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Embedded USB developer boards already exist and are just as cheap/easy to use as Arduinos.

But are you going to run 72 MHz on a breadboard?

You're right, better overclock it to 168MHz just to be sure.

Or you just buy a Teensy 3.1 for around $20. Its a 32-bit ARM running at 72 MHz and runs Arduino code.

If an Uno isn't fast enough, the Mega is twice as fast as the Uno

It is? They both run at 16 MHz according to the specs. The Mega gives more IO options and more storage and more hardware timers. I don't think you get more speed. For speed, I rather like the Teensy, which has true analog output too (not just PWM pins)

Today Atmel, Microchip and others make inexpensive microcontrollers with native USB peripherals. The Atmel "8u2" chip, for example, is less expensive than even most of the FTDI clones, and certainly a LOT less than a genuine FTDI chip.

For years, I've published a very simple and easy-to-use USB code for those chips.

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/usb...

I also publish a signed INF installer that works with ALL USB Serial based on this standard protocol (called Communications Device Class, Abstract Control Model, or CDC-ACM). All 3 operating systems have the necessary driver built in. Mac OS-X and Linux load it automatically. Windows needs the user to add a INF.

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ser...

Sadly, the CDC-ACM driver in Windows (called USBSER.SYS) is buggy. About a year ago, I sent Microsoft this reproducible bug report.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In a follow up email a few months ago, they were supposedly testing a fix. I'm hopeful that Windows 10 may be the first version of Windows to ever ship with a good quality USB Serial driver (as Linux has done for many years, and Apple as done since releasing Lion a few years ago).

Today Atmel, Microchip and others make inexpensive microcontrollers with native USB peripherals. The Atmel "8u2" chip, for example, is less expensive than even most of the FTDI clones, and certainly a LOT less than a genuine FTDI chip.

For years, I've published a very simple and easy-to-use USB code for those chips.

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/usb...

I also publish a signed INF installer that works with ALL USB Serial based on this standard protocol (called Communications Device Class, Abstract Control Model, or CDC-ACM). All 3 operating systems have the necessary driver built in. Mac OS-X and Linux load it automatically. Windows needs the user to add a INF.

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ser...

Sadly, the CDC-ACM driver in Windows (called USBSER.SYS) is buggy. About a year ago, I sent Microsoft this reproducible bug report.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In a follow up email a few months ago, they were supposedly testing a fix. I'm hopeful that Windows 10 may be the first version of Windows to ever ship with a good quality USB Serial driver (as Linux has done for many years, and Apple as done since releasing Lion a few years ago).

Check out xprotolab (http://www.gabotronics.com/development-boards/xmega-xprotolab.htm) from Gabotronics. Not too fast or too easy to use but it is very capable and Gabo provides very good support. It is self-contained (small oled screen) but can also send info to PC over USB.

Also, the "arduino" teensy 3.1 could be used to make a USB-based scope for ca. $20 (plus some additional parts) and can have a lot of other cool uses too. Check it out: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/tee... and http://forum.pjrc.com/threads/....

Check out xprotolab (http://www.gabotronics.com/development-boards/xmega-xprotolab.htm) from Gabotronics. Not too fast or too easy to use but it is very capable and Gabo provides very good support. It is self-contained (small oled screen) but can also send info to PC over USB.

Also, the "arduino" teensy 3.1 could be used to make a USB-based scope for ca. $20 (plus some additional parts) and can have a lot of other cool uses too. Check it out: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/tee... and http://forum.pjrc.com/threads/....

Teensy would be tempting to anyone who has already done embedded development in the ARM microcontroller world. Insufficient memory to run any Linux, but plenty of flash and RAM to run any of many deeply embedded RTOS. Looking over the reference manual shows that the chip's peripheral blocks are powerful, including what appears at first read to be a pretty snazzy DMA controller.

I've been seriously considering it as a target for developing a communication front-end for a project at work. Previous experience is with a Cortex-M3 (Atmel AT91SAM3U) which was a great MCU to work with. GCC is available and I've been able to do all development on Linux workstations.

The price at PJRC, $19.00 can't be beat.

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html

If all you want is a USB and a bunch of pins with it, then the Raspberry Pi is overkill where a simpler microcontroller board would do.

One example of such a board is the Teensy 3.0 USB Development Board. It has a 48MHz ARM cpu (Cortex-M4), is only 1.4 by 0.7 inch large, has 28 pins and a micro USB port.
By default, it gets its power from a host computer, but you could also wire up its own power supply. There is also an optional Micro-SD card board for storage.
However, I don't think that it would run Linux like the Raspberry Pi, only your own code.
It is definitely in a small form factor.

Not all NeXT keyboards talked ADB, but rather some proprietary NeXT protocol.

The commercial USB-to-ADB adapters, such as the Belkin iMate are not that easy to come by.
The best option might just be to use a small microcontroller board and load it up with custom firmware.

Most keyboard hackers use the Teensy instead of an Arduino, but the boards have more similarities than differences.
You can find open source ADB adapter firmware made for the Teensy over on the Geekhack.org forum. It was made by a guy with the handle "Hasu".

It is a great learning tool, but the Arduino always seemed a little overpriced: especially the Mega 2560 version. On the Uno you inevitably run out of I/O pins when you are building anything remotely useful. I've switched over to the Teensy for my projects. A much better value: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

Anything that will play nice with a kinect, or its older-and-less-sophisticated-but-much-more-mature-at-emulating-a-mouse sibling the IR webcam with illuminators and a retroreflective dot(because the commercial units have been touched by the dead hand of 'assistive technology' pricing they are damned expensive for what they are, DIY hacks are less likely to be polished; but can come in at a factor of ten less) could be useful to provide an extra 'hand' worth of control without occupying your good hand(if you are a flight simmer, you may well want one anyway: for immersion, nothing beats having your cockpit view actually change when you turn your real-world head...)

Other useful things: the switch discussed here(or its reasonably numerous clones) is basically a cheapy guitar stomp pedal that can be programmed to perform more or less any keystroke, or short keystroke sequence(and possibly a mouse click event, not sure) that a normal USB HID device could. I think that 4-pedal versions are also available. For relatively little money, a chunk of plywood or something, and a USB hub, you should be able to get your feet in on controlling a bunch of useful hotkeys and whatnot.

For more thoroughly custom work, the teensy is extremely convenient. It is essentially arduino compatible, so basic development is dead simple; but it also includes a USB HID bootloader out of the box and enough I/O pins to tack on a reasonable number of switches that can then be tied to keycodes sent to the host(I could imagine, for instance, that if you don't have the finger control for WASD, you might still be able to handle a joystick/grip type arrangement with 4 contact switches mapped to those allowing you to control standard left-hand functions with only gross motor control of the arm/shoulder and possibly one or two of the footswitches for crouch/reload/whatever.

Also good to know about for custom ergonomics work: Polycaprolactone. At room temperature, it is a plastic with bulk properties pretty similar to nylon. However, it becomes soft enough to be moldable at only 60 degrees C or so. This makes it only slightly uncomfortable to hand-mould grips and things that precisely fit you. It can also be tool worked when hardened with a minimum of trouble.

Normally, no - you either get your choice of a board that's shaped like a standard Arduino and can support the Arduino shields, or else a board (such as the Teensy or Really Bare Bones Board) that's narrower and has all the pins on 1/10" spacing so it can plug directly into a standard breadboard, leaving you room to connect it to other things. While most of the Arduino connectors are on 1/10" spacing, a few of them are offset for historical backward compatibility reasons.

Yes, this is the way to go. Grab an older Android phone.

Fuck micro-controllers, just write an app. It's got wifi, bluetooth, ethernet (I assume that can be done over USB easily), haptic feedback...what else do you want on a hobby board?

Yes the high level of a standard smart phone is very useful. Especially for human interface. And WiFi/BT/ENet/USB for communication with other high level devices.

However, how many user programmable I/O pins does it have? How man AD converters? What if you want to read temperature probes or other analog devices? Or interface with other low level devices? Sure you could design a custom USB device to do that, but now you've defeated the convenience of using a smart phone.

The hardware depends on the application. If the project is primarily for human interface and network communication go for the smart phone. If the project is an electronics project you'll want a development board. Personally I like Teensy, but there are many good ones out there. Check out these neat projects.

Yes, this is the way to go. Grab an older Android phone.

Fuck micro-controllers, just write an app. It's got wifi, bluetooth, ethernet (I assume that can be done over USB easily), haptic feedback...what else do you want on a hobby board?

Yes the high level of a standard smart phone is very useful. Especially for human interface. And WiFi/BT/ENet/USB for communication with other high level devices.

However, how many user programmable I/O pins does it have? How man AD converters? What if you want to read temperature probes or other analog devices? Or interface with other low level devices? Sure you could design a custom USB device to do that, but now you've defeated the convenience of using a smart phone.

The hardware depends on the application. If the project is primarily for human interface and network communication go for the smart phone. If the project is an electronics project you'll want a development board. Personally I like Teensy, but there are many good ones out there. Check out these neat projects.

The electronic music/DAW/DJ crowd has been all over this sort of stuff for some years.

Something like the Aurora is an open source hardware example; but there are a large number of devices at various price points and levels of openness that boil down to a whole bunch of knobs, buttons, and sliders, with some sort of computer-compatible interface(often MIDI or USB-MIDI device, sometimes with a driver or plugin for Ableton or Max specific to the device).

The audio guys may not map 100% to your requirements; but they have the advantage of being a reasonably large, reasonably active, community with a fair amount of existing hardware available off the shelf.

As an alternative, many contemporary microcontrollers are capable of serving as USB slaves. Something like a teensy is pretty cheap and makes it dead easy to turn inputs from buttons and sliders and rotary encoders and things into USB HID keycodes.

Don't forget "classicness" and correctness.

Classicness - Gradnpa's or Dad's watch (smuggled in teh azz of a fellow soldier for many years as a POW, etc). I've got my Dad's that he bought in Zurich before he left the service in ww2.

Correctness - In my '65 Porsche I want an mp3 player since my original radio is AM/FW/SW and not the worlds best. Speakers are easy, there are some cheap radio shack ones that are 6v and the right size to put in. I've got an original radio, and I plan on gutting it and putting a mp3 player board similar to this one into the guts of it. The preset knobs could still be used to shuffle forward/back/etc wtih a little work.

The mass-produced ones used in advertising(I once got one from a fucking Credit. Card. Company. encouraging me to plug in an untrusted device, which then activated the run box and sent me to a free godaddy.com hosted page, presumably unique to that specific ad-campaign, so they could track its efficiency, that then redirected me to their actual page. I couldn't believe it. Incidentally, if you are using any online features of "ZYNC from American Express®", I'd stop immediately, cancel your account, and then firebomb them...) are quite polished. small PCB, 4 USB contacts on one side, epoxy blob, a couple of passives, and a teeny ROM chip(presumably for customization, per customer) on the other. Whole circuit, plus plastic housing, fits inside a USB connector. Very cute.

If anybody fancies some DIY mayhem, a Teensy is cheap, dead-easy to use, and comes with a set of library extensions to the arduino programming environment that allow it to emulate a USB tty, a USB HID keyboard+USB HID mouse(why, yes, Virginia, that does mean that it could, simply by guessing mouse-clicks in a pattern that would hit the "OK" button before the "deny" button, execute a command and then accept the UAC prompt entirely automatically...), a USB MIDI device, if one is feeling more artistic, or a USB keyboard + USB MSC presentation of an attached SD card, perfect for a little of the old exfiltration... It also has the usual digital and analog I/O pins that you'd expect of an atMega dev board, so clever little tricks like only having its evil side come out when a magnet is held near the reed switch hidden inside the bugged mouse, using an onboard mic or other sensors to make sure that the computer's user isn't in the vicinity before doing something evil are all possible. Fun toy.

I have an ipod, that my company *gave* me. My gf has a Zen Nomad 30g. Her sister has a Zen mini (dunno the model). My brother has a Zen Nomad 30g. My mom has a Zen Nomad 30g. Oh, and besides the ipod, I also have a PJRC that currently has a 20 gig drive, because it gets unhappy with the 160 gig that I strapped on there, and the 80 I had on there died recently. That one gets by far the most comments. ("That's a WHAT?" "A ten year old MP3 player." "They *had* those back then?" "Yeah, they looked like this.")

I know I'm not taught to care about CPU speed or memory, sure I'm doing a Computer Engineering BEng where software programing is second to hardware but I spent two years programing in assembly for the 8031 (8052 varient) as well as learning c/c++. This year I am continually argueing with my software lecturer about methods of doing things, I automatically want to do the least memory intensive design and am continually told that worrying about a 'few bytes' doesn't matter in an age of gigabytes. It's not an attitude limited to this lecturer either most of the technology department have it. My course and a lot of other technology and engineering courses are certified by the UK in britain perhaps they should put greater emphasis on memory management and efficenty of algorithms. It wouldn't necessaryirly take a lot either during my second year we (Electrical Engineering based students) all had to design and manufacture an addon and program it for a slightly altered version of a 'open hardware' 8031 design ( http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/board4/index.html ) pretty much everyone in the class learnt the lessons of having pretty much zero memory. Perhaps similar development boards used through more technology/programming courses would help improve matters as they do make the point about how important clock cycles and memory are.

My final year project is a very similar device, I've redesigned the MP3 open source project from http://www.pjrc.com/ then using the Compact Flash drive and a Sony Erricson Bluetooth Starter Kit (uses an old rok chip.) I spent 3 months researching to make sure the idea was original and some other company beats me to the punch line.

Karma Whore:PJRC, Minty MP3

A link like this is a far greater use than a simple "Hey, I put an mp3 player in an unlikely spot! Here are some pictures and absolutely no explanation!!"
This is like having the Phantom console make the slashdot front page! Oh, wait. Nevermind.

/Now if he had put Linux on a toaster, then we'd be all ears...

Last month's log file for PJRC.COM (another little tech-oriented site) has 21401 lines with "Opera", out of a total of 854854 lines for August. Two of those 21401 appear to be some machintosh browser that includes about every possible browser string (noticed someone mentioned this above, so I checked for it). So by raw number of lines in the log file, opera's at 2.5%. Doing some more quick command line tricks (eg "grep -i opera access_log_detailed.1 | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u | wc " vs "cat access_log_detailed.1 | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u | wc" shows 1103 unique IP numbers for opera, out of 39078 total IP numbers all month. So by unique IP numbers, opera's at 2.8% Actually, I was expecting to see the sub-1% everyone seems to claim opera is at... but it looks like Opera really does have some market share. Well, at least among folks interested in . I also tried MSIE, which is at 69.5% by raw number of lines, and 72.3% by unique IPs.

Let's not get overly optimistic about what this is going to do for the web... such as:

By developing this tool, Google is helping to clean the Internet up and enable it to become the massive source of pure information it has such potential to be.

What exactly is "pure information" anyway?

Consider my little website. Lots of pages about how to design electronic stuff. But we sell components that support those activities, so it's not 100% "pure", is it? You could consider all those pages as a giant ad for the stuff on the store section of the site. But most people would consider my pages on the more informational side (and the vast majority really are).

About once every 2 or 3 weeks, I get a call from one of these search engine optimiztion companies. Not sure if it's the same couple companies... I usually just say "no" and ask to be on their do-not-call list. They're mostly a bunch of slimey people and probably don't honour such requests.

But sometimes, the idea is tempting. I resist because I believe it's unethical, and ultimately a bad long-term investment. Still, to anyone selling via the web, even a tiny little 2-person company like me, the sales pitch is quite compelling. Pay some fee, traffic goes up, more sales, increase in revenue offsets the cost for the SEO's work. Maybe it's not so bad if they don't stupe to cheating.

Still, I resist because I know it's not a black and white distinction. It's a fuzzy line between the obviously good techniques (improving site structure, rewording page titles, etc) and the obviously bad (cloaked pages). I also just don't trust them.

But even the distinction between "pure information" and "spam" is fuzzy. I'd like to think I'm leaning towards the "pure information" side, but we do indeed sell products. It wasn't always that way... in the mid-90's, the site was smaller and hosted at a university and no products were sold. I had several people begging me to sell them a few of the parts needed for a project. Eventually, a friend started selling some stuff (prices were high, service poor), and so I took it over. Satisfaction with the site has improved dramatically since then!

Still, it's a fuzzy area between pure information and purely commercial, or advertising or spam.

I can tell you it's a lot more work crafting really good web pages than just writing a check to a seedy SEO company. But if these ranking algorithms really do improve to perfection, the response is probably going to be more and more pages appearing in that gray region. Increasing sales can pay for a lot of man hours to author more material that's compelling for visitors and truely does help them to solve their products (especially if they buy the described products).

So, in a best case scenario, these algoriths reaching perfection (seems unlikely) is probably going to lead to a lot more very good content, but content that revolves around pitching products (eg, infomercials), and not "pure information".

There was another one, whose name I don't quite recall, which was truely the first hard drive player.... became available around the time I was starting my second design (the one you see now). It was an in-dash car player, selling for approx $1100.

and already slashdotted- must be a new record.

Here's a link where you can by mp3 player circuit boards: http://www.pjrc.com/tech/mp3/

Trusty 'ol HandyBoard
68HC12
Lego Mindstorm
8051 development board
Good 'ol Parallax

There are also chips/development boards from Microchip (manufacturers of PIC series of ucontrollers) and Atmel.

Most of the above DO NOT come with motors, sensors, base, wheels etc. However, these are not difficult to find at a nearby hobby shop.

For a little more challenge, get a DSP board (TI, Motorola, Analog devices etc). You can get a good new/used one for pretty cheap from eBay

Less fun, maybe. But after my bad experience putting together this 8051 kit for my EE class (and having it not work, likely due to my lack of soldering sk1llz), I think I'll be buying my electronics pre-assembled for a while...

But I do agree that they should give you the option of just buying the book.

Anyway, I've got 4 gmail invites. Respond below if interested.

VWCDPIC Audio Interface Adapter

PJRC MP3 Player

Belkin iPod Cup Holder

Belkin iPod Auto Kit

Real geeks don't wait for the major car companies to do something for them when they can just make their own hack...

Hook up a PJRC MP3 Player to your Volkswagen using a VWCDPIC audio interface adapter. 100% Open Source.

:-)

Consider a couple of the pioneers. With the iPod music player, Apple Computer added a tiny hard drive to a music-playing computer and -- voilá! -- vast music collections suddenly fit into a pocket.

The quantity of historical revisionism in what passes for business journalism never ceases to amaze me. Goebbels would be proud!

Archos was first company to market with a hard drive-based mp3 player in late 2000, although Compaq had a prototype device in early 2000 that they failed to market. There was even an open-source project to build a "High Capacity MP3 Player" in 2000 that quickly advanced to using hard drives.

I have a hardware/low-level jones, and it's been years since I've had a fix.

• MZ104: One of the most popular SBCs around. Small size and many uses. If you follow the pricing on that page you'll find you'll be paying at least $300/unit for the setup you need.
• PPC-E5: Looks to have almost everything you need, and then some. Unit comes with processor, RAM, disk-on-chip, and even a bundled touchscreeen LCD that fits nicely to the whole thing. It doesn't have USB/CompactFlash/etc.. and it also costs ~$1,000/unit.
• PCM-3350: Made by the same company as the PPC-E5 and actually a better option. 300MHz proc, CompactFlash, onboard VGA @ 1024x768, USB. Slap a screen on this thing and away you go. But, alas, it's still $348/unit and it doesn't come with a screen.
• ViewPad: From ViewSonic. Another all-in-one unit that could probably also work for you. At the time of posting, this unit is going for $200 (a decent deal). But it's only one unit, and it's still twice as much as your mentioned target price.

For example, it could be used in museums and galleries, where visitors could download high-quality audio and visual content about exhibits.

Will this hinder museums from adding both visual and audio cues to their exhibits? I personally think that cell phones should be banned in public places such as museums and this will just encourage Joe to hop on his cell phone and chat with Mary while I am trying to enjoy some peace and quiet.

I saw some really interesting usages of computers in museums (like here, I realise this is more of a piece of art, but you get the idea).

Keep the cell phones out and enjoy getting away from things that you see and use everyday.

Just my worthless .02

This has got to be the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Those guys are awsome! Thanks for the link. My basic stamp is obsoleted.

Still, when it comes to an in car server, it's tough to beat a full gnu/linux system. Networking, scripts make the little PC worth the extra $300. Those extras translate into ease of use with less effort. Those 8051 programming gizmos are really cool for dedicated control projects but being able to ssh -X into my car's music player by 802.11b sounds like a much easier way to program my music.

Ah yes, the GIF patent. That stopped any free software using GIFs.

The MP3 patent's licensing terms don't even prohibit legal Free Software implementations - you pay a one-off licensing fee, and you're fine. There seem seem to be plenty.

The reality is, those patents haven't killed MP3 or GIFs. If anything, it's Ogg Vorbis and PNGs which are an endangered species - not from litigation, but disuse. (The MP3 patent, by the way, is Fraunhofer's - a German group, not US.) Patents or no patents, MP3 and GIF are still the format for that application, and supported by plenty of free/open source programs.

So the future for free software is (and this would be fine with me, except that it doesn't promote either fair use or interoperability) a ghetto of free formats like Ogg.

Unlikely. As I said, we've had MP3 and GIF patents for years without this result - the former from a German company, not a US one - without the result you predict. Why would Europe adopting the US system have this result, when it hasn't happened in the US?

What if someone started making SSDs for the consumer market, though? How cheap could they be?

Produced at modest volumes in the USA (not made by the boat-load in China), we've been looking at somewhere in the $250 to $300 (usd) range for the bare board with 16 or 20 DIMM sockets, IDE interface, and power management circuitry with aux power inputs.

The unit is planned to fit into the form factor of a cdrom drive, which allows just enough room for 20 sockets and a couple inches to pack in all the circuitry, IDE and power connectors. There just isn't room for a battery, so the plan is to have 2 or 3 "aux power" connectors that accept 9 to 12 volts. We'd make a battery pack that fits into a 5 or 3 inch drive bay and recharges itself from PC power, so you could connect 1, 2, or maybe even 3 battery packs, or maybe a battery pack and 12 volts from some external source like a "wall-wart" power adaptor plugged into a cheap UPS, or maybe something a bit more "reliable". I'm not sure what the battery pack will cost, but it's hard to imagine it'll be over $50-60 even if we splurge a bit for a fancy microcontroller-based rapid charger and advanced battery monitor.

Today, 512 meg DIMMs are the most affordable, and today's pricewatch says about $40 for PC100-SDRAM and $46 for PC2100-DDR. Prices fluctuate quite a bit... a few months ago the 512 meg PC100-SDRAM was $30. But assuming you pay $40 each for 20, plus $280 for the bare drive and $60 for a battery pack, that puts you at $1140 for a 10 gig ultra-ultra-fast drive. Ouch. Even if the prices drop back to $30, which puts you under four digits, it's still quite expensive.

But not as expensive as the article claims.

Anyway, at this point the project is pure vapor. The earliest you might see it would be about one year from now, but 18 months is more likely. Even though DDR is more expensive today, the design will almost certainly use DDR because it is expected to become cheaper and remain more easily available for the years to come. It's also quite likely I'll do serial ATA only, as S-ATA is going to become the mainstream down the road, and it's already gaining acceptance now. My hope is that 1 and 2 gig DIMMs will become more common and their price/byte will come in line with the 128/256/512M sizes.... 'cause there's no way we're going to get more than 20 DIMM sockets into the 5.25 inch drive bay form factor.

The project also has a number of technical challenges... including the difficulty of connecting that many unbuffered DIMMs (the design will need 4 or 5 separate memory channels and a lot of buffers & PLLs that there aren't really room for on the board).

Well, enough vapor for one day.

PJRC has a nice introduction to the fat32 file system on their website. It's aimed at people writing code for microcontrollers to access fat32 partitions on IDE drives, so it's got the goods.

-Adam

Yes, mod_gzip is great and I use it on my own server, but for any "normal" website the main advantage is an interactive speed-up for dialup users. It really doesn't save huge amounts of bandwidth (in this case, enough to matter for withstanding the slashdot effect).

As an example, the page slashdot linked to is 22443 bytes of compressable html, and approx 84287 bytes of images (not including the ads and two images that didn't load because they're not handling the slashdot effect so well as they thing they can). At -9, the slowest and best compression (remember, this is a dynamic JSP site, not static content you can compress ahead of time), the html compresses to 5758 bytes, thereby reducing the total content from 106730 bytes to 90045.

That's only a 15.6% reduction in bandwidth.

Also, a typical HTTP response header, which can't be compressed, is about 300 bytes (not including TCP/IP packet overhead, which we'll ignore hoping that HTTP/1.1 keepalives are putting it all in one connection...). There were 18 images (actually 20, but junkbuster filtered 2 out for me). That's 19 HTTP headers, at 300 bytes each, all uncompressable. Adding in HTTP overhead we're at (approx) 112430 without compression and 95745 with mod_gzip. So the uncompressability of the headers reduces the bandwidth savings to 14.8%.

The big advantage that makes mod_gzip really worthwhile for a site like that is the a dialup user can get all the html in about 2 seconds, rather than 5-6 (assuming the modem's compression is on). Then they can start reading, while the remaining 82k of images slowly appear over the next 20-30 seconds.

Now in some cases, like slashdot's comments pages, mod_gzip makes a massive difference. But for most sites, the majority of the bandwidth is images that are already compressed. That 10% to 20% reduction in bandwidth from simply installing mod_gzip is pretty small compared to a bit of effort redesigning pages to trim the fatty images.

Probably. As I understand it, if you were to purchase something from my little website, which is based in Oregon, one of the few states without sales tax (the server is in a datacenter in California, by the way, but I don't think that matters, as the business operates in Oregon), we'd charge you the Florida tax and make a payment to the state of Florida (yearly, quartly, monthly is still unclear).

The system supposedly simplifies the process so we could only need to know 45 different rates (5 states w/out tax) multiplied by the number of different taxable categories in each state, rather than 7000 (cities, counties, etc) multiplies by non-uniform rules about which types of goods are taxable and the rates of each in each district.

You could move out here to Oregon, but then you'd have to pay the high income tax, and also property tax (or higher rent if you don't own the property).

Under the states' plan, online sellers would be required to purchase approved software to compute the appropriate state and local taxes or to certify with the state any in-house calculation systems already in place. E-tailers could choose to outsource tax collection to a certified third-party under the states' plan.

My little website is just one of thousands of tiny little businesses that are run part-time, or just barely pay the bills for one person to run it.

It's absolutely unbelievable what a lot of companies charge for "e-commerce" software. How likely is this to be a $49.95 turbo-tax package? Nope, it'll be targeted at businesses and a few blood-sucking companies will see this as a big opportunity to rake in the dollars from every on-line merchant. We've seen lots of this mega-expensive software, and we manage to get by and make customers happy without any of it. It's unheard of to be _required_ by law to purchase some particular (extreemly expensive) software. And with some special gov't appoval/certification process, you can be sure it'll be plenty expensive...

But for the little guys (like me), that money just isn't there. We can't spend thousands on software, or just about anything else for that matter. It looks like the company these states are working with is Taxware. Go visit their site and take a wild guess at what they're going to charge for this sort of software. It ain't gonna be cheap.

The fact is that there are many thousands of very small on-line merchants. VERY small. Filing 45 tax returns is going to suck. Paying for expensive software, or consulting fees to some "approved" company will only add injury to the insult. Our accounting software budget includes a new version of Quickbooks for next year. That's about all we can afford software-wise.

And it goes against all other tax paying practice to require specific approved software. You don't need special software from a specific "approved" vendor to file taxes. You do need to know how to do it, of course. My partner is a CPA and she knows ordinary sales tax very well (even though we live in Oregon where there is no sales tax). Why should we be held hostage to purchasing special software? Why does it need to be from specially approved vendors?

If the tax can't be paid by a company with an ordinary CPA, and some special software is required, and that software is so special that vendors need to be certified by some special approval process, they certain't haven't made great strides towards making this a simple enough process. Special software isn't required for paying normal taxes, and requiring a special certification process for tax calculation software is totally unheard of. It reaks of a back-room deal between GovOne (the makers taxware) and these states... if some complicated certification process is required for anyone else trying to enter the market for this new software that every on-line merchant is compelled to buy, guess what the prices will be in the first year when Taxware is the only product available and everyone is REQUIRED to buy it?

Well, enough ranting for one day. Maybe it won't be so bad. I'm just in a bad mood because a customer refused to pay the tax/duty on a package we shipped to the UK (and now we need to do something about it, and all the options suck....)

You can find discussion areas like people using TINI embedded Java card along with STA013 mp3 decoder [greenend.org.uk] to do it but they all seem to be characterized by an initial burst of activity and then a trailing off once enthusiasm fades away...

Thanks. MP3elf and PJRC MP3 player look like the sort of thing I was thinking, and available in kit form.

Starting this morning I began reading the docs and installing the ht://Dig search engine. There are a lot of configurable settings.

When I first got it working, I immediately realized that the 350-some static html files on my site really only have a couple dozen different sets of meta tags (due to starting new pages by copying existing ones). In fact, many of my pages don't even have really unique title that differentiate them from other similar pages on the site. If you're interested in seeing it, it's not yet linked from the rest of the site, but will be soon, at this new search page. The results still suck, mostly due to my poor meta and title tags.

That's not ht://Dig's fault, of course, and they do have you options to configure the weight for various things... and luckily I've used <h2&gtl and <h3> tags for labeling sections on almost all the pages, so I turned up the weighting for the text in those and in the link text on the site.

Still I have a lot of work to do to make my little site nicely searchable... and most of it is in the titles and meta tags. The keyword meta tags are the one place where you can list words that you can be certain a local search engine like ht://Dig will make use of them and display those pages.

Too bad the meta keyword tag was declared dead today.

Look here.

You could have followed the link to our website, and then clicked on About Paul/Robin. The message even says "(yes, we're all very geeky... even Robin... see our website for more info about us)".

Oh well.

Have you see my little open-source mp3 player circuit board project?? Yes, a shameless plug, but on-topic. I have the Neo guys also sell a box that you can plug your own drive into... or at least they did some time ago.

All I want, and please hear me out, is a pretty plastic box big enough to fit a laptop drive. Put a rechargable lithium ion battery in it. Some sort of LCD screen, Alphanumeric, TFT display, I don't care.

Saddly, there's nothing simple about pretty plastic boxes and li-ion batteries. Injection molding involved tooling costs in the range of $20k to $60k. Li-ion batteries are complex and take special circuits. They're only sold to a small number of companies who make custom battery packs (because the packs include critical safety circuits). High tooling setup fees also apply to Li-ion battery packs.

Keep the OS in a rom so I don't have to worry about storing it on the hard drive. Make sure there is enough OS to format the drive fat32.

Yep, did that. It's all GPL'd too, available from a CVS server, or on this firmware download page.

And I want all this for about $100 bucks. I think that's fair.

That would be fair, if you and millions of others were serious buyers.

But the do-it-yourself market is a niche, and the economy of scale associated with mass production just isn't possible. Still, I've tried to keep the costs low (and also keep it buildable for hobbists with hand soldering). By the time you add the LCD, it's at about twice the "fair" $100 mark. If you go price the parts alone (not even soldered together) at small quantity, you'll find you're well over $100. If you're Creative Labs or Apple building millions in China, you can make it that cheap, but a niche market as small volumes, it just isn't possible.

Anyway, later this year I'm planning to make a car stereo cd changer protocol emulator board, so this thing can emulate a cd changer (but with lots of discs with lots of files... depends on the limitations of each deck and its protocol).

Have you see my little open-source mp3 player circuit board project?? Yes, a shameless plug, but on-topic. I have the Neo guys also sell a box that you can plug your own drive into... or at least they did some time ago.

All I want, and please hear me out, is a pretty plastic box big enough to fit a laptop drive. Put a rechargable lithium ion battery in it. Some sort of LCD screen, Alphanumeric, TFT display, I don't care.

Saddly, there's nothing simple about pretty plastic boxes and li-ion batteries. Injection molding involved tooling costs in the range of $20k to $60k. Li-ion batteries are complex and take special circuits. They're only sold to a small number of companies who make custom battery packs (because the packs include critical safety circuits). High tooling setup fees also apply to Li-ion battery packs.

Keep the OS in a rom so I don't have to worry about storing it on the hard drive. Make sure there is enough OS to format the drive fat32.

Yep, did that. It's all GPL'd too, available from a CVS server, or on this firmware download page.

And I want all this for about $100 bucks. I think that's fair.

That would be fair, if you and millions of others were serious buyers.

But the do-it-yourself market is a niche, and the economy of scale associated with mass production just isn't possible. Still, I've tried to keep the costs low (and also keep it buildable for hobbists with hand soldering). By the time you add the LCD, it's at about twice the "fair" $100 mark. If you go price the parts alone (not even soldered together) at small quantity, you'll find you're well over $100. If you're Creative Labs or Apple building millions in China, you can make it that cheap, but a niche market as small volumes, it just isn't possible.

Anyway, later this year I'm planning to make a car stereo cd changer protocol emulator board, so this thing can emulate a cd changer (but with lots of discs with lots of files... depends on the limitations of each deck and its protocol).

I am. Well, sorta anyway. My site has all of the pages that have ever appeared, all the way back to 1995. For example, this circuit board schematic page got a lot of hits in 1995. For years, I got emails from people who attempted to build it... a few were success but most were failures. So, in 1997 I redesigned the board/schematic so that it would be much easier to build and troubleshoot, and then I made another new rev in 1999 (because the flash rom chip became obsolete).

Based on lots of user feedback, I redesigned it yet again in 2001, mainly to increase the speed, add more memory to be C compiler friendly, and I added the most user-requested feature, a port to plug in a standard LCD.

Today, those old pages (well, still need to update the '99 ones) have a message at the top of the page that tell the visitor they're viewing obsolete material and strongly suggests they follow a link to the new version of the circuit board, which is easier to build (added in 1997), uses parts that are currently available on the market (added in 1999), and has more features (added in 2001).

An archive of the original 1995 page, even archived in 1996, isn't going to warn the poor user about the usability improvements added in 1997, the part that became obsolete in 1999, and the nice new features that were added in 2001. At the very least, it'd be proper for archive.org to link to the current version of the page (if it's on-line)... but even that would be difficult since the site moved from a university to its permanent domain name in 1999 (the old site keep a redirect for a couple years, but even that is gone now).

So, while it sucks that someone might find that old material and suffer though all the problems that have been corrected and miss out on the improvements of the last several years, it doesn't suck enough that I'd hire a lawyer, or even bother to tell them to exclude my material.

But I can understand how a large company would not want its old products displayed with the then-current literature in a way that might confuse potential customers.