effluvia of a scattered mind

I've had significant issues with the new Ubuntu GUI and Gnome 3.0; ranging from irritations (difficulty to create launchers) to bugs (m...

The Arduino is great; a microController you can actually do something with for 30 bucks!  Ok, but your train layout needs 5 of them ($150), ...

In the last posting I described how I made a few PCBs to act as SMT breakouts.  I've discovered that this seems to be a pretty ideal job...

Using modern components in PCB circuit board design essentially requires the use of small surface mount packages.  Testing these components ...

I think Eagle 6 was rushed to market :-).  It resists installation on the most popular Linux distros, and when you do finally get it working...

Bruce Perens (who did Busybox and Debian as well as defining "Open Source") has created an Open Hardware Journal ( http://openha...

 A few days ago I held a workshop on do-it-yourself (aka cheap) surface mount electronics techniques at a Boston artspace/hackerspace calle...

Recreational Software Designs GameMaker product was a program that ran on the IBM PC machines around 1991-1995, sold in the USA, UK and Kore...

Its a royal PITA to specify the pinout of a 144 pin part! So there is no point to doing this more than once -- across the entire internet. ...

For some reason, Lattice provides its new Diamond GUI for the second most popular Linux distribution instead of Ubuntu, the most popular di...