omino code blog

WordPress Pages, Anywhere

David Van Brink — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:44:52 +0000

Pardon this post which is about technical trivia unrelated to API’s and Weird Blinking Lights. But I needed to jot it down somewhere. It’s a note about including contents out of WordPress in parts of a site which aren’t under the WordPress installation. Now that WordPress includes revision management (as of 2.6) I intend to use [...]

Free Idea: New International Power Plug

David Van Brink — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:57:14 +0000

This morning I woke up doing some dream-design work. It was about the new international standard power plug. It resembled an American power plug, nonpolarized. The tines were a little bit more widely spaced, and narrower. The power cord was a little bit thinner and more flexible than normal cords. This was for two reasons. First, the [...]

Practical API Design by Jaroslav Tulach

David Van Brink — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:01:47 +0000

Found and acquired this book today at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Very nice tome on good Java API style. Alas, slightly pricey ($75 retail). The fellow’s a bit ranty at times… but, ah, I can relate. The author was a founding architect of NetBeans , and is still a principal on that project. Also, look, google lets [...]

XBee Untethered

David Van Brink — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:02:11 +0000

The XBee module has an odd connector. It’s 20 pins in two widely-space rows, with 2mm spacing. Nice and efficient, but doesn’t fit into my gridlike 10th inch world view. I mean, it’s fine, if you’re spinning a board… But if you’re just dinking around, it’s nice to have it fit into that 10th inch protoboard world. Thankfully, [...]

Fun With XBee

David Van Brink — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:16:05 +0000

About a year ago, I was vaguely wondering if there were any low cost 802.11-ish WiFi modules, to easily add a net-presence to my dinky electronics doodles. There wasn’t; WiFi modules seem to run around $150 or more. (Which is the same price as a WiFi Kodak picture frame, but that’s parts for ya.) But [...]

one more wordpress plugin

David Van Brink — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:36:29 +0000

// Support function for saShowCode wordpress plugin function showCodeShowHide(id,shown) { var outer = document.getElementById("outer_" + id); [...]

simple browser tricks

David Van Brink — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:45:54 +0000

In a detour to a detour to some longer term goal, I needed to do some minimal HTML/JavaScript coding. The regularly scheduled hardware and WBL tinkering — including soldering, LEDs, and wireless sensors — will resume shortly. Specifically, in WordPress, I wanted to hide <embed> tags behind a “click-to-show” link, to reduce browser-clobbering in some of [...]

In Memory Of an early WBL

David Van Brink — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:01:44 +0000

Specimen: a Lazer Tag target, circa 1987, manufactured by Worlds of Wonder, an early commercial WBL if ever there was one. I’m doing a bit of dejunking and shedding, but wanted to give a moment’s silence for this one. LEDs and speaker and a tiny cpu, delicious. The LEDs would blink back and forth, a little [...]

The Old Parts

David Van Brink — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:24:39 +0000

Getting on towards deep self indulgence, here … but these particular parts in the collection, spanning nearly 40 years of components-hording, asked me to memoir them. They’ve traveled place to place, and box to box with me, and survived the prunings. Click to flickr to see notes upon’t.

12f509 cheat sheet

David Van Brink — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:16:26 +0000

Back in the 80’s, I thought it was the coolest thing that you could call up someone in San Jose, tell them you were interested in such and so category of parts, and they’d send you a great box of literature. I obsessively read the app notes and features of the 8051 and 8048 “single [...]