awhile since the magazine I used to work for (New Architect) has a blog (the "daily")
that I wrote to (along with the other editors). Where else am I on the Web?
Programming and consulting Electronics
Ham Radio and PIC/CPLD/FPGA Tutorial.
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Al Williams
WD5GNR Rambles
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Tuesday, December 17
wwsaWebmaster Fun Here are a few neat things I've found to use with my server:
You may not know it, but we are in the Web services business among other things. Our main offering is FAQ-Pro, but we can also provide managed dedicated servers for any purpose.
21:14
Wednesday, November 13
Browsers, BrowsersFor a long time I've used an IE shell called MyIE that was written in Japan. There's no English documentation and I had to customize all the search stuff, etc. to use English. The nice thing is that it is free and appeared to contain on spy ware. It was a little quirky though. However, now I've found another nice free spyless browser that is very similar called CrazyBrowser. It is in English and is being actively developed and has a nice help file. It has tabbed browsing (that's mostly what I want), and a popup filter built in (that's great too). It handles all the P3P privacy stuff you expect from IE and you can use the middle mouse button to toggle full screen mode.
It doesn't have auto form filling which MyIE never did quite right anyway. However, I've been using RoboForm for that anyway and it really works well also. Have fun browsing!
18:21
Saturday, November 9
Gotta love Unix I've long been an avid Unix/Linux user. Of course, under Windows I use Cygwin's tools to make Windows act more like Unix than you'd think possible. Really, if you are a programmer or a power user, you should install Cygwin and learn to use the Korn Shell (ksh; here is a tutorial or, if you prefer, here is another one). Once you use a real shell, you won't care much about command.com, cmd.exe, or even 4DOS (although I will say 4DOS is not bad).
My latest setup is that I am running Redhat Linux on a machine out in the "lab" that we use for testing thing. Now I don't want to tramp out to the lab everytime I want to run a Linux program. So I use VNC. VNC is a program that lets you use one computer over the network from another computer and its free. You can remotely use a Linux or Windows computer (and probably some others). At the least, you need a Web browser with Java on the other machine. However, you can also download clients for Windows, Linux, hand held computers, etc. The clients are nice because it looks like you have a real desktop.
Here's the trick. I run two monitors anyway. If I move the VNC client to my second screen and tell it to go full screen, it disappears! But then if I click on the icon in the taskbar twice, it shows up on my second monitor in full screen mode (the monitor and the Linux desktop are set to the same dimension). So In front of me I have a Windows desktop and to the left I have a Linux desktop. With some clever network shares, they all have access to the same files and printers.
True, with Cygwin I can run X Windows and run apps from the Linux box on the Windows desktop, but this is much better. If you've used VNC on Windows, I have to tell you the Linux server is much smoother (since it looks like an X server).
The cost? Let's see... Red Hat Linux is free. VNC is free. Even Cygwin is free. Can't beat the price.
08:22
Saturday, November 2
Interesting portal page Tired of pop up ads and the like, try www.myway.com. Clean, useful, and unobtrusive.
08:53
Thursday, October 3
Free Telezapper You've probably seen the Telezapper that sells for about $50. It sends a tone on the line that makes telemarketers think your number is out of servce. Guess what? You can record this same tone on your answering machine and get the same result for free. This page tells how.
11:18
Interesting Web Sites If you want science links, try http://www.scientopica.com/sci/index.php. A large collection of links to tutorial sites at TutorGig. These sites don't really have their own content, they just index other sites. Speaking of tutorials, have you seen our tutorial site at http://tutor.al-williams.com?
08:40
Tuesday, October 1
Spam, spamI get a lot of spam! Really. More spam than you can imagine along with a huge volume of actual mail from readers, clients, press releases, and mailing lists. Two things have helped a lot. First, www.spampal.org.uk is a free program and a great idea. It becomes your POP3 server. When you ask for mail, it checks your real POP3 server and then tags the Spam. You can send all your spam to one folder or even delete it if you are sure. The program supports a white list (so your friends never get tagged as spam). Great stuff.
Another big help, but not free, is Nelson. This program organizes your Outlook (not Outlook Express) mail folders in interesting ways. It doesn't interfere with Outlook so you can stop using it anytime you like. Finally they allow you to tell it to ignore your spam folders, so it works great with the above mentioned SpamPal. You can use Nelson free before you buy it. I bought it because, although it has a few bugs, going back to not using it would be unthinkable.
I can actually look at all my e-mail for the morning or afternoon one ONE SCREEN now! Wow.
10:04
Farscape Cancelled! Rats! Farscape -- one of the best SciFi shows on TV and certainly one of the most original -- has been cancelled early. There will be a few new episodes, but after that, nothing. Sounds like another brilliant, "Let's cancel Star Trek! No one watches it," studio executive decision. Here's the headquarters for the save FarScape effort.
09:57
Blog is back! Blogger has been unwilling to publish for about two weeks, so I finally bit the bullet and reloaded and recustomized some bits to get it to work.
09:54
Sunday, September 15
Goodbye Seiko S7600 I noticed that Seiko is dropping its S7600 TCP/IP stack on a chip. Have a look at what you missed!
12:40
Friday, September 6
PDF For a long time I've used GhostScript to produce PDF files. It works, but you have to be a techno geek to get it to work. Worse still, if you want features like bookmarks, you have to be a super techno geek. I recently ran across a free tool at http://www.pdf995.com that is pretty clever. This guy has three shell programs that work together and with GhostScript (which is included). The first one sets up a printer driver so you can print to a PDF file (I've done that for years with REDMON). However, the second program can post process the output file to add watermarks, bookmarks, links, and other features. The third program can encrypt and sign PDFs (I wasn't impressed with this one -- I use PGP, GPG, and/or S/Mime to do that).
These programs are free -- the catch is that they pop up an ad in your browser when you use them (but the PDFs have no ads or changes). The 995 part is that you can buy a key to turn of the ads for $9.95 each or get all 3 programs for about $20. A fair price for a nice piece of work.
The program isn't perfect. For example, when entering bookmarks there is no way to edit or delete them. You also can't save them for later. Here's a tip though. If you look in the pdf995 directory you'll find the file it works on is temp.ps. You can easily identify the bookmarks there and change or delete them. You can even copy them to another file for saving. If you know how to put pdfmarks in a PS document you can do that here too. For example, I set the PDF options to automatically start with bookmarks visible. When you are ready to recreate the PDF, just run the res/995.bat file and your changes will take effect!
If you want to learn about pdfmark, have a look at the sample chapter at: http://www.pdflib.com/pdfmark/index.html -- good stuff.
07:48
Monday, August 19
Free Stuff Over time I've written a lot of software that is available free somewhere in our Web multiverse (I have way too many Web sites). I got the bulk of it together on one page.
Have a look at http://www.al-williams.com/free and you can see things from the wildly popular (in its day) PSKGNR to the lonely SCBIND that almost no one uses.
18:10
Tuesday, July 30
I think we are back up... I had mentioned the great hosting deals at Cyberwings earlier. Well, they crashed and burned leaving our "non critical" Web sites DOWN. They claim they will come back and I hope they do. Meanwhile, we are moving all of our sites to a single dedicated server which should make all of our sites as reliable as our main site is now.
Want some advice? Just because you have a Web site backed up because you develop it locally doesn't necessarily mean you have the database that goes with it backed up. Check that back up now....
07:03
Wednesday, May 22
Look what a tough macho hacker I am... If you miss writing assembly language you might enjoy some of these "ultra tiny" programming languages: Wierd Languages and the Random Language Page. Cool in a very geeky sort of way.
14:59
Wednesday, May 1
Resistor Color Codes Can't remember that resistor color code? Here's what to do. Call 1-800-555-TELL (free call, but won't accept pay phone calls). When prompted say "Extensions" and then when prompted for which extension, say "82123." A voice will ask you for each color band and will then tell you the value of the resistor. This is something I wrote for my Web Techniques column some time ago. It is the 106th most popular extension on the service. Go figure.
13:35
Wednesday, April 17
Star Trek... er, sort of Even if you aren't a die hard Star Trek fan, you ought to get a chuckle out of this site: http://www.angelfire.com/fl/sapringer/STONETREK.html. This guy should be working as a professional animator (and maybe he is, I don't know).
09:17
Sunday, April 14
Morse Code Practice Online at http://www.aa9pw.com/radio/morse.html. You can even take the test. Is it just me, or does it seem like when I do find someone on the air that is going "my" speed, they are so weak or sloppy that I still can't copy them?
10:53
Saturday, April 13
PC Tune up Tune up your PC online at http://www.pcpitstop.com/. Pretty slick.
19:41
Friday, April 12
Online CAD... Sort of Have a look at this online application for drawing schematics.
18:13
Thursday, April 11
Amazing Stuff
Two things I've found recently of interest. First, I picked up "lead free soldering iron cleaner/tinner" at Radio Shack (although it looks as though they are discontinuing it). I've seen these made by Kester and you can get them anywhere. This is a little tin of some gray material. When you wipe a hot iron on it, the iron comes away clean and as shiny as a mirror.
The other item of interest in MG Liquid Tin. This is a liquid that tin plates your copper boards at ROOM TEMPERATURE. Seems to work pretty well. Expensive though. I paid about $30 for a half liter.
19:00
Monday, April 8
New URL Our pages have moved to www.wd5gnr.com although the old links will transparently take you to the same new page for a very long time still (maybe forever). Getting a domain is not as expensive as it used to be. GoDaddy will register your domain for around $9/year. There is a cheap Web host called CyberWings that seems to cheap to be true. How cheap? Their plans range from $2.10 to $32.50/year. That isn't a typo -- the price per year is about what you'd pay most hosts for a month. No secure server, though. No shell account either. But you do get a cgi directory and FrontPage support. The other catch is that it takes 7-10 days to get an account set up.
So far, I have two domains hosted with them (for a total of about $8 for both). My only concern is that I have to wonder if they can stay in business with that kind of pricing.
13:19
Friday, March 29
Ubicom discontinues the SX18 No joy in Mudville. Ubicom is "upgrading" the SX processor line by discontinuing the 18 pin DIP packaging. Or so I've heard.
13:34
Tuesday, January 22
Virtual PIC Programming If you've ever wanted to try PIC programming, you can do it all on the Web with no downloads or anything. http://www.feertech.demon.co.uk/. Pretty slick. If you like, you can download it and run it locally, too.
16:55
Welcome Well, as if I don't have enough stuff on the Web, I've decided to post an electronics-oriented "blog" to replace the defunct Al's Electronic Workshop program. What can you expect? Who knows? My random thoughts and finds on electronics, microcontrollers, ham radio, the Internet, and who knows what else? I've been blogging for awhile since the magazine I work for (Web Techniques) has a blog (the "daily") that I write to (along with the other editors).
Where else am I on the Web? Programming and consulting Electronics Ham Radio PIC Tutorial. Oh, and my vastly underused WIKI (which I should be using to do this by the way) at VirtualAve.
16:35
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