Coder’s Eye

With the resurgence of interest in hobby electronics, I thought my readers might enjoy looking at the details of a simple project I did with cheap EBay-acquired parts. This was a fairly straightforward scrolling LED ascii display.
Goal
A simple-to-use Simstick display, capable of showing a reasonable subset of ASCII, utilizing cheap 15seg displays.
15 Seg Display
I […]

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I have a prediction for Google’s soon-to-be-released service GBuy that I haven’t read anywhere else. I think they may incidentally take out PayPal, but it will only be a pleasant (for them) side-effect of thier real goal. I just don’t think that goal is big enough for Google.
They want the holy grail.
They want […]

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The situation was that my wrists and fingers hurt almost all the time, and it was clearly due to computer use.I decided to do some real research with the intent to follow up by adopting a new scheme for interfacing with my computer…. I was willing to learn new keyboarding skills, even to the point of learning to chord-type.Searching for the Ergonomic Holy GrailMy solution constraints: must be possible to use for the medium-term future…. should be programmer-friendly What I came up with: retrain from qwerty to dvorak typing vary posture get a zero-force touchtyping keyboard with an integrated mouse I knew it was going to be difficult to change my keyboarding habits…. With a QWERTY layout, one can only type about 10% of the words in the English language without leaving the home row…. For example, the home row for the left hand has all the vowels, with only “Y” requiring any finger stretching, and that is with your strongest finger, the index. The right hand has “DHTNS”, which makes many word startings-and-endings immediately accesible.Here are the steps I took to switch: Bought Dvorak key labels for all three of the keyboards I use at the houseIt took about two weeks of mental pain before it “clicked” and I regained any real ability to touch type…. The stick was that I really hate wrist pain and I honestly believed the ergonomics would help (even if only marginally) decrease my pain…. I can’t honestly say how much the Dvorak has played a part in this wonderful change, since I changed a few other aspects of my approach to computer interaction at the same time…. Changing layouts allowed me to relearn some other aspects of data input, which would have been difficult to address in isolation.I am now a somewhat faster typist than I was before, and I have not lost my QWERTY skills.

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When Wordpress 2.0 was released, its aggressive tag attribute stripping caused me a lot of pain.

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I offer the code for my Invisible Castle site under a GPL license. However, it is not the easiest code in the world to get running. Plus, it is really overkill for most people. Most people who ask for the code really just want a die-roller with database lookup for their site.

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