Author Archives: todd

Multirotor Reference Links

Great intro to Lithium Polymer (LiPo) batteries: http://www.instructables.com/id/Lithium-Polymer-Etiquette/ Loads of great info on all aspects: http://blog.oscarliang.net/  

Posted in Multirotors | Leave a comment

Hubsan X4 H107L Quadcopter

My son and I had been looking at quadcopters for a while and decided it was time to pull the trigger.  The idea was to confirm our interest before spending too much cash and time building a more sophisticated one. … Continue reading

Posted in Multirotors | Leave a comment

Using End/Home key for SUSE Linux with PuTTY

Using the default PuTTY session configuration the [Home] and [End] keys don’t work under SUSE.  Not sure why the keys work differently on SUSE linux with PuTTY then other distributions, but it does.  Anyway the solution is a simple setting. … Continue reading

Posted in Linux General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

WD My Book Live Duo – Readonly Public Share

The Western Digital MyBook Live Duo is a nice cheap NAS for home use.  Can be set to RAID1 for redundancy.  The first nuisance I ran into was for making public shares read-only to the world and write-able to specific … Continue reading

Posted in Linux General | Leave a comment

Kenwood KDC-BT752HD Bluetooth Through the Front Speakers Only?

A while back I installed a Kenwood KDC-BT752HD in one of my cars to replace the lame unit that came from the factory.  The main feature I wanted was BT audio (A2DP streaming), Pandora functionality and HD radio were bonuses.  I use the … Continue reading

Posted in Car Stuff | 34 Comments

Android Bluetooth ODB Reader

Useful Links: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/wireless/bluetooth.html http://code.google.com/p/android-obd-reader/

Posted in Car Stuff | Leave a comment

Secure Remote Backups on the Cheap

Like many “technically minded” families we have started to accumulate a startling amount of data at home.  A couple hundred gigs of storage on the file server used to be more than adequate.  I did a pretty good job of making sure … Continue reading

Posted in Linux General | Leave a comment

Getting Permanent Marker off a Whiteboard

The other day while taking notes during a conference call I accidentally wrote on my whiteboard with a Sharpie marker. After several minutes of swearing I remembered a tip I had heard years ago. Using a white board marker scribble … Continue reading

Posted in Life Hacks | Leave a comment

Batch gpg Decrypt and Unzip

In Linux: To batch decrypt with gpg: echo {yourpassphrase} | gpg –passphrase-fd 0 –decrypt-files *.pgp To batch unzip: unzip “*.zip”

Posted in Linux General | Leave a comment

Common SQL Server Troubleshooting Queries

Last Query for All Open Connections (source): SELECT    * FROM    sys.dm_exec_requests er     CROSS APPLY    sys.dm_exec_sql_text(er.sql_handle) AS t Number of Open Connections (source): SELECT      DB_NAME(dbid) as DBName,      COUNT(dbid) as NumberOfConnections,     … Continue reading

Posted in SQL Server | Leave a comment