Compass Rose

I LOVE THIS PICTURE.  I believe it’s from a 1950’s issue of Popular Science magazine.

What exactly are the two "steering" type wheels used for?

This evening marked the last hours for my trusty 21" CRT InterGraph monitor.  The picture finally went out on this 75 lb beast of a monitor.  It’s only… um… 15 years old?  Now I’m stuck with this crappy 22" LCD monitor.  UGH!  How do people deal with these things.  What will I do with all the extra desktop space? 

I know LCD monitors are smaller, lighter, lower energy consumption and *much* better for your eyes, but I still like my CRT behemoths.

I’ve come across two packages that seem to excel at schematic capture and PCB layout. 

KiCad - a full featured schematic capture and layout program that has extensive libraries and is entirely free and open source under the GPL license.  It runs on Windows (XP, 2000, Vista) and Linux  and there are rumors of it being successfully built for Mac OS X as well.  I’ve tried the Windows XP version and it works great.  I’m still searching for a pre-built downloadable version for OS X.

Eagle (by CadSoft) - A commercially available package that has a limited version that is free for student and non-commercial use.  The Free version is limited to 1 schematic sheet, two signal layers per board and a board size up to 4 x 3.2 inches.  The libraries seem to be much more complete and because it’s a commercial product with a large following, some chip manufacturers provide libraries for new products.  It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. 

I like the looks of Eagle and I’ll probably play a bit more with it. The limitations aren’t really that crippling.  I had an intimate relationship with Orcad some years ago and really liked it.  I believe it’s around $3,500 for a single user license.  There wasn’t much it couldn’t do.  Eagle seems to be close in concept and functionality for a whole lot less money. 

However, I really don’t like limitations in software.  They have a tendency to sneak up and bite you when you really don’t need it.   As much as I understand and respect the fact that a company needs to provide a commercial product to generate revenue and I think it’s great that Eagle offers a low cost version for people like me, I think I will try a couple of designs in KiCad too…. just in case I need it one day.

If you’re looking for a program that just does PCB layout, then check out FreePCB.  It looks perfect for most small to medium boards.  In fact, it has maximum dimensions that are larger than any other freely available programs I’ve seen.  Although it doesn’t have a built-in autorouter, it is designed to interface with a free web-based autorouter. 

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours;  you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

(from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy)

To you nay say-ers, “Towel Day” is a real holiday. 

Another great holiday is “Steak & BJ day” Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.  Men, mark March 14th on your calendars for this male counterpart to Valentine’s day.

My significant other and I just got back from a week long vacation in Jamaica.  What a hoot.  If you’ve never been, GO!  I’d never been before and I’d never been to an “all inclusive” resort before either.  This trip was a first for both and it was a wonderful experience.

After many days and nights of research (none of which I did), *we* finally decided that Sandals in Negril, Jamaica was the place to go.  If it had been left up to me to plan or decide, we never would have made it anywhere.

I can’t possibly give the resort a higher recommendation.  It was a fantastic all around experience.  You can do as little or as much as you like with as much luxury or relaxation as you choose.

To tell you the truth, it was a bit uncomfortable not doing anything for yourself for a week.  I could probably get used to it though

We met some really cool people while we were there.  In particular, there was Randy and Carol and their friends, Daryl and Jen, all from Montana.  Matt and Kristy from Michigan, Ashley and Josh from Ohio and last but not least by any means, Rorie and Aaron from Ohio.  I definitely want to thank you all for making our vacation so much fun.

A special tip-of-the-hat to the snorkeling crew at Sandals Negril.  Mackey and “Shark Bait” are two of the best guides I’ve ever met.  It’s a very fun and entertaining experience.  Don’t be surprised if one day you see an album of reggae and rap tunes come out of Jamaica entitled “Mackey Sings”

Photos?  You want Photos?  You Can’t Handle These Photos!!!  OK, maybe you can.  Check ‘em out here.

In the quest for blogging tools, yet another free tool has made an entry here.

ScribeFire

To quote from their web site:

ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

The good:

• It works on any platform that runs Firefox. Which means if you’re reading this on a platform, it works on that platform. (Blogging from the PDP-11/83 terminals still won’t work. DARN! Oh wait, there’s no IP stack on it either.)
• Installation is a snap. Configuration is just as easy.
• It really makes blogging from web sources easy. Too easy maybe….
• It has all sorts of other features that allow you to digg, facebook, propeller, etc… a particular page.
• All the documentation is on-line and readily accessible.

The bad:

• Figuring your way around the interface is a bit confusing and I inadvertently triple posted an entry while editing in the first 5 minutes.
• It needs a lot of screen space. TONS!!! I’m used to seeing most of a web page while browsing and most of an editor page while blogging. Sharing a screen between these two real-estate intensive applications is uncomfortable at best.
• I keep looking for options I think should be there and they are, but not where you would expect them.
• Some of the options are confusing
• I could only figure out how to add Flickr images. There is a link to instructions on how to “Upload an image and insert it into a post” from th ScribeFire web site, but that link gave the dreaded 404 error.

Summary:
It’s installed. I didn’t pay for it. I probably won’t delete it. I probably won’t use it for general blogging or managing blogs but when I see that cool article or item on the web that I need to comment on *RIGHT NOW*, it’s there, waiting for me.

I’m sitting here at the Mac. I would be at the PC right now but a hacked version of a ‘certain software’ installed on my PC allows my significant other to print out professional looking documents for less than the $2000 price tag of a full version.

It’s kind of lame really. She prints 5 times a year and just wants her fully-licensed student version to not paste a giant “STUDENT VERSION” banner on everything she prints. There must be some other way to entice users to take a class in your software without forcing them to shell out thousands of dollars.

But, I digress.

The problem is that my 30 day trial of Red Sweaters MarsEdit 2 expired. I tried Ecto and it just didn’t work right for me. MarsEdit is a great piece of software but before I spend the $29.00, I want to look around and make sure I know what all my options are.

A quick web search revealed…

Qumana. So far, a decent interface. Price is free. I tend to rate software based on whether or not I can figure out how to use it for the purpose I intended in under 5 minutes. Qumana passed with flying colors in that regard. Initial configuration was easier than any other blogging software I’ve tried. It pales compared to Live Writer when it comes to being able to see what your blog entry will look like when posted. Qumana does offer integration with their “Q Ads” product. I haven’t tried it but according to the documentation, it looks like a truly valuable asset if you are trying to maintain content related advertising on your blog.

And… This was posted using it. So, it works.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I purchased a LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini Drive.  In short it’s a 500GB Gigabit Ethernet NAS device with a built in media server.  It uses Linux as its internal OS and Firefly Media Server to share media files. (music files show up in iTunes under shared libraries and are also accessible via “Front Row” on the Mac)  

With virtually unlimited storage for all the mp3 files and the ability to share them among multiple computers, I’ve been ripping my entire CD collection like a madman into iTunes and then copying them along to the NAS.  The problem is that apparently, once the Firefly Media Server on the LaCie makes an initial scan of the drive, it has trouble updating the media database.  Not it’s internal one, because that appears to know exactly how many media files are on the drive, but the one it uses to share with iTunes.

Meaning that no matter how many files you have on the NAS, or how many times you tell the NAS to rebuild the database, it only will share (via the media server) the files that it found the very first time it scanned the drive. 

I’m not a Firefly Media Server expert but I found a great link to people who know much more than I do and a potential fix for this problem.

So… the fix is a link to a file that is supposedly from LaCie Tech support.  However, the file is not available from LaCie tech support, (at least I can’t find it anywhere on their website) it’s currently hosted on a file sharing service that is rife with popup’s and other such fun.  But, I tried it and it works.

Download the fix.  Install the fix via the instructions for installing updates from LaCie.  If you can’t find them, (neither could I), you can update the firmware from the “Configuration” tab of the Web Based Admin Utility for the NAS.  Once you’ve applied the patch it is important to rebuild the media database from the “media” tab in the admin utility.  Go back into iTunes and all your files should appear.  Woo-Hoo!

Note:  This “fix” apparently causes iTunes to name the shared library “EDmini” as opposed to the network name you configure for the NAS device.  Annoying.  I wonder what happens if you put two of them on the same network.  Hmmm.

At some point, friends of mine decided to see what propane, oxygen and a short fuse would do if all combined in exactly the right proportions inside a clothes dryer.  Kind of a science experiment of sorts. 

If you listen closely, you can almost hear someone say… “Hey Bubba watch this”.