If you can see this post you have reached the new server! Please report any problems you experience. We’re now running on Varnish and some cached stuff may need tweaking before it runs smoothly. We will post the full setup of the server next week.
Category Archives: site
SITE: comments fixed for real, new server coming
Finally, a real fix for the commenting bug that crops up from time to time. Recently, as well as a year and a half ago, WordPress comments would timeout or give NGINX 504 gateway errors. There were two issues, both related to over zealous security settings: Modsecurity was treating the comment submission, by some versions […]
Comments seem to be acting up again
The server is alive, but some misconfiguration seems to be making commenting difficult again. We’re in the process of building a new box and and will install everything for WordPress from scratch. Sorry for the issues, we’ll keep you updated.
Linux Foundation offers free online course
Jerry Cooperstein, PhD, Training Program Director at The Linux Foundation has announced the opening of their free online course, Introduction to Linux (Course number LFS101x). The course is self-paced and should take between 40-60 hours to complete. We’d love to hear how you’re enjoying the course and we’d love to hear when you complete it! […]
Site up, site down, fingers pointing everywhere…
Over the past week things have been getting really slow and buggy around here. I reinstalled WordPress a bunch of times to get rid of the slow and timeout comment bug, but last night someone said it’s back. A system admin has been working on it for the past few days. We found some corrupt […]
WordPress reinstall and server update complete
Comments have been hosed for the last few days, and posting became impossible. This happened about a year and a half ago according to the site changlog. Everything seems to be working now, please hit us up if you notice any problems. It’s not clear what caused it. Like last time, a complete reinstall of […]
Reinstalling to clear hacks, cracks, scripts, other bugs
Commenting is timing out, and the back end is really slow. Additionally we’re having daily down time during scheduled database checks. I’m currently making a full backup snapshot, then I will completely clear out WordPress and reinstall the blog from scratch. It should go smoothly, except I have to do it all from China’s terrible […]
NandLand – FPGA info and tutorial site
Russell is interested in working with FPGAs. He’s developed an educational website: www.nandland.com. “It’s an educational website for people interested in learning about FPGAs and ASICs, mostly by focusing on VHDL and Verilog tutorials and examples. I have written all of the content on it myself and I’m adding new content constantly.” Check it out! […]
Easy WebSockets with Flask and Gevent
Miguel Grinberg writes: This weekend I decided to take a short vacation from my book writing effort and spend time on a project I wanted to work on for a long time. The result of this effort is a brand new Flask extension that I think is pretty cool. I’m happy to introduce Flask-SocketIO, a […]
Free online course: Introduction to Linux
“The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, has announced it is building a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program with edX, the nonprofit online learning platform launched in 2012 by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). More than 31 universities have partnered with edX […]
The deal with Dirty Cheap Dirty Boards PCBs
This sad FACE FRAME! documents the moment Ian found out Dirty PCBs hit Hacker News, Hack a Day, etc. Here’s the story behind our joke PCB site… A few months ago there were some comments in the forum about various PCB services making ‘crap’ $0.90 boards. Later we posted a picture of our own $0.20 […]
EasyEDA web based design tool
Dillon He writes with an update on EasyEDA, a web based EDA tool for electronics engineers, educators, students, makers and enthusiasts. It is the work of a tiny hacker team over a period of three years and nine months. It can be used by all hardware and operating system, whether you are using Linux, Mac […]
Site problems, update in progress
Earlier today I installed a new WordPress plugin to take reservations for Hacker Camp Shenzhen. It hosed the .htaccess file. I got that sorted, but now I can’t get the /docs/ projects wiki working again – all pages return 404 not found. No idea why. It’s a mess. Please hang tight, I’ll get it going […]
Apple II DOS source code available
Could you write a Disk Operating System in 7 weeks? That was the time frame in which the Apple II DOS was developed! According to the Computer History Museum, “On April 10, 1978 Bob Shepardson and Steve Jobs signed a $13,000 one-page contract for a file manager, a BASIC interface, and utilities. It specified that […]
Online Contextual Electronics course
Chris, co-host of The Amp Hour podcast writes about his new project and website called Contextual Electronics. It’s an 8 week course that teaches people how to take theoretical knowledge and translate it into a real electronics project. The first course (session 1A) teaches how to build an open source arduino shield for lots of […]
MIT unveils Android App Inventor2
The App Inventor group at MIT have unveiled App Inventor2. You may be familiar with the App Inventor project when it was previously featured. (At that time it was known as Google App Inventor.) Essentially it helps you build Android apps using a graphical interface which is useful for quick coding and debugging, and is […]
Transistor info site
Ivan writes to inform us of his new site, www.info-transistor.info. “It allows you to find the technical specs of transistors (bjt, mosfet and igbt) and even put this information here in the forum with the BBCODE export option!” Via the contact form.
Killing cformsII contact form SPAM with regex
It used to be a trickle of two or three a day, but lately we’ve been hammered with hundreds of automated SPAM submissions through the cformsII contact form plugin we use with WordPress. The contact form feeds into a Google Groups mailing list that forwards to the whole team. 99% of the SPAM advertised a […]
Share and visualize KiCad components with KiCadCloud
Alan C. Assis writes with a new way to share and visualize KiCad components. It is not easy to find KiCad components. Normally people search at www.kicadlib.org or just “Google” for the component part-number + KiCad, but neither approach normally will return good results. At end of day he/she decides to “home-brew” their components. But […]
Rant: ham radio and hacking
Bill Meara just did a great guest post at Hackday on why today’s electronics hackers should give ham radio some serious consideration. With the removal of the Morse code requirement from all licensing exams, and the use of multiple choice testing (with the questions/answers available online) there’s no excuse not to consider pursuing your Amateur […]