Anton’s Stuff

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To use, drag the URL to your bookmark toolbar.  When you find a blog you’d like to subscribe to, hit the bookmark and it’ll take you to Google Reader and offer to subscribe to the feed (if Google can find one).

Google Reader’s new search can find the rss feed when you search for a blog’s URL. This book marklet takes you to the search results for the current page. Makes subscribing to blogs in google reader way too easy. It seems to work equally well from pages withing a blog as from the front page.

Is it me or does Sourceforge just suck lately?

In the last 3 months it seems that half the time I’ve wanted to download something hosted by them I cannot connect. I’ve tried from home, both my web servers, and work and the connection times out from all locations.

[update:]

Now that I’ve complained about it things have improved.  The preferred mirror options seems to be working correctly and downloads are once again fast.

Making hobbyist PCBs with professional CAD tools
Very cool tutorial on using EagleCAD to design a circuit and etch a board with the toner transfer method.

Intro Making hobbyist PCBs with professional CAD tools

It’s nice that there are some professional circuit board tools available to the hobbyists. Here are some tips for using them ito design boards that don’t need a professional fabricator to actually MAKE them…

I got back from a weekend at Huntsville State Park for the Texas Kayak Builders Bash.

Check out my Flickr set for more details of the weekend.

There were about 40+ boats, mostly kayaks but a few very nice looking canoes. Hannah (my daughter) was bitten by the kayak bug and is now convincing me to build her a kayak. I’m consideirng a couple of Skin on Frames, particularly Tom Yost’s design for kids, the Sea Pup for Hannah and the Sea Tour 17 for me.

When I do get around to building a kayak, I’ll probably document it over on my father’s blog: Kayak Bytes.

A group of us were interested in the Graffiti Research Lab’s Throwies and decided to try some for Fiesta in San Antonio. A throwie is an LED, small battery, and a strong rare earth magnet. The cost on all of these items is now low enough that you can make the throwies for under 50 cents each in quantity.
We started out the evening at La Tuna to assemble the throwies and discuss our plans. After building almost 200 throwies we started talking about where to toss them. At least a few of them went on the outside of La Tuna while we made up our minds. We all piled in the van and made our way to the Riverwalk.

At first we just experimented with lamp posts, street signs (most are aluminum) but we soon came to one of the tressel bridges over the Riverwalk. We used up about a third of them on the top of the bridge, handing some to passer-bys that looked interested. Many strangers joined in the fun by throwing ones we gave them and picking up fallen throwies. Everyone thought it was great fun and a cool idea.

Next we trapsed around the river where we tagged a number of fence posts, signs and various vendor and restaurant carts. The undersides of most bridges turned out to be too crowded to risk throwing things but we did manage to light up the beams under at least one bridge.

Before the night was out we returned to the original bridge to see how many LEDs had gone missing. Most of them were still there (the ones up high) so we handed out a few more and added more color to the bridge before heading back to La Tuna. We lit up the back wall at La Tuna with the remaining LEDs before calling it a night.

The whole evening was a lot more fun than I expected with much of the thrill of graffiti without the permanent damage that paint causes. The LEDs should shine for close to a week at which point we’ll go back and recover as many as we can to to be recycled and reused.

For some more information about Throwies check out these links:
http://www.instructables.com/
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/
http://www.makezine.com/

[Update:]

Another post about the evening here: http://sweaterproject.org/2006/04/24/concerning-throwies/

dailywireless.org - WiFi Routers for Cars

Daily Wireless has a small roundup of Stompbox alternatives.  All of them are cheaper and at least one offers a GPS option.

Travelers this summer will be able to stay plugged in at broadband speeds using The WavBoard CM3 ($379.00), by Omniwave, one of the first broadband cellular routers specifically designed to be used in a moving vehicle.

I gave my first stompbox presenation at the XCSSA meeting in San Antonio tonight. It was a good mix of old and young geeks, mostly hardware afficianados with a love of the non-standard.

I hope everyone enjoyed my first attempt at presenting to a user group. it was good to meet new people and I’ll definitely try to attend future meetings. XCSSA meets at 7pm on the 3rd Monday of every month in the Nail Technical Center, San Antonio College.

Rich Jennings presented the the Cubix embedded computer stack. It’s 1.5″ square, runs an ARM[?] processor with 256K of RAM and 2MB of flash. Power consumption is under 100mA for most applications. It runs the open source eCos OS and can be programmed with a number of free and commercial applications.
Nate brought his Nokia 770. The 770 is now officially on my want it now but will have to wait list. It runs a variant of debian complied for the ARM processor and has a lot of potential. The LCD is amazing for a pocket display with fonts that work great in an xterm. Bluetooth and WIFI round out the connectivity getting you to the net and allowing use of a bluetooth keyboard.

The family and I made a spur of the moment trip to Galveston this weekend and took the stompbox with us.

I didn’t spend anytime on line but my wife was able to surf the web and IM with people for the whole trip. The connection didn’t drop once in 250 miles.

Price

It’s quite expensive for a toy. I had a hard time justifying the cost to myself but the old laptop I was using had some issues and I didn’t expect it to last long. My wife wasn’t too happy with the expense but she got over it this weekend when she was able to surf the web and IM with people while we drove 4 hours to Galveston.

If cost is a real concern, just get the evdo card and plug it into your laptop. The next option is one of the commercial 3G routers that can be up and running for under $300. It’s probably possible to do the stompbox for under $500 but it’d be tough and you’d have to scrounge a lot of parts.

Value

The stompbox is a solid and robust solution. I don’t have experience with any of the cheaper commercial routers but would expect them to be as reliable and nearly as solid. One thing the stompbox offers is endless configuration and software options. It’s 133Mhz 486 processor and 64MB of RAM make it powerful enough to run a large selection of applications. If you’ve got some Linux experience, time, and a few C-notes to burn then I’d suggest giving it a try. The project has and continues to be fun.

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USB

My very next step is a PCMCIA USB adapter. Fortunately these things aren’t too expensive if you’re patient on ebay. I may even build a small 5V power supply that taps off the 12V in to allow more devices. From this point on any other peripherals will have to be USB or RS-232. The obvious advantage of USB is that the device can be powered by the port.

GPS

Now what good is a mobile router if it doesn’t know where itself is? The original stompbox image supports gpsd and I plan to get one of the small “gps mice” that are on ebay for $50-60. Once we know where we are and export that information with gpsd we can use a wide range of scripts or apps to access it. A laptop running linux in the car can get gps data over the wifi, we can send the data off to a web server for real-time vehicle tracking and we can also log to a local disk for some war driving logs.

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