Memcached is a distributed object caching system that was originally developed to improve the performance of LiveJournal and has subsequently been used as a scaling strategy for a number of high-load sites. It serves as a large, extremely fast hash table that can be spread across many servers and accessed simultaneously from multiple processes. It’s […]
The Apple Blog recently posted a simple SDK tutorial for the iPhone that walks you through the steps for creating a little RSS reader. It’s pretty cool in that it’s one step above a Hello World app – it performs a real world function, but doesn’t get too bogged down in features and details that […]
Thanassis Tsiodras wrote in about a utility for adding additional error correction redundancy to your backup data: The way storage quality has been nose-diving in the last years, you’ll inevitably end up losing data because of bad sectors. Backing up, using RAID and version control repositories are some of the methods used to cope ; […]
View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHC experiments designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics. (Maximilien […]
We posted David Cranor’s Arduino card reader the other day, and today he wrote in with an even better magstripe hack: a way to simulate a card swipe using an iPod an electromagnet. David writes: When the card is swiped past the card reader, the changing magnetic field of the passing flux reversals induce a […]
When you take pictures with the built-in flash on your digital camera, it’s common to get a washed-out, deer-in-headlights result from your subject. This is particularly noticeable with portraits and close-range photography. To obtain a softer, more natural look from your photographs and eliminate the glare, you need a flash diffuser to help disperse and […]
Instructables user powerpants created a quick and dirty card reader interface with an Arduino. The Arduino decodes the data from the swiped card and transfers it to a PC over a USB serial connection. This instructable shows how to use some freely available code, an arduino, and a standard magnetic stripe reader to scan and […]
