3 Must Haves for Road Warriors
If you travel at all, here's a few tools to make life on the road more livable:
- Orb - I just discovered this. It is essentially a personal Web server that lets you access your files, audio, video, and even TV as streaming data. So last week in Los Angeles, I watched Battlestar Gallatica from my hotel room. If you have a MPEG in hardware TV card, this thing will work like a remote control TiVo -- you can record your shows on your PC while you are at any Web Browser and then watch the shows from anywhere -- including many mobile phones, PDAs, etc. You could set up your own streaming server, of course, but this is point and click and works great. Oh, and it is free!
- Thinkfree Office Online - I've written about this before. Still my favorite online text editor, presentation maker, and spreadsheet. Very Office compatible and it is great to always have the latest version of a document at your fingertips online. Also free.
- UltraVNC - My favorite of the VNC programs let you access your desktop computer from anywhere. Unlike many VNC derivities, this one makes it simple to use high security and transfer files. It also uses a video driver for good performance on screen updates.
Orb is hard to explain but priceless once you've used it for about 10 minutes. But with these tools you can get to all of your data and applications with a minimum of fuss as long as you have an internet connection.
Labels: PC, software, Tips
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Geek Ghristmas Gift #2
USB Missile Launcher
. Look a the picture. Software-controlled 3 missile launcher. Do I need to say anything more?
Labels: funny, geek
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Geek Christmas Gift #1
I haven't bought one (yet) but Mattel is selling a
toy RADAR Gun
for about $25. The idea is to measure the speed of Hot Wheel cars or your buddies on bicycles. At first I thought this couldn't possibly be real RADAR, but the box clearly says 10.5 GHz!
A little searching on the net found
this Australian post that has internal pictures and discussion about hacking and modifications.
I'm sure for $25 it isn't going to compete performance-wise with a "real" gun, but it looks like a cheap source of parts for a 10GHz oscillator and detector, along with a PIC FFT circuit!
Labels: electronics, hack
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Circuit Simulation without Spice
As you may know, I'm a big fan of simulation software including some online freebies and Linear's LTCSpice which I've blogged about before. However, the Qucs project (
http://qucs.sourceforge.net) has improved to the point that it is quite usable and really very slick. The program is made to run under Qt on Linux, but it will also run with Cygwin quite nicely.
Features include:
- Simulation not done by Spice (but support for Spice net lists)
- Analog and Digital simulation (with support for VHDL and with some wrangling, Verilog)
- Command line simulator back end for use with other programs (Qucs uses a GUI)
- S-Parameter, AC, DC, Transient, and noise analysis
- Very powerful way to create graphs and charts
- Filter and attenuator synthesis
- Smith charts
The program is actively developed and more features are planned.
If you want a good idea of what it can do, look at
this tutorial.
Labels: electronics
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