One off the RSS feeds in my browser is from the site hackaday.com This is a very active blog with all kinds of electronic and software related hacks. For me it is a good inspiration source for my projects. It also keeps me updated about new technologies and other high tech news. You will find realy crazy stuff on this site as well as verry well written tutorials.
Warning! hackaday is very addictive and may become a daily routine !
If you have followed my guide to install misterhouse on an openwrt router you may use it as proxy. A misterhouse proxy is used to offload slow hardware interfaces or slow processes from the main misterhouse process. Another reason could be that you cannot connect some hardware physically to your main misterhouse box but like to have that hardware available to your main misterhouse box. Gregg from the misterhouse mailing list pointed me to the Xap protocol support build into the misterhouse code. So I started testing out the code. Read the rest of this entry »
The next device I added to my misterhouse proxy running on my router is the Velleman K8055 IO board. This is a USB powered experimental IO board with 8 outputs, 5 inputs, 2 DAC outputs and 2 analog inputs. I used the k8055 openwrt kernel module from the sourceforge project homepage. Read the rest of this entry »
As software developer it is very useful to reflect on the UI you are creating before you start coding. That's when you need create screen mockups. There are many open source and commercial tools on the market. The latest and greatest newcomer in this area is WireframeSketcher.
What makes this product so great ? First of all, it integrates perfectly in Eclipse, the IDE of choice for me and most other Java developers (sorry Netbeans guys). Installation is standard, add the WireframeSketcher update site and click install. At least Eclipse 3.3 is required to use WireframeSketcher.
Creating mockups was never easier. Read the rest of this entry »
After installing misterhouse on my openwrt router I started adding devices. I plugged a 1-wire usb interface into my router and started playing around. There are at least two software programs that work for me in openwrt kamikaze 8.09 Read the rest of this entry »
Misterhouse is home automation software written in perl. Because it is written in perl it can run on any OS that has perl binaries so even on a small router that runs openwrt. If you don't have openwrt already running on your hardware first follow my guide to install openwrt with USB media for extra space.
The first step is to install perl and all the modules misterhouse need . Read the rest of this entry »
www.barcodepedia.com is what I believe a very interesting project. It is an free to use database with the barcodes of all kind of products like books, compact discs, electronics, food, ... It is based on a community and everyone is free to add new products. For the moment there is no API to interface the database that is behind this website but there seems plans to make one available soon. I can think of a lot of cool applications that can use this database : Read the rest of this entry »
Installing openwrt on your router is already well explained on the openwrt wiki This guide describes my experience with installing kamikaze 8.09 on my router but it should work on other hardware too . I have the Asus WL-500g Deluxe and installed the latest openwrt image kamikaze 8.09 Read the rest of this entry »
If you like to bike like myself then you should check out OpenCycleMap.org This project collects all the National cycle roads and paths in one big map. This is a side project of openstreetmap.org You can find more info on the openstreetmap wiki and the legend on the maintainers website. For G1 Android owners it is also good to know that these maps are also supported on the AndNav2 Android navigation system app. Now is the time to start planning your summer holliday bike trip and this are the tools to help you. Have fun.
Gmail logo
Gmail running in Firefox 2 is broken. Several actions seem to trigger a javascript error :
"Unable to find activeViewRootEl".
Not sure if the error occurs on other platforms or wether only hosted domain version is affected, but you can find at least one other report about it on twitter.
Not good, with previous Gmail outage less than two weeks ago.