WD5GNR rambles about microcontrollers, ham radio, electronics, the Internet, science fiction, and other oddball things.   Archives << current   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.

Al Williams WD5GNR Rambles   Wednesday, November 13   Browsers, Browsers For 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