Cyclopedia Square

A friend recently purchased an ASUS WL-500g Premium V2 wifi router and installed PacketProtector on it for his mom. She wanted some filtering for the household internet connection, and my buddy thought that this would be a nice self-contained, stand-alone, hard-to-bypass solution for her and the fam. So far it seems to be all of that. I got to thinking about my own curious boys and wondering if I might want some DansGuardian filtering on my own internet connection. I've been pretty anti web filter ever since I discovered the web, mainly because I've been successful at avoiding and ignoring bad stuff on my own, and have only been annoyed by filters that always seem to block useful pages right when you need them. I've realized lately, though, that without even thinking about it very much, I really don't let my kids online at all. I think it's because I know that they won't be able to avoid all the bad stuff, and I fear they won't ignore and quickly m...

I feel like I'm so close on this, but I'm just not getting it. I mentioned my 8510w laptop setup previously, and how I have two xorg.conf files that I switch between, restarting X to configure using either my dual-external displays or my laptop display. Well, I'm not satisfied with this setup. I've been playing with xrandr and MetaModes and I can use xrandr to switch from the dual external displays to the single laptop display, and I can sort of switch back to the external displays, but it either only uses one of them and you can pan to view the whole dual-display-sized screen, or it uses the laptop display and one of the external displays. Grr. Has anyone been able to get this to work? I've seen mention of using refresh rates or EDID to somehow get this working, but I haven't seen any solid examples of what to do. I've also seen suggestions to just use nvidia-settings. That's a lot of clicking. I'd love just a simple script to run.

I hooked Google Analytics up to this blog and have had fun looking at all the stats in their different views. I was about to do the same for my little family blog that I run on my home machine, when I realized that I have all the log files right there, I shouldn't need Google's crazy javascript to figure the stats out for me. Cue awstats . I combined advice from here and here to get it set up, and it wasn't too difficult. It's cool to see where people are coming from (some friends of ours have blogs, and we didn't even know it!), and what crazy search terms people find our site with ("are fumes from rotten milk toxic?"). I know, web site stats are old news for most hardened bloggers, but I'm liking it.

Another interesting embedded systems blog . The sample chapter from her book was an entertaining read too. I got a little impatient with the explanations to the, evidently, inexperienced co-worker and I just wanted to get to the end of the chapter to see that I was right about the cause of the bug. The sloppy indentation was a little too much of a giveaway, if you ask me. I first thought that it was a perfect argument against coding standards, seeing as how that buggy line wouldn't have stood out so much if it had been following the standard, but then I realized that if there was no standard (as I've seen somewhere before), then all the lines look equally sloppy and the bad ones never stick out like that (because the buggy code is always formatted incorrectly :-) Anyway, not your usual embedded systems reading material, in a very good way. I'm glad the Embedded Muse pointed it out.

It gets dark early up here in winter, so I've got a little more to say about flashlights. About a year ago my wife and I sold my old Nissan Altima and I used the proceeds (and then some) to buy a nice bicycle for commuting to work. At this time of year, when I first got the bike, it's just getting bright enough when I come home from work that I didn't need much of a headlight, so I thought I was all set up with the cheap headlight from Fred Meyer. As winter came this year I quickly learned just how dark it gets by 5 PM up here in the northwest. I needed a better headlight. Being the cost-conscious engineer that I am, I did my due diligence researching and looking around before I decided on a solution. There was no way I wanted to pay upwards of a hundred dollars for a headlight. For a while I thought about making my own headlight , but then I found a website that talked all about using flashlights as bicycle headlights ( UPDATE : safer for work link, with more idea...