Dammit Jim!

As a biologist, I’ve often thought “I could really use an instrument that did X”. Logging temperatures, locations, depth, light levels and other variables, controlling devices like cameras or servos, and communicating with a computer seem like a task for microcontrollers. So it’s been in my head for a while to try and learn a bit about them.

I’ve ran into a weird bug in Firefox. It seems to mess up p.test:first-letter{float:left;} when there are 2 or more <div> with float:right;clear:right;. Firefox seems to put the floating first letter at the bottom of the first div which seems incorrect to my inexpert judgement. I guess it’s not too common a problem but it’s a little annoying especially since Internet Explorer seems to handle it correctly. An example of the problem should be below. This is with p.test:first-letter {color:blue; float:left; font-size:500%;} in the css file since you can’t use first-letter inline (as far as I know).

Laptop Repair Guy points out that Toshiba has issued a warranty extension resulting from a class action lawsuit. As far as I can tell (I’m not a lawyer so better check for yourself) I’m out of luck since I’m in Canada but definitely better to have Toshiba fix it for free than try yourself.

My Toshiba Satellite A70 started having power problems several weeks ago. Although the power cord was plugged in, the computer was not charging and was draining the battery. The little ‘plugged-in’ LED would come up but the battery status LED would still show power coming from the battery. I could jiggle the power cord and it would come back up so I ignored it and got used to jiggling. Unfortunately, the power got more and more touchy and I spent more and more time jiggling the stupid power cord. I first guessed it must be something with my power adaptor but (after cutting open the outer wrap of the cord), I finally put it together that the ‘plugged-in’ LED was coming on but not the battery charging light. This seemed pretty odd. So I finally went out and bought a multimeter. For $20 it was a really good investment and I wish I would have bought one several hours of jiggling frustration earlier. Anyway after the multimeter showed the cord was giving the appropriate 19V without any interruptions, I finally got the bright idea to google the problem and found out that this is a common problem for the A70. Although I have soldered maybe once in my life, the repair didn’t look all that difficult so I thought I’d give it a shot. I ran out and grabbed a crappy Radio Shack iron for $15 and a pack of resistors and circuit board to practice on for $10. You could skip the practice if you were already confident in soldering.

I just found an interesting (that’s interesting in the ‘I just spent an hour debugging that?’ sense) characteristic in SAS. If you have a variable, x, and are using the lag of x, do NOT put the lag(x) inside a conditional statement. This can apparently cause some pretty strange results. It is probably easier to see through code than to explain:

I was curious how I spend my time and wanted something simple to log which window was active on my computer. I couldn’t see anything that did this easily on the internet, although there is a (more sophisticated/complicated) browsing history tracker, and I needed to relax for an hour or two so I thought I’d give it a shot in Python and see what came out. After looking at the flashing taskbar icon tutorial, how to get the currently active window, how to detect if Windows is idle and how to get rid of the console window, I could finally start programming. I really don’t know how people programmed before Google.