I really enjoyed watching this hour-long talk by Jonathan Oxer, entitled “Hardware/Software Hacking: Joining the Real and the Virtual,” which addresses the growing trends in physical computing, and the process of connecting the physical world with the virtual. ~ from Google Tech Talks, July 31, 2007 ABSTRACT Software developers usually confine themselves to working entirely [...]

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use microcontroller hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. This short tutorial will guide you through the installation of the Arduino development environment on Ubuntu. These instructions reference arduino-0010 and have been tested on [...]

Here’s how to get rid of that annoying “Busy Cursor” bouncing icon next to the mouse pointer in Kubuntu. (1) Press Alt+F2 to bring up the Run Command dialog box. (2) Type kcontrol and click Run. (3) Select “Appearance & Themes” from the left sidebar menu. (4) Select “Launch Feedback” from the sub-menu. (5) In [...]

Skype is a free text/audio/video chat and softphone client for PCs. Version 2.0 for Linux finally includes support for webcam video. It’s still in beta, and it’s designed for a 32-bit OS, so AMD64 users have to do a little creative tweaking to get it to work. Thanks to this tutorial on the Ubuntu Forums, [...]

“Home isn’t what it used to be.” It’s all over the place, in every sense, as more and more of us are. We live on planes, in fast-food courts and hotel lobbies. True to the spirit of the times, I haven’t had a place of my own for almost a decade now; I simply shuttle [...]

STS-98 Space Shuttle Atlantis landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The view is from the Commander’s Head-Up Display (HUD). Notice the incredibly steep descent angle (~20deg) and the pre-flare maneuver on final approach.

After a fresh install of Kubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon,” there are a few extra tasks necessary to get everything set up and running smoothly, especially when it comes to multimedia support and internet tools. This short tutorial will allow you to quickly enable some of the features missing in a vanilla installation. The goal of [...]

Login to MySQL: ~$ mysql -u username -p Create a database: create database db_name;

Pretty URLs are URLs that have meaning for human readers, rather than just being seemingly random jibberish only a web server could appreciate. The following is an example of a “pretty” URL: http://my.blog.com/archive/2007/10/pretty-urls Note that every part of the URL is relevant for a human reader. For comparison, here’s an example of an “ugly” URL: [...]

If you want to build dynamic websites, one of the first things you’ll need to do is set up a development environment your local computer, so you can experiment and test new code without uploading everything to a remote web server. In a nutshell, this means LAMP — Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. With this [...]