computoman

Have had a chance to play with the Google Nexus 7 that runs Android (I think was built by Asus ) for little over a month now.  Generally have a good thoughts about it though there are just a few reservations which I may discuss later. Since the unit has been out a while, you probably already know the specifications of the unit (you can use you web search engine to get the details if you have not.) I was lucky enought the get the 32 gigabyte version of the unit. Getting anything less than that could make real challenges for you. What was the first thing I added to the unit. first was some experimentation with some home made stands. Even the dollar store had a plastic stand. I based one of my experimental stands off of it. The main reason why I wanted the unit was to see how web applications work with touchpads and maybe also develop some software for the unit. Found out right way that the touchpads react differently than t...

Arduinos are the hot item when comes to microcontrollers right now but there are others that will still do quite a bit and do it on less power. For example you can control your sprinkler system, have a burglar alarm system, and many other projects that will all run off of just a yard solar lamp.  A  burglar alarm system that does not run off the car's battery is a real plus. Virtually impossible to disarm unless you know where it is and can get to it before it goes off. There are tons of projects for the Atmel 2313 (and related) chips in particular. You could make a toy for your child's holiday gift such as a homemade robot. That adds meaning to the gift given to give of yourself. Another thing I like about the micro-controller is you do not need some fancy setup to program it.  You can virtually use an old parallel cable and a computer with a parallel port that can run the free development package). The parallel cables are discarded by zillions. We made a special ...

Cloud computing what is it. It is a service of various types. Traditionally you have accessed a web server for your needs. There are actually many ways you can use "The Cloud" as a service (AAS). One that is becoming more prevalent is Infrastructure as a service (IAAS). Wikipedia defines it as: "In the most basic cloud-service model, providers of IaaS offer computers - physical or (more often) virtual machines - and other resources. (A hypervisor , such as Xen or KVM , runs the virtual machines as guests.) Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational support-system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements. IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as images in a virtual-machine image-library, raw (block) and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles. IaaS-cloud prov...

Made some coat hanger tablet stands in another post using coat hangers, I wanted a stand that would be less likely to damage a touchpad and be easy to store while traveling. This what I dreamed of after seeing another idea. Draw your pattern. Trace it over two pieces of thick posterboard. Cut out the pieces. (Just using one long piece is hard to fold.) Double tape the backend of the two pieces together. Bend and insert your tablet. Update: yet another prototype stand. It did not work as expected, but worked well enough.

Years ago there was a song called "Where have all the flowers gone". I sort of wanted to do an introduction based off of that.  In a way the Intel i386 based architecture is not gone, but there is certainly a new major player on the scene. The Arm architecture is the new kid on the block. Originally used for embedded systems, is now coming into the main IT stream. There are desktops, laptops, tablets (aka palmtops), servers and etc that the I386 based systems have done for so long. What is the advantage of the Arm cpu's?  They are cheaper, require less electrical power, and require less space just for starters. The picture represents four different arm or arm derivative based devices that are all within a foot or so of each other. Almost like a whole network of devices.  None of them are the traditional Microsoft operating system based devices either. They are all using some kind of unix lookalike operating system. That is a good thing as it allows similar software t...

More and more of the plastic routers you get from a retailer are limiting you from installling a third party firmware to make the unit more valuable. So it is nice you can put an old pc back to work and install the same kind of firmware you would put on the store bought routers. Also with the pc you can swap the nic cards for better nics without getting a whole new system. Pulled out of the closet the pc I was using as a router and found that a few things have changed. I just went ahead and installed the latest openwrt kamikaze image on the system. What does the system have? Intel PII 266 mhz with 192 meg ram. The openwrt hard drive is only 2 gig. Thinking about using another case. The system actually has two drives. one with a minimal Debian linux to be able to get the latest image or dd (or install) to the openwrt drive. The Debian linux drive is usally left unconnected. First thing I did was to change the dead motherboard battery.  Second  thing I did was change the passwor...

Lets play with assembly language programming one last time.  This time let’s use dos assembly language programming. A program is a set of instructions much like a recipe. With this recipe, we will have to use commands like you might use stir in a recipe.To make this recipe, we will use debug.com which is sort of a simple interactive assembler/disassembler. Our goal with the program is to print out the letter A. Now that seems a bit simple, but you have to start somewhere. So fire up debug from the command prompt. We are going to use dosbox (dos simulator) to make it easy to capture images. Thall shalt document. But first let us look at the letter A. If we went to an ascii  (american standard code for information interchange) table we can see the letter A is 65. So far so good.. But the computer does not recognize that nunber as the letter A. You remember base 10 arithmetic. where you have ten fingers to work with to do math. Well the computer in this case has 16 fingers or ba...

Finally testing some over the air foil based antennas Also wanted to test the composite output of an old computer I have made. Next antenna, I think is a gray-Hoverman antenna. I tried to follow the specs the best I could. The last antenna I tested was a fractal based antenna. it was definitely directional.

In the last article, I talked about looking at programs and disassembling them. What is that really all about. Let us take the very simple program hw and run it. $ ./hw Hello world! $ The program hw printed out the famous Hello world. We can understand that, but let's look at what the computer sees to do that program. $ cat hw � �̀Hello world! ( ���� ����� .shstrtab.text.data � eddie@oedt01:~$ ��" ��� Obviously garbage. At this point we can not really use that output for our needs. Remember I talked about a disassembler?  It changed that gobbletygoop in to something that a programmer might use.  Let's try it. $ objdump -D hw hw:     file format elf32-i386 Disassembly of section .text: 08048080 <.text>:  8048080:    b8 04 00 00 00           mov    $0x4,%eax  8048085:    bb 01 00 00 00       ...

Like to thank the late great Jim Butterfield for getting me into assembly language programming for the 6502/6510 so many years ago. So lucky to be able to have taken a class in person with him and others who wanted to learn. Most of which I have forgotten, except for the techniques. That was a time when Commodore gave out information about their machines. They were open source before open source was ever coined as a term. You could get documentation about the c=64 by the truckload.  Think I had most of the Compute books and many of the magazines available at the time. My brother first had me interested in the Vic 20 and eventually the Commodore 64. To be able to use a monitor and a keyboard was awesome compared to the punch cards we had to use on an old IBM 360 model 40 to learn Fortran in college. Anyway, some things have never changed. Companies want to prevent you from using your equipment to the fullest. A company that is no longer around made a third party modem that exceede...

Feel like App stores and epub sites have too much control over your commuting computing devices. Well you are not alone. That is the general feeling from all the people who have seen ebooks and or applications either locked down or mysteriously missing. You do not feel as if you own the touchpad or the like. Chances are the web browser on your touchpad, will never be tampered with except for being updated.  Too many local applications on your device can also clutter up storage space.  Picture  What can be another option. You can use your own web server, or lease on-line web space, or use a web hosting service to use your own web applications. In earlier articles, I have talked about how you can write your own progrems for web use. You can actually get quite a few web based applications that are open source from the likes of sourceforge.net and other sites if you do not want to reinvent the wheel. There are so many programs available, from cooking to advanced business...

Nowadays people use the Arduino and the Raspverry Pi to control all sorts of motors and other things. but also older computers can do the same thing with the parallel port. In fact, you can add several parallel port cards to even make a cnc machine, http://www.machinegrid.com/2008/12/parallel-port-tutorial-part-1/   is a good article about using the l293d chip as what is known as a h bridge with the parallel port. Note: In Qbasic you can control the parallel port with out 888, 0 instead of outportb(0×378,0×00); as used by the C language.

Had a tripod, but the digital camera did not have a place for the screw from the tripod. No problem. a bit of pvc and a nut now allows the camera to have new uses.