Aaron Parecki

UPDATE 2/13/09: There is a newer version of the IMAP Authentication plugin for Wordpress 2.7.1.

I am setting up a security camera mounted under the eve of my roof. Rather than running an ethernet cable and an extension cord up there, I figured I could use the four unused wires in an ethernet cable to provide the camera with power. The camera only uses 9v, so it should be pretty safe. I had a couple extra 1ft patch cables lying around, so I spliced the transformer into two patch cables. This will let me run a long CAT 5 cable from end-to-end, and attach it to the camera and ethernet/power.

This morning after waking up to lots of thunder and lightning, I got a text message saying my raid5 array had failed. Only this time, 2 of the 3 drives were missing. Since both of those drives were actually mounted via a vblade share (on a different physical machine), I assumed that the other server had freaked out during a power surge. I quickly rebooted the machine to bring back the vblade shares, but then the trouble started.

This is primarily targeted towards graphic designers, although anyone can benefit from the information here as well. This post focuses on the hardware of a laptop rather than the software. I figure I’ll save a talk about software for a different day.

presented by Aaron Parecki & Effie Siverts

I just stumbled across Google's Treasure Hunt. They're always doing neat things, so I checked it out. It's a series of four problem-solving puzzles released one week at a time. I found out about it after the first question was already over, so I jumped in starting with the second question.

When you have a database of books or movies, some of the titles begin with "The." If you do a regular ORDER BY on the table, all the titles that start with "the" get clumped together. One option is running an unsorted query and sorting in PHP, but it would be better to sort at the database level. Here is a query I came up with to do that, using an IF function in MySQL!

This is pretty much the coolest thing in the world! I am posting from my laptop which is connected to my cell phone's wifi connection, using Sprint's EVDO connection to the internet. The software that enables me to do this is called wmwifirouter. Earlier this month they released their first final version of the software, and started charging for it. It's not outrageously priced, but you can still find the earlier free versions on the internet if you search for versions 0.90 or 0.89.

Well I did it! I got the HTC Mogul on Sprint's SERO plan. Everything has been pretty painless so far. Activation was easy, text messaging works, and Internet browsing is pretty fast! Now comes the hard part: getting my data to sync between Windows Mobile and OS X.

But not in the radiation kind of way... in the omg-too-many-things-to-think-about kind of way.

Project Description

A lot of information about this device online is misleading. When I first heard about this, the site I was reading claimed the transmitter didn't have a battery, and used the energy from the foot impact to power the burst transmission of the device's ID. This is what got me excited about the device in the first place: that it was so simple.

I just got a Nike+iPod gadget thingy. It's pretty cool, and stores all the running stats in xml files on the iPod, making for easy hacking of the running data. However, that's not what I really want to do with it.

Using VMware Fusion and Multiple IEs, I set up my iMac to run the four major browsers simultaneously! IE 7, IE6, Firefox and Safari. With a 1920x1200 display, I can get all four to fit on the screen at once.

Haven't posted on this project in a while, but there have been some developments.

I bought a new 24" iMac last week, and it arrived on Friday. It worked flawlessly for the first day, but on Saturday, I noticed a pixel at the top of the screen about in the middle that was stuck magenta.

I was scratching my head on this one for several hours before finally figuring out the solution which turned out to be ridiculously simple.

Thank you Brandon K! You just saved me 6 hours apparently:

Just as I had suspected, the new 16mhz crystals work great.

Disclaimer: The posts in this "Ultrasonic Sensors" category are primarily a reference for myself during this project. However, I suspect some of the things I discover will be of use to others doing similar projects, so I will make them public.