computoman

We decided to do an indoor version of the Ehow outdoor DTV antenna. For more details see: http://www.instructables.com/id/Ehow-outdoor-and-indoor-DTV-antennas/

Easy home made wifi reflector that should boost power. More info at:  http://www.instructables.com/id/Ehow-wifi-booster/ D-link makes a lot of third party routers (i.e. Airlink, Frys, and etc.), so the DD-WRT firmware works well.

Thought this was awesome. Gave me ideas for doing other things. Arduino version. and how it was done: Source code::  https://github.com/SammyIAm/Moppy/ Using the parallel port: More details: http://georgewhiteside.net/projects/diskette-organ/ http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/16715/Controlling-Floppy-Drive-Stepper-Motor-via-Paralle

We have all seen ereaders. They vary in price from low to high.  They are also usually very fragile and easy to lose. If anyone can lose something it is me. One of the reasons we have held back from getting one. Besides we would prefer something that will fit in our pocket. Since most e-readers will not fit in the pocket, what is there as an alternative? Came up with something as least for me is better than an e-reader is an e-listener. A what? Actually it is a pocket media or music player. The advantage here is that you can listen to an e-book rather than reading it. Best advantage here is even if it is dark, you can enjoy your reading. Backlit screen not ever required.To use the music player as a reader so to speak, you must convert the text into voice.  Most computers now a days come with some kind of speech synthesizer. To do the conversion, the reader files should be in the standard pdf format. A program called Calbre can usually convert most e-reader formats into the standard pdf

One of the things I get dismayed with is when going to the bookmarks and a link is dead. Also too, If I have several web servers I like to access, it would be nice to know if the site is up before I try to go to that site. Here we will use a small amount of PHP (another web language) that can be used with HTML just like javascript. Generally PHP is used only on servers, but you can run a local copy of it. PHP is available for most systems. Bookmarks really do not carry that much information per se. The above example only has one entry for sake of simplicity. What I would really like to know is if that site is still good, that is up and running. So I added an extra column for the server status. Again just one entry for sake of simplicity. Now before I even go to the site I can tell whether it is available. In the real world, you will probably will have many entries and many servers. For example, one page I use lists several servers, but some  sites are virtual so they wil

Not so long ago there was a product called Blackboard. Sort of an internet classroom setup. Most colleges may still use it. Blackboard was allegedly trying to keep all the competitors out of the marketplace. My understanding is they lost that fight. Never really had any real experience with Blackboard except as a tech at a local college, where I heard numerous complaints about the product. What else is there? There are three major open source products we are looking at. Moodle, Drupal (which was even used for the Whitehouse web site), and Claroline. Claroline is probably the simplest, but is also the least powerful. Drupal is probably the most powerful, but requires the most work. Moodle sort of fits in the middle of the two. It is very powerful, but very structured in it's own way. Just to give you an example, here is what we did to start setting up the class. Will not go through everything., but will give you a gist of how it works. So we started by looking at what classes