Chad Kidder
Author's posts listings
When writing a script to download files off a site, I figured there was an easy python library to do that. Well, sort of. I chose to use the HTMLParser library. The documentation is not the best, so I thought I would add a bit of what I found. If I had to do it …
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Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/07/using-the-python-htmlparser-library/
We here at Curious System Solutions use dreamhost as our hosting provider. One of the nice things they give us is a nice, tidy, backup every month, if we ask for it. It may take a few days if you ask at the beginning of the month, and it is easy to forget to download. …
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Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/07/automating-dreamhost-backups/
One of the projects I’m working on involves using capacitive touch sensing (CTS) on the TI MSP430. TI has been pushing their touch sensing capabilities recently and has even released a library that helps in implementing touch sensing on the MSP430. I decided to give it a try. The short story is that there is …
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Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/06/capacitive-touch-sensing-on-the-msp430/
After our recent activity making the emergency ATX power supplies, I got a call one evening from one of the hams who couldn’t get their salvaged 24-pin power supplies to work. It turns out that many of the larger computer manufacturers use their own proprietary pinouts. In this case, he got bit by a Compaq …
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Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/05/a-quick-note-on-atx-power-supplies/
Last Friday night one of the local amateur radio groups that I’m affiliated with had a get together with good food, friends and activity. We soldered together the Compact ATX 12V board that we wrote up a little while back. There were a few people who were unable to stay and put it together. For …
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Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/04/directions-for-soldering-of-compact-emergency-atx-12v-output-board/
This board was designed to be a good beginning board for someone to learn to solder on. There are a lot of amateur radio operators that originally got into the hobby as part of an emergency communications group (RACES, ARES, etc.). This board is designed to start them down the path to the… hardware side …
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Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/04/compact-emergency-12v-dc-power-supply/
Occasionally, one comes across a problem where using a relational database is the correct tool. For me that is very occasionally. Some things I recently (re)learned that I thought I would share are:
Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/03/fun-with-sql-or-i-know-it-should-do-this/
Quick Tip: I often find that I delete files before I remember that I should have deleted them using subversion. To help solve that problem I found/created the following command. svn st |grep "^\!" |cut -c8- | xargs svn rm –force This takes all the files that are missing from the checked out version of …
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Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/03/getting-rid-of-dead-files-in-a-subversion-working-directory/
For Valentine’s Day my son needed to make a “mailbox” for his kindergarten class. He & his mother made a rocket out of an old oat container. Since this was a family project, I decided that my contribution would be lighting it up. My son was quite excited when I told him that I was …
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Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/02/a-valentine-example-for-blinking-lights/
When using the ADC10 in an MSP430 with multiple conversions, the ADC10BUSY bit will stay on even after the conversions are done. Trying to be a good little programmer and checking to make sure the ADC is done will leave you hanging… forever. The conversions must be done for the data transfer and the data …
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Permanent link to this article: http://blog.curioussystem.com/2011/01/the-never-ending-conversion/
