Yay, the oldest (and personally most used) part of neodux finally got an overhaul. That's right, the links page. I have it set to my browser's start page, because I can visit all of my favorite sites in one stop. (Add to the fact I can open them all easily with the wave of a mouse thanks to Mouse Gestures...)

"Okay, I don't see anything different..."
Great, I was hoping you'd say that. I didn't want to change it much, because I've come to love its simplicity. What has changed is that it is now dynamic. See, for years, any time I wanted to add/edit a link on the links page, I had to manually go and find the link, edit the HTML, make sure I didn't break the table, save and refresh. (It was a chore.)

Now, the page reads links.txt which is a simple text file formatted so the script can read the file and understand what is a category name and what is a link title and url. Now, whenever I want to add/edit a link, I just have to find/replace the line in the text file and the links page will do the rest. Phew!

Grendel sez: Report any problems, plz. Or, if I should add a link, put it in the comments below.

I just learned about Digg from Slashdot. It has a whole list of great links with a short description - a lots of 'em!

So, here I'll link you to the more promising finds: 'Black Friday' Ads for 2005, Best Buy computer hacks, howto for a Wifi biquad dish antenna, Running Apache, Perl/PHP, Mysql on Windows, Getting started with Ruby, 10 Best AJAX hacks, Build a radio, Telnet with your browser, Flash-based VNC, Learn PHP, History of GNU/Linux, What's SNOBOL?, and finally a Hack-a-Day like site: DIY Live.

Hope you find something interesting!

I recently grabbed the torrent of Quake 3 Arena for the Xbox, which was ported to the Xbox by a fellow named Carcharius. It's not an illegal copy of Quake3, since id Software released the Q3A source earlier this year.

The reason you won't find the Xbox version publicly available is, like all modded Xbox software, it was compiled using an illegally obtained version of the Xbox SDK for Visual Studio. To download the ISO's .torrent, you can grab it from your favorite torrent tracker. The ISO comes with all of the .pk3 files, but if you want to play online you'll need your own q3key.

To view the associated README, click here.

Tommy gave me a parallel character LCD that he's had stashed away for a long time. He was on the right track, just never finished it. I looked at what he'd made, based on the original schematic. I hooked the LCD to a DB25 connector that was already soldered to a ribbon cable, hooked it up and it worked.

I noticed that the brightness and contrast knobs were set and didn't need to be adjusted. One pot was even set to 0! After a few minutes I was able to boil down the circuit to just use one 50-ohm resistor.
Here is the final "simple" schematic:


This schematic should work on any Hiatchi HD44780-based character LCD, so long as it only has a single 8-bit connection, like the Seiko L2014.

update: You may also use this LCD screen test app to check your LCD: http://www.neodux.com/projects/lcd/LCDsetup.zip

Grendel sez: You da man, sir. Thanks. Here is a picture of the LCD in action. Videos are here (2.5Mb, avi) and here (6.9,avi).

update: I (grendel) just got the LCD working under linux using lcdproc/LCDd. Now, if only I could figure out how to get lcdvc to work with it, I'll be even more pleased.

Amazing.
As I outlined in this post on the forums, Jennifer got a bunch of balloons for her birthday from her mom. We kept them in the living room for a few days, just enjoying their atmospheric buoyancy. Tuesday came around and we noticed that a couple of the balloons were starting to sag a bit, so we decided to either let them wither away or do something fun. We decided to tie a note to the entire cluster and let them go. Kinda the whole message in a bottle thing. Just to see where it goes. We released them on Tuesday, October 11. This morning, I got an email from a lady in Illinois that said her husband found the balloons on Thursday, October 13.

I'm amazed. Not only that someone actually replied, but that our little balloon cluster made it that far! According to Mapquest, from Longview, Texas, to Bartelso, Illinois, the estimated distance is roughly 657.55 miles!

The email is posted in the forums.