Category Archives: Nerdery

External power and non-Nikon batteries on the Nikon D3100

_DSC8718, originally uploaded by afiler. The Nikon D3100 is a great camera for the price, the bottom end of Nikon’s DSLR range. Being a bottom-end camera, a few things are missing, like an external power connector. I’m using this camera … Continue reading

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My clock. It ticks.

201_0291.MOV, originally uploaded by metrixcreate. My clock. It ticks.

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My new internet radio

My new internet radio, originally uploaded by afiler. It has knobs like a real radio, but yet it plays modern radio stations. There’s no screen yet, but one is coming. I use an Arduino to connect the switches and selector … Continue reading

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Apple II Plus as a USB keyboard

Connecting an Apple II keyboard to a computer with USB is surprisingly easy with a Teensy board. The Apple II uses an ASCII keyboard, which means that rather than returning scan codes, it returns a 7-bit ASCII value. This also … Continue reading

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Extending a keyboard with LASERS

Photo by Duncan at Metrix [flickr stream]. Since Unicode “works” in most places on the internet these days (from webpages to Twitter to IRC in terminal sessions), I like to use all the characters that are available to me, when … Continue reading

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Hello, m’am, I’m from the Phone Company

_DSC2454.JPG, originally uploaded by metrixcreate. Duncan and I made tshirts with the “phone company” logo on them (no actual phone company has this logo, but it looks a lot like the logo of some random independent phone company in the … Continue reading

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Instant document conversions

Want to squeeze a text file out of a Word document you found online, or need a CSV from an Excel file? Use doc.mar.cx! For example, http://doc.mar.cx/http://www.ieee.org/documents/IEEECopyrightForm.doc This will give you an HTML version. If you’d like a different output … Continue reading

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More finger features

My finger gateway now supports much more of the Internet. It supports some sites specifically, like Facebook (try finger cdc@facebook.com@finger.afiler.com), but it also supports sites that have per-user RSS feeds linked to from the page at sitename.com/username (e.g. finger afiler@flickr.com@finger.afiler.com). … Continue reading

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I made a monitor stand

I made a monitor stand out of black gas pipe and fittings, compression tees, and an adapter bracket. The compression tees (as in pipe fittings, not clothing) were an awesome find. They have rubber gaskets inside that made a surprisingly … Continue reading

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Top Telephone Switches

With AT&T saying that “with each passing day, more and more communications services migrate to broadband and IP-based services, leaving the public switched telephone network (“PSTN”) and plain-old telephone service (“POTS”) as relics of a by-gone era,” I thought it … Continue reading

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