Web Development on Windows Made Easier With Virtual Box

Let's face it. Windows just isn't great for development. You can argue against this point, but in general it just doesn't as well as it may with Linux operating systems. Even Mac OS X is somewhat better. But forget that. I don't know if there's a purpose to this tutorial, but I know that it could help somebody.

Working in a VM is tedious at times. The purpose of this is to set up a development environment where you can work in Windows, save to your host hard drive, but use a Linux based server to test it in real time. How, you ask? We're going to tweak a Linux VM to do just this.

The Complexity of GTA V

I've been playing Grand Theft Auto 5 for about 80 hours now. I've beaten the game on story mode. But when I first started playing, was was absolutely blown away by the graphics and the amount of just pure stuff that was in the game. People talk to each other and interact on the streets, buildings are more than just storefronts, the island is a gradient from wealthy to poor, etc. But it got me thinking, how do certain things in this game actually behave? Is it random? Or is there some basic AI behind it? I decided to find out.

Repurposing a Printer's Parts

I'm sure there are a billion things out on the web that show how to repurpose a printer. But I'm doing this for the purpose of making that damned CNC machine that the CD Drives just weren't good enough to do. I bought four of them and, wouldn't you know it, only two of them had stepper motors in them. That's okay though, because I still got the other two motors out (a brushless, and a DC) and kept the other laser movement motors just in case. I said I'd be taking the laser apart, and I have, and I'll post that next time. But let's just say that I didn't get any of them to light up like I had planned to. In fact, one of the chips on the laser box kinda blew up. So yeah, the whole laser thing is bust. But hey, we got this neat printer to take apart!

Graphing Every Debian Package

I decided to try and graph every Debian Package and its dependencies. And thus was born the Blogger label "Not Worth The Time Invested" with which this was tagged.

The first part was fairly easy to do: gather data. I wrote a short PHP script to read the package lists and write a DOT digraph with every package pointing to its dependencies. This file was sorta big, but that was expected. I then proceeded to try to put it through GraphViz. This was an utter failure, and the search for better graph rendering software was on.

Hidden TeX Commands in Google Docs

I use TeX to do my math homework on Google Docs. I quickly realized that it supported more symbols than the documentation leads on. I dug through the editor source and found the list of the TeX commands that the Google Docs Editor currently supports. Here are all of them. Let me know if I'm wrong on the name of the symbol/operator.

Installing Damn Small Linux as a Server Environment

This will probably be one of many Damn Small Linux things I post because I enjoy working with DSL because of its small size and small footprint. Some computers just can't handle much else. I know, I know, why don't I get better hardware? Because I like making old stuff do new stuff. It's a hobby of mine. 

This tutorial assumes you're in need of the LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). I'm going to be doing this in a Virtual Machine (512MB of RAM), but it should work on any physical hardware you have.

CD Drive Salvage Part 1 - Tear Down and Inventory

This whole expedition was inspired by Tinkernut's tutorial on turning CD Drives into a CNC Machine. I wanted to try my hand at it and maybe take a different approach. As I am very new in the world of electronics, this is a huge undertaking. I honestly have no idea what I'm doing but it's exciting to try.

I'm not just going to make a CNC Machine, however, but I'm also going to make stuff out of the rest of the motors (and maybe lasers). I have a few ideas about what to do here, but I don't exactly know if I can do those things yet. But we'll get there in another part. For this post we're only going to be focusing on disassembly and salvage from these drives.