todbot blog

Pololu Custom Laser Cutting offers an easy path for cheap and quick
machining of Lexan and other plastics.

For larger, more complex pieces, out of metal and other materials, perhaps
eMachineShop is a better choice.

hardware-hacking | No Comments »

RRDtool is a great gizmo for storing and displaying time-series data.
Normally it creates PNG or GIF graphs to display info,
but often I want to zoom in/out, turn on/off data lines, etc.
This is normally non-trivial. But a Flash-based UI for RRD display would make it easy.

ideas | 1 Comment »

At work we have this cool Canon copier that is also a printer. It has a duplex widget that allows one to print on both sides of a sheet of paper. Of course this is fairly niche enough for Apple to have not supplied drivers explicitly for it, but the ‘generic Postscript’ driver does work well enough to print, just not duplex.

And of course the drivers listed on Canon USA’s page for the copier is just a bunch of Windows files. A websearch for ‘ canon iR5020 ppd turned up a Canon Aussie site that had a nice .sit file with a PPD in it. For future ease, I’ve placed this file here:
CNIR61U1.PPD

To use, just add a new printer, choose ‘IP Printing’ -> ‘LPD/LPR’ as the type, put in the hostname and print queue name, and then for printer model select ‘Other…’ and use the above PPD file.

Now I can print 2-up with duplex and get four pages on a single sheet of paper!

macosx | 5 Comments »

I read this on Slashdot, so it must be true:

T-Mobile will allow their phones to be unlocked after about three months of service. Just send email to simunlock@t-mobile.com with your name, phone number and IMEI number and they’ll hook you up.link

toys | 2 Comments »

(from an email to a friend 2 July 2003)

Language is a recursive web of syntax and semantics. A.I. systems seem
to have faltered in the last 20 years as they try to parse seemingly
simple sentences. Given a string of words, one can interact with this
recursive web, finding the interrealtionships (and bring in past conversations,
‘knowledge’ about the world, etc), but intead of diving off the end into
recursive looping, could one use a PageRank-like calculation to help converge
on the useful nodes that are what the sentence ‘means’. (by which I mean:
prune down the web to the small set of interconnected base principle nodes
that can then be machine parsed, sorta like finding the ‘concentrator’ nodes
in a web graph)

Has anyone done this?

ideas | No Comments »