Kanojo.de IdeaBlog

Tired of Google Analytics and or awstats In…

nebuk — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:00:02 +0000

Tired of Google Analytics and/or awstats? In the meantime there is a really nice alternative to giving away your data or seeing old-fashioned reports with few data: http://piwik.org/ ! It’s a versatile php-based system to analyze your websites traffics and provide you with data about your visitors. It can be installed everywhere where php and mysql is avalable in just a glimpse (using a often-seen-php-website-install-script-thingy), really no more than about two minutes. Usage is simple, you get provided with a few lines of javascript which you stick into your website and receive nicely formatted and detailed statistics, just as you expect!

Firefox 4 has a nice builtin synchronization feature…

nebuk — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 13:54:58 +0000

Firefox 4 has a nice builtin synchronization feature – too bad that it’s a bit of a hassle to sync to a own server if you don’t feel like giving your data away (even if encrypted). Luckily the guys at Mozilla know how to deal with us hacker folks, so they released weave, the underlying server architecture for syncing.
It’s actually quite simple to get it running once you’ve found the right site. Although there is a simple-to-setup “weave-minimal-server” it seems that it is outdated and not anymore compatible with the API used in FF4. But as it goes you really only need to grab the sources from http://hg.mozilla.org/services/sync-server/ and http://hg.mozilla.org/services/reg-server/ and follow the instructions provided in the README combined with a little general administrators knowhow (you really want to watch your chmods and ACLs…). As soon as my installation is used by a couple more users and teste i will publish more detailed instructions on blog.kanojo.de!

Recently trying to solder SMD parts for …

nebuk — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 11:23:28 +0000

Recently trying to solder SMD parts for a diy-able low-cost-per-deployment-arduino-board (which can be found here: http://bluesceada.blogs.ghostdub.de/2010/12/23/freeduino-etching-at-home/ ). Problem’s to get the SMD parts clean on it with a old/bad solder-iron… some cheap flux came to rescue! With flux – even if it’s cheap (i bet you guys out there using better flux wouldn’t want to solder using something like that) – even the ftdi chip was no problem at all! I just ebay’ed for a cheap large package and found thingies like http://img.auctiva.com/imgdata/1/1/4/5/0/1/0/webimg/408441030_o.jpg which are meant for xbox rrod fixing … it works, seems to be made by a well known company (balverzinn, try googeling for the product-id on the package)!

Finding good In-Ear-Monitors (HeadPhones…

nebuk — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:19:43 +0000

Finding good In-Ear-Monitors (HeadPhones/Canalphones) seems a hard thing to do – in the upper pricerange there are plenty of choices, whereas in the lower region stuff tends to get “consumerish” – meaning they get sounded, a hump around 4K and “booming”, loudness-war bass … not quite what one would take for quality. So, it’s a good deal of searching to find something in a acceptable price range yet good enough to provide some serious fun listening with them. There are quite a few devices matching those criteria:

http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/478568/multi-iem-review-140-iems-compared-meelectronics-cc51-sp51-added-02-03

lists a good deal of them and is a great point to start searching. The next hard thing is to find something that’s available outside of the US – which is less then 1/10 of the devices listed on the above url. Among those for around 20-50$ the ViSang R02 seem the most potent ones, and they are available for free shipping from ebay (watch out for fakes, seems like “from: china” is a bad sing whereas “from: hongkong” seems okay most of the time – why i don’t know Oo). http://tinyurl.com/629jemx seems a okay buy it seems.
Also note that the great thing about those IEMs is that you don’t need a dedicated headphone amp for most of them, whereas on the other hand most still will sound better using one.

For someone like me you need a really si…

nebuk — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 18:22:27 +0000

For someone like me you need a really simple PCB layout program – and best it runs on linux too. Eagle is really nice – even though unfree (as in speech) – but it lacks some useability aspects. It took me two hours to design a package that wasn’t in the libs yet (and no, google didn’t find anything) and even then that part wouldn’t work for magical reasons. So, some searching and i’ve found http://www.diptrace.com/ – unfree too, but officially supported on wine (it DOES run smoothly on a recent wine) and … what should i say? Even a beginner like me can design a simple new package and simple board with good looking layout in under a hours. Yay!

Lights for your figure display cabinets:…

nebuk — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:32:02 +0000

Lights for your figure display cabinets:
As we have quite some glass cases (partly DIYed, partly IKEA ) a nice solution of unobstrusive internal lighting was needed. The german Electronics-crap supllier “Pollin” has something nice:

http://tinyurl.com/64h3fel

A 48CM LED-Strip with internal resistors, 2pack only 4.50Eur. Wow! Add a cheap 12V SMPS, some glue or doublesided tape and you’re there! Alternatively you can check Dealextreme here: http://tinyurl.com/6j93njy

New Camera (Canon S90, go go low-noise a…

nebuk — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 13:36:28 +0000

New Camera (Canon S90, go go low-noise and high-iso ) arrived, now as it probably can do not-all-that-crappy-video and some Kanojo.de BlogPosts would need a video howto to make things clearer i was thinking about how to make ‘em look a little better than those myriads of handhold crapvideos on the net. And here comes hackaday.com into play, a while ago they linked http://www.yb2normal.com/DIYsteadicam.html (or the more current version http://www.yb2normal.com/DIYsteadicam5.html). Now with those (check the example video) nice handhole videos might just be possible. Add two large continuous lights and you’re there … hopefully!

I somehow really came to like the idea o…

nebuk — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:35:13 +0000

I somehow really came to like the idea of this “idea-grave”. If something comes up in my mind i can either archive it here or write a little longer post to inform people, share interesting links, etc. This is so much better than bare twitter or a bare wordpress! Yay for P2!

It really seems the best way to glue gla…

nebuk — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:32:12 +0000

It really seems the best way to glue glass for decent looking figure/display cases is … SILICONE. After our try with special glass-glue http://blog.kanojo.de/2010/10/04/custom-modelkit-display-part-2/ here which ended in a near desaster due to the bad adhesive strength of the glue we tried silicone and it works perfect. That and a new (better(!)) glass cutter makes building display cases for your figures really easy. Stay tuned for a kanojo.de blogpost which will be coming up!

The MarkAudio CHR70 seems like a decent …

nebuk — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:34:22 +0000

The MarkAudio CHR70 seems like a decent little chassis for a mini broadband driver, luckily someone already developed one: http://tinyurl.com/4hrns2r.

It’s rather cheap given the excellent looking (for such a small driver) frequency response i really want to try it out. Good thing a birthday’s coming up!

(Credits for the design/pics to the originator of the Thread on HiFi-Forum)