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Hopefully not, but you never know given the patent laws these days.

I used to build these things when I got bored. There were others before me, and I suspect they have existed ever since the first appliances containing a stepper motor got old enough to be scavenged for components.

That said, I don't know if the claim that the pattern changes with windspeed is just based on the different voltages of different color LEDs. Once I put an independent timer that ran at an entirely different rate than the coils in there -- now that was an interesting display.

Classful netmasks can screw up even globally routeable netblocks that have been since CIDRed, but it's becoming less and less of a problem. Last time I had issues was dealing with split tunneling on crusty old VPN clients.

More here on that.

I suspected this could still occur although I have never encountered it.

Thanks for confirming ;-))

Classful netmasks can screw up even globally routeable netblocks that have been since CIDRed, but it's becoming less and less of a problem. Last time I had issues was dealing with split tunneling on crusty old VPN clients.

More here on that.

That I had some tiny bit to play in this. I posted this a year or so ago and it gets hits from search engines occasionally. http://abrij.org/~bri/my2c/boincps3.html

To bad it's not more general purpose a-la BOINC but if I get a PS3, which is a possibility, I'll definitely turn it on. At least in the winter when I have a use for the waste heat.

Floppies are very easy to hack into something else due to the easy controls for the step motor. You don't really need to know much electronics -- just TTL. That's the whole point -- most of the electronics are all done for you. A stepper for steering and the spindle motor for drive is enough to make a little robot, for instance.

Recently I made a heliostat from one though the design could use a bit more work.

Lately I've been mulling over the possibility that, since the FM/MFM read heads use a comb frequency around that of an AV IR remote control, it might be possible to get the data read line to activate when hit with a remote, though florescent lights would probably interfere.

Hrm, I've been mulling over converting an old Cannon BJC to a robot (you can see the mainboard here
most of the way down the page.) That would be pretty damn cheap :-). ...but newer printers come with USB (gadget-side, yes, I know but it would be would be much more convenient/flexible than parrallel ports at least, and depending on the hardware it's possible host-side could be software added.) Maybe I should try to get my hands on one of those instead and see what the guts look like.

Aren't there some IRDA/bluetooth/whatnot wire-free printers now? (Rhetorical, don't answer, I'll just google.)

Well, that sounds like a chore. First you have to do the same damn thing over and over again, and determine how much to charge based on how much time and materials it takes. Then you have to advertise, and then deal with the sales mechanism and all the irregularities in orders that inevitably pop up. Then some several months down the road, if you have any success at it at all, some Chinese company will catch on and start underselling you.

Such things are better left for fun and amusement.

It is those very "minutia" that lead to new discoveries. For example,"total internal reflection" was discovered quite some time ago. If scientists had not then turned their attention to the minutia, they would not have then discovered "frustrated total internal reflection" and the resulting ability to mass produce sensors for biological and small particulates.

In reality there are tons of areas where even a garage setup could add to the body of scientific knowlege. Noone has exhausted the empirical study of even the most simple and well-known devices. You could spend your entire life finding new things out about transformer/inductor design, for example, if you have the creativity to conjur up some interesting configurations. It's nice to think that "oh we can just model that now" but the truth is that when you actually build a real, physical device, you end up with a bunch of interference from the effects of other physical properties. A normal engineering mindset is that these are "problems" to be "overcome" in order to distill the intrinsic effect and isolate it from the others... but it is the very interaction of the effects, for example, that make thermoacoustics work.

I attribute the lack of innovation directly to the unwillingness of the modern scientist/engineer/hacker to engage in the kind of methodical, near-brute-force searches for interesting phenomina that are neccessary. There is a focus on deciding what you want to "invent" and then engineering it. A more free-form, go-with-the-flow approach of creating something unique, studying it, and then figuring out "well, what might that be good for?" would IMHO yeild more innovation. In the end, innovation is the result of discovery, not "invention."

Of course, if you just spend a few minutes here and there of spare time on it as a fun hobby, you'll probably only end up with some silly little toys like mine, but hey, at least I have fun doing it. Most people do not have the luxury of being able to engage in "leisure science" which is a root cause of the lack of empirical study.

probably it ends up like this

(And for a larger perspective I came up with while in a obviously fevered state, check out my horrible hyperlink haiku)

In fact, USB sucks
so I'm looking forward to PoE-based input devices.

Here's some food for thought, since we are treading around the topic.