The monkeys got my multimeter article has an interesting video that shows a really crappy design aspect of this IDEAL multimeter. Was this caused by a design or specification problem is hard to say. Very probably, for an economy DMM like this one, the ability to operate the buttons without rear support (i.e. your own →
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. It features five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, →
Control Geek blog pointed out that a revision of ESTA’s BSR E1.17, the “Architecture for Control Networks” protocol (ACN) developed by the live entertainment industry for control of pretty much anything, is up for a public review ESTA TSP Public Review Documents until August 24. ACN is a control protocol that has potential applications far →
10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design slide set has many good points. It is a very good presentation on designing for the user experience. Take the inspiration from the slides. →
My Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR) circuit is now available in kit form. Far Circuits has made a TDR kit that consists of circuit board and components. The Far Circuits version is a slightly modified circuits, the modification is that the circuit board has a 5V regulator IC in it. With that regulator the circuit power →
I has been very hot and dry in Finland. Some kind of irrigation system or manual irrigation seems to be necessary to keep the plants happy. Livehacker reports on an interesting Build an Arduino-Powered, Tweeting, Self-Watering Garden System. It’s extremely simple. And, not only will the Arduino water the soil when it starts to get →
Chipshow’s LED tube page gives some views what LED tubes look like. As you can see there are many LEDs inside a LED tube. The most economical way to run sich LEDs from mains power is to connect many LEDs in series and then use some current limiting circuit to set the drive current right →
The idea if replacing fluorescent light bulbs with LEDs seems to become popular. There are different kind of products made for that purpose. LED bulbs utilizes large arrays of high power LEDs to provide up to provide light. They are at best an economical way to replace commonly used fluorescent tubes. Since introducing LED based →
Toolkit: A Look at the Gear That Experts Use to Spy on Spies is an interesting article. Kevin Murray heads one of the most sophisticated surveillance-detection firms according to the article. Wired asked Murray about the bevy of gizmos he and his staff use to sniff out corporate espionage. →
Testing software sucks. However, it is not the worst part of being a Software Engineer; that seat is taken by documentation. Which is why a lot of open source software documentation is horrifically bad. This is an ongoing problem with Linux as most open source developers won’t pay technical writers to polish their documentation. Study: →