After years of wrestling with the out-of-date TeXLive packages with Ubuntu and Fedora, I started simply using the official TeXLive packages. It is easy and highly pleasurable to have completely up to date packages and a full set of package maintenance tools.

For a beginning AVR developer with more typical platform programming experience, introductory information can seem scattered and sparse. There are a lot of programming tutorials, but since many people develop on Windows using AVR Studio, getting started using Linux can have a steeper learning curve. This article aims to be a complete introduction to setting up the hardware and software IDE for developing for the AVR platform.

There are several available libraries for communicating with the Wii nunchuk. I somehow found something lacking in all of them, so I wrote wiinunchuk.h for my projects. It is inspired by Tod E. Kurt. but my wiinunchuk.h boasts more powerful features and a more flexible API.

The government is trying to ram through an anti-Internet set of electronic surveillance laws that will invade your privacy and cost you money. The plan is to…

About two months ago I bought a Solomon SL-30 from a1parts.com, the online store for A1 Electronics here in Toronto. I chose that station after a lot of research, despite not being familiar with the name. This review is not based on a series of cleverly designed test, but just my day-to-day use of the station for soldering connectors, wires and even a little PCB work.

Recently, I’ve been getting a few of people wanting to use tfreq, autocorrelation and vibrational density of states to analyse data from CPMD. tfreq is written to process output from Quantum-ESPRESSO‘s cp.x output. The two options are to modify the source file tfreq.c to read the new input, which could be difficult for someone inexperienced [...]

In case you don’t already know, the big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Canada want to start billing Internet usage by the byte. Anyone with a smart phone is familiar with this system. For anyone who lives on the Internet, as most twenty-somethings and younger tend to do these days, this could easily become prohibitively expensive.

I usually go to sleep listening to gnaural or watching old TV shows on the computer beside my bed (which my wife just loves). Rather than have it running all night, I’d rather have my computer sleep after a certain time.

Here’s a simple (Bash) script to do just that.