Assembly Summer 2009 is Finland’s largest computer festival. It takes place in Helsinki 6th to 9th of August 2009. ASSEMBLY is a four day computer festival, in which thousands of people and their computers spend the long weekend by meeting friends, playing games, surfing on the net, talking on IRC and enjoying the great productions →
Today the dependability of the communications infrastructure and the applications flowing over networks is more important than ever. Users rapidly become dependent on new networked services to conduct their personal and professional lives. Users expect new, innovative distributed services to be delivered on demand and without interruption. Understanding Service Availability article tells that communications and →
A floating measurement reads the voltage between two points, neither of which is at ground potential. A most typical floating measurement done quite often is when doing voltage measurements with a battery powered multimeter. The floating insulated multimeter allows doing floating measurements of slowly changing signals easily. The advent of switching power supplies and motor →
Design News has published an interesitng on-line article Gadget Freak Case #128: Syncing Music and Fireworks on how Deane Williams fixed up his PC to synchronize fireworks with music. He used his PC’s parallel printer port to connect the circuit controlling the fireworks. The software was written in Agilent VEE 8.0 but Williams says it →
In 1973, Bob Metcalfe sent an internal memo to his colleagues at Xerox proposing a local system of interacting workstations, files, and printers. The devices would all be linked by one coaxial cable, he said, and would run within a local area network. He called the system an Ether Network, or Ethernet. And 36 years →
Multimeters are very good tools to find out problems in electronics circuits and testing electronics components. Resistor measurement is found in practically all multimeters, capacitance measurement range is becoming more and more common and some high-end models can also measure inductance. Many multimeters have also possiblity to test bipolar transistors (Hfe measurement range), but I →
Fire When Ready – A Pyro-Electric Safety Primer is a great document on issues around controlling dangerous things electrically. The document tells the techniques used on pyro/fireworks electrical control. Quite similar practices are used in other control applications where potentially dangerous things are controlled using electrical circuits or electronics. →
Slashdot has a post on World’s First 3D Webcam. There was a hands-on test of Minoru 3D webcam published on the web. That claimed be the world’s first 3D webcam allows you to takes 3D anaglyphic images that can be viewed with suitable 3D viewing glasses. That technology allows 3D videos and stereoscopic 3D video →
Inside building there are situations where you can see 60-115 V AC between different equipment grounding points. When going outside the building the voltage differences can between different grounding points can become larger. In electrical engineering, Earth Potential Rise (EPR) also called Ground Potential Rise (GPR) occurs when a large current flows to earth through →
The traditional PC parallel port is getting more and more rare on new PCs. It could be said that the parallel port is practically dissappearing from the PC technology. For example my new PC I use (bought more than year ago) did not have parallel port in it. Started documenting parallel port controlling document Parallel →