repak shawahb
the triumph of the grill

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rsw@jfet.org


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Wed, 23 Feb 2005

ghetto fabulous

Today Tim's car had a flat, so he asked me to give him a ride over to the tire place to pick up his car. On the way, we spotted perhaps the most ghetto thing ever: a golf cart with motherfucking spinners. Behold:



Thanks to Tim for taking the pictures while I drove. Also, thanks to whomever owns the golf cart for not spending as much on the rest of the cart as he did on the wheels; otherwise, we might never have seen it riding down the road on the back of a flatbed.


This is the kind of event that makes me glad I carry my camera with me at all times.

By the way, there are some new pictures available.


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fruit of last weekend's labor

Last weekend I had some spare time while I was doing laundry, so I decided that it was time to set down a board layout for the single-digit Nixie clock I made a long time ago. I didn't have any more B-5853 tubes, but I do have a large number of B-5440s, which are even better for this purpose because they have stiff legs. I even found this nifty little page, the soculator, that will generate an Eagle script given some tube parameters. Hawt!

I was pretty anal about this layout, and I actually put the switches and transformer directly on the board. I ended up making a few Eagle library parts in the process, but it was a good refresher in using Eagle (though I suspect that these days the Orcad interface might be more intuitive, given that I'm using Cadence, which is made by the same company). Other than the Nixie and the 74141, I believe all the parts are available from Digi-Key. I love Digi-Key...

By the way, gerbv is a hot little program. It'll do cool things like superimpose several Gerber files, and it allows you to turn individual layers on and off. You can also control how it superimposes layers (e.g., xor, or, and, invert), which would probably make for some interesting pictures given the right Gerber file. It can also export PNG files, the result of which you see on the right.

Another incredibly hot utility is gbtiler, which lets you take one or more Gerber files and tile it, thereby putting several copies of the same (or even several different) layout(s) in the same Gerber file. Since Advanced Circuits allows 66 square inches (used to be 88; I'm not sure when it changed) for $33, you may as well take full advantage, right? Technically, they don't want you doing this, but I just put through an order for four of these guys tiled up and they didn't bitch too much. You just have to explain that you need several on the same PCB for an "experimental apparatus" or some such nonsense. Hehe.

I can't wait for everything to get here...


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another reason fvwm2 rules

I'm a devout fvwm2 user. My desktop is ugly and plain, but it's completely useable.

For example (from my .fvwm2rc): 

# shift- to move a few pixels
Key   Left   A   S   CursorMove -1 +0
Key   Right  A   S   CursorMove +1 +0
Key   Up     A   S   CursorMove +0 -1
Key   Down   A   S   CursorMove +0 +1

# shift-meta- to move 1/4 page
Key   Left   A   SM  Scroll -5 +0
Key   Right  A   SM  Scroll +5 +0
Key   Up     A   SM  Scroll +0 -5
Key   Down   A   SM  Scroll +0 +5

# shift-control- to move a full page
Key   Left   A   SC  Scroll -50 +0
Key   Right  A   SC  Scroll +50 +0
Key   Up     A   SC  Scroll +0  -100
Key   Down   A   SC  Scroll +0  +100

So I can hit shift-<up|down|left|right> to move my cursor around the screen, thereby shifting focus (sloppy focus goes without saying, and anyone who doesn't like it needs a trip to the Ministry of Love). I can do basically everything without taking my hands off the home row—no time wasted moving my hand to the mouse. (Note that the reason that ctrl-shift-<left|right> only moves 50% in the x-direction is because I have a double-wide screen thanks to my dual-headed setup. A virtual screen fills both of them, but by moving over 50% I can straddle two adjacent ones.)

I think fvwm2's slogan should be something like

fvwm2: finally GUIs don't suck


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