Category Archives: computing

TP-Link TL-WR1043ND DD-WRT No WAN fix

Fixing the TL-WR1043ND wireless router so that it works with DD-WRT firmware. Continue reading

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Spinning down USB drives in linux

Some of the commercial solutions like the “Passport” and “MyBook” USB drives have spin down logic built in to avoid excessive wear and tear. I recently came across a steal on newegg for a bare bones Intel D2500 (atom) based nettop, and … Continue reading

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Handbrake Copyright Protected DVD PC Fix

Handbrake, the easy one step DVD ripping program for PC/Mac/Linux, is giving you crap about a “this DVD may be copyright protected”? And the VLC fix obviously didn’t work, because you have a windows PC, not a mac. Well you … Continue reading

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Shopping for a cheap VPS

It’s still a bit of a Wild West in terms of VPS providers. There is Amazon’s EC2, Rackspace…. and then there is everybody else. Amazon seems to have a “micro” tier for $2.30/mo…. but you have to pay 3 years … Continue reading

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Libtcod and Roguelikes

Digging around in a friend’s python scripts and editing them for my own use got me thinking about games like Dwarf Fortress, NetHack and even old space trader games like Elite and Freelancer. Generally, Roguelikes are characterized as being text/console … Continue reading

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Windows 8 Developer Preview

I’m writing this on Windows 8 right now. It both installs and runs surprisingly well inside of a virtual machine. Actually, it shouldn’t be that surprising; in this day and age most people would rather cautiously install it on a Virtual Box or … Continue reading

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The Albatross Around AOL’s Neck

Actually that’s a misnomer. But let’s look at digital music, MP3s, digital distribution and ecommerce for a moment. Apple is a $40 bn company, reshaping their OS (Lion) to reflect their mobile devices (originally the iPod). From largest to smallest, … Continue reading

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Building a Steam Chat Bot

First off, I’ll admit, this is a kludge built upon at least two dirty hacks. But it works! We were running in to problems with getting preferred users in to the video game server when full. Battlefield and the Frostbite engine supports … Continue reading

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A case for the Nexus S that doesn’t suck

Google phone owners sometimes have bad luck when it comes to accessories, compared to say the Motorola Droid, iPhone or Blackberry. It’s easy to find good cases and docking stations for those devices. I finally found a hard shell case for … Continue reading

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A brief history of Boeing Calc, the first modern spreadsheet

At one point they might have said that TV would be the downfall of modern civilization. That may have to be revised; one can spend an inordinate amount of time clicking about on Wikipedia, and then googling for information not … Continue reading

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