For the past few days, I’ve been jumping-out-of-my-shoes excited from reading the cover story of the February 2010 issue of Wired magazine entitled “The New Industrial Revolution,” by long-tail theorist Chris Anderson, and the related issue of Make magazine, the theme of which is “Desktop Manufacturing.”

Have you ever been messing around on your Ubuntu box, only to notice some sluggishness or some suspicious spikes in your internet connection, and wondered, “What the hell is using up all that bandwidth?” Or worse, “Have I been hacked?” If so, then NetHogs might be the program for you. NetHogs is a lightweight Linux [...]

Here’s the remastered final version of Andrew McCombs’ classic documentary “The Principia Process,” which chronicles the spring 2002 launch season, and the beginnings of Team Principia. Watch and enjoy.

One of the annoying little setup items on my list of things to do every time I reinstall Kubuntu is changing the bootsplash screen resolution from 800×600 to something more appropriate for my monitor, specifically, 1280×1024. Here’s how it’s done: sudo nano /etc/usplash.conf The file should be altered to read: # Usplash configuration file # [...]

So there was this web page, nothing more than a text file in fact, which I was compelled to check regularly. I had ordered something online from a company whose web-store design was still in the dark ages, and their “method” of letting customers know whether or not their products had shipped was to periodically [...]

So let’s say you have a private LAN running in your secret underground lab. Maybe you’ve got a Linux box hardwired to a WiFi router, and maybe a Mac or Linux laptop floating around somewhere, and you need a quick way to transfer files or execute shell commands remotely. What you need is SSH, the [...]

LightScribe is an innovative technology that uses a special disc drive, special media, and label-making software to burn labels directly onto CDs and DVDs. The labels are laser-etched, not printed, so there’s no ink, no smudging, and no peeling. LightScribe lets you create one-of-a-kind designs with your own photos, text, and artwork. The days of [...]

I recently soldered up a Boarduino from Adafruit Industries. Boarduino is simply an Arduino clone with a smaller form factor, designed to plug directly into a breadboard rather than giving you the female headers of the original. I thought I’d post a few photos of the process. I really like the idea of the Boarduino, [...]

image: Randomskk / cc by-sa My Weller WES51 arrived today (w00t!), and in celebration, I thought I’d compile a list of my favorite soldering tutorials around the web. How to Solder Correctly: An excellent starting point, thanks to a detailed seven-minute video and lots of close-up images. Soldering Tips (PDF, 284K): Ten pages of required [...]