I saw this post from Maximum PC on the construction of a multitouch surface so I decided I’d try my hand at it. I ended up paying under $200 to build it and, for the price, I’m very pleased with the results.
Multitouch Table
Aug 20
CNC Mill
Aug 20
This is something I’ve been working on that has been taking far too long. However, over the past few months I’ve made a little bit of progress on it. The above setup looks pretty rickety, but it’s actually worked out pretty well so far. So far I’m keeping it under $150 but we’ll see how long that lasts when I give up on the controller boards.
Reverse Projection Screen
Aug 20
This was something I had to think up while working on my multitouch table. I needed some sort of film that would show the projector’s image but from the opposite side, rather than the same side. Reverse projection screens aren’t cheap though. I searched around online but the best recommendations I could find were vellum (also pretty expensive), shower curtain (had low expectations with that) and wax paper. I decided wax paper seemed like the best idea, since it was easiest to come by, and if it didn’t work I wasn’t out more than a few cents.
So after I started work on my multitouch table (which I’ll post asap) and I needed to get my hands on a projector. Projectors are obscenely expensive, in the range of hundreds of dollars for a low end one, not to mention the cost of bulbs. I was looking for used ones and stumbled across a few broken ones on ebay. This got me thinking, how hard can it be to really fix one of these? I did some digging and was unable to find more than one solid source for fixing a broken projector. I found this guy’s blog post about it, and decided I would start from there. I started looking on ebay at broken projectors and eventually found one where the seller basically said, “got a bunch of these, don’t know if it works since there’s no bulb.” I was able to win the auction at just over $30 USD. Then I set to work.
DD-WRT
Jul 8
I recently purchased a Buffalo WHR-g300n wireless router to screw around with. I picked this one since it had alright reviews, got $45 off and most importantly because it was supported by DD-WRT. What’s that you ask? It’s an alternate firmware for wireless routers that greatly expands upon its capabilities and is supported by a wide variety of hardware.
This part is a continuation from Setting up a Laptop as a Wifi Hotspot. This guide will tell you how to setup the clients so that they can get the internet that the host should now be distributing.
This Guide will instruct you on how to setup your laptop as a wireless access point. It is intended for Windows machines running Vista, however, it’s almost exactly the same in Windows 7. It’s a bit different in XP, but I’d rather not get into that since most people are running newer operating systems, but even then the methods are exactly the same in XP.
First off, this guide is intended for people who kind of know what they’re doing on a computer, but if you’re below that level, feel free to give it a shot, just understand that I am not responsible if you break something. As a “computer nerd” I am constantly bombarded by people asking me to help fix their computers. Usually it’s “just slow” or “acting funny” which is what this guide intends to remedy. In my experience it has fixed 90% of the problems. Hope it works as good for you guys as it does for me. This is my (general) set of tasks designed, of course, for Windows:
This is an essay I wrote for scholarships a while back and thought it was still relevant. It’s a pretty interesting read. I made a post over on Striggler.com, and I would kindly ask for those of you who have old essays sitting on your hard drive collecting dust to post them up there and help some students out. Here’s the essay:
I keep seeing people make this mistake, and it’s slightly frustrating to continuously explain it. There’s 8 bits to a byte. Speeds are measured differently.
Generally, when you’re talking about networking upload or download bandwidth (like what your ISP tells you) it will be in b/s (bits per second) such as kb/s (kilobits per second) or Mb/s (megabits per second). This is different when data is being transferred though, since it will be measuring it in B/s (bytes per second) such as kB/s (kilobytes per second) or MB/s (megabytes per second).
Here’s an example. Most modern NIC cards are gigabit cards, meaning their maximum throughput is 1 Gb/s (gigabit per second), but people expect to be able to transfer one gigabyte in a second. Since there’s 8 bits to a byte that 1 Gb/s is only 125 MB/s. Meaning that with maximum throughput you have is 125 MB/s (again, 1/8 of a GB/s). I know that was very redundant, but for some reason I have the hardest time explaining that to people. Just be sure to note the difference between the capital B and the lower case b.
Also, it’s a good time to point out that there’s a difference between what operating systems consider a kilobyte and what disk manufacturers consider a kilobyte. OSes generally use 1024 bytes per KB (2^10, 2^20 for MB and so on…) and hardware makers use 1000 bytes per KB (the traditional definition of the SI prefixes). Some people freak out when they look at their one terabyte hard drive and only see .9TB and they feel ripped off, but really it’s just because of different definitions of data amounts. Hope that helps.
So in conclusion:
1Mb/s = .125MB/s or 125kB/s