There’s a huge discussion happening both on Lifehacker and Get Rich Slowly regarding the pros and cons of paying off a mortgage early. Contrary to my own assumptions, the numbers (assuming current interest rates around 6%) seem to strongly encourage investing your money instead of paying toward your mortgage’s principal. On the one hand, you […]
Christian Flickinger wanted to be able to sync status updates between his Twitter and Facebook accounts, so that when his status is updated on Twitter, his Facebook status is automatically updated at the same time. Unfortunately, Facebook didn’t have an API for setting status, so Christian decided to hack his own using PHP and cURL. […]
When two machines running Skype need to communicate directly, but are both behind a NAT firewall, there’s a clever trick that’s employed to start a communication channel. It works like this: First, both machines open a connection to a non-firewalled server. The server takes note of the source port (which may have been altered by […]
I’ve enjoyed Gareth’s writing for a while and it was great to finally meet him at Maker Faire. He was giving workshops on how to make Mousey the Junkbot and I got him to explain a little bit about it on tape and got inspired to make my own Mousey. Gareth wrote the article that […]
Hobbylab has a pretty nice looking PC USB Oscilloscope for $170 – PC USB Oscilloscope is a great tool for your microcontroller projects! Simply connect the device to the computer USB port, run the Windows application and you can analyze the UART, SPI, I2C and 1-Wire interface signals. In the same box you get Oscilloscope, […]
Bean looks like a pretty spiffy open source word processor for Mac OS X – Bean is lean, fast, and uncluttered. If you get depressed at the thought of firing up MS Word or OpenOffice, try Bean. If you use Text Edit but have to jump through hoops just to get a word count or […]
The Weller blog is on fire, well sorta – there were three updates today with some products… The WSB 80 Solder Bath – Link. The WHP 80 Preheating Plate – Link. Weller Therma-Boost Soldering Gun – Link.
