One and a half years ago I wrote a post complaining that there were no IP-cam apps available for Symbian. I concluded that the options available were a waste of time.
Well it turns out there actually IS an app that will do what I want from it. A few days ago a user, Travis, commented that the app TrendCam would do what I wanted.
Continue reading if you want to know if this app is also a waste of time.
I was looking to get some VLANs up and running to separate traffic on my network into safe zones and fun zones. The Tomato firmware on my router was turning a bit old, so I looked at the newer builds. It’s a jungle out there, but I managed to work my way through it. It was actually quite easy, so read on if you have a 610N and want the even easier way 🙂
I recently got a new phone. The old Nokia 5800 had done well during it’s time, and it sort of seemed a shame to just throw such a capable device in the trash. It has two cameras, and it can connect to other devices via WiFi, Bluetooth and USB. The obvious idea was to use it as an IP camera.
An afternoon of wasted time later, I concluded that this is not worth it. Here’s the story so you don’t have to waste your time too.
EDIT 2013-11-12: A user commented that he had found a proper IPcam app, and it really worked. Read about it in the TrendCam article.
I’ve always been interested in electronics that could control stuff in the real world. Back twenty years ago I used the Commodore 64 to control some motors etc. and had fun with that. It was fairly easy because everything on the serial port was directly available. A peek here and a poke there, and you could do everything! If you had a LED you could wire it up directly into the C64 and turn it on using only two poke commands.
But then the world changed, OS’s became complicated, and the serial port even pretty much disappeared on all computers. USB was the new thing, but USB is seriously complex. Both coding for it, and just to turn on a LED you need a load of electronics at the far end of the USB cable.
Then came the internet, and everything had to be online. All my dreams about controlling stuff sort of boiled down to: “I want it to be online and easy to do.” and thus went nowhere for 20 years… until today where I got my hands on a Nanode board. The only problem was that I hadn’t fiddled with electronics for 20 years! This is how it went…
I own one of the first Synology NAS’s ever made, the 106e. Synology stopped the development of new firmware for this model a few years back, but because many of the Synology devices are based on the same hardware it is still possible to upgrade the 106 series to higher than supported firmware. This article will tell you in detail how to do this.
During some cleanup I found a bunch of old pc’s at my parents house. One of them was in the original casing from my first pc back from 1995. A nice Baby-AT case. It looks cute compared to todays bulky ATX cases.
I also found some old games: Phantasmagoria, Civilization 2, MDK 2, Populous 3 and Die by the Sword.
Unlike very old games for DOS, I haven’t been revisiting any of these games lately. DOS games are easy to run in DOSBOX and usually work great, but the games above are from that strange area during the late 90ies where everything related to computers skyrocketed. These games have great accelerated graphics using some of the first 3D graphics cards available. They have loads of data on CD-rom. They have great sound. But all this comes at a price: Hardware support.
DOSBOX, compatability mode etc. just doesn’t help if the game needs a Voodoo 2 card to run.
The plan was set. I was going to build these old PC’s into one big bad king of late 90’es games. Including windows 98 and everything!
Continue reading
Back in 2005-2006 I was writing my masters thesis at the University of Ã…rhus. I was studying was if using a high level language would be useful for programming embedded systems like the LEGO RCX. I used JAVA as the high level language. Java can be run on the RCX using the LeJOS firmware and classes.
To see if this really had any effect on development time I had to do some sort of practical project that would also include a bit of robotics and embedded systems. Why not make something fun? A game where a bunch of robots whould bash the hell out of each other seemed like a good idea…
The LEGO DACTA 70909 controller has 8 outputs and 8 inputs that can be controlled from a PC via the serial port.
As a part of my thesis in computer science that I did in 2006, I coded a JAVA class that can control the box. It also comes with a some example code that will enable you to control the box.