Doogie's Blog

Completed Mount
Amateur Radio

VW GTI Antenna Mount

I've been thinking about how to mount an amateur radio antenna on my car for a while now. Everyone says the best way is to use an NMO mount in the center of the roof. But since I have a small car with a sunroof, there is only a small area of the roof near the back where it would be feasible. A backup option is usually a semi-fixed mount on the trunk, but my car is a hatchback so a magnetic mount will not work and there aren't any edges straight enough for a lip mount. Looking at all the various ways people have mounted their antennae, I ran across one person who had used a license plate frame mount under the bolts on their hood hinge. Looking at this location on my car led me to think this would be a really good location to mount mine. I got my father to help since he has the tools needed and we came up with a mount.

2
21 June 2012
Software

F-Script Injection in Lion

I wanted to use the very handy F-Script environment to snoop around inside an application. F-Script can be injected into running applications by using gdb, which of course works fine, but they also provide a services-menu item for performing the injection. Due to several changes in OS X 10.7 Lion, the automator workflow that came with F-Script to perform this did not work.

I reworked the injector service so it works on Lion and doesn't leave behind (or even create) any temp files.

2
21 May 2012
Screenshot of PDF Maps, showing geolocation dot exactly over shelter icon.
Software

Georeferencing Trail Maps for PDF Maps on iOS

When I first got an iPhone, one of the first app ideas I had was one that would let me take a trail map image, mark a few known coordinates, then use the GPS to display the blue dot like in the built-in Maps app. I've searched for something similar a few times, and had actually started doing some research into libraries for doing the math. This weekend, I thought I'd search one more time, and there was actually a free app recently posted called PDF Maps by Avenza.

0
12 September 2011
Software

HP LaserJet P1102w Firmware Update on Mac

Update: as of the last few versions, the standard HP firmware updater appears to be working fine on the most recent OS X versions. What follows is now strictly of academic value.

I have had an HP P1102w printer for over a year now.
I've had no complaints about it so far, but a firmware update was recently released that adds AirPrint support, allowing printing from iOS devices.
The problem is: the firmware updater refuses to do anything on OS X (at least in 10.6.8 and 10.7.x).
I searched but was never able to find a solution that worked.
So, I did what any normal person would do: I loaded it up in gdb.

2
18 August 2011
Hardware

Ford Misfire Diagnosis

My Dad has a Ford F-150 and has had a misfire problem under part-throttle, mid-power acceleration in the past. The first time, he took it to a mechanic who eventually diagnosed it as a coil failure. He had that one replaced (this engine has a coil on each plug) which fixed the problem, then several months later a second one failed. This one set a code and we were able to figure out which one to replace from the misfire code. This week, he has noticed the same problem creeping back up, but a code wasn't set yet. Using my scan tool, I was able to get the status of the misfire monitors and conclusively determine the cylinder with the issue.

0
29 December 2010
Hardware

Laser Projector

Using extremely simple and cheap parts, I constructed a laser show projector, capable of displaying various patterns onto surfaces in a dark room.

0
06 January 2007
Software

Server Attack Visualizer

This project consisted of two programs. The first was a server, basically just written as a shell script, which sat on a Linux machine watching log...

0
06 October 2006
Software

AVR Plugins for Eclipse

This set of plugins for the Eclipse IDE was originally designed to provide two key functionalities when developing C/C++ programs for the Atmel AVR family of microcontrollers (way before Arduino made them cool).

0
06 February 2004

Like This Article?

Feel free to tip some Ethereum 😉

Learn more here!

Social Media