Year: 2010

Removing Excess Weight

No Picture

I carefully looked over the entire mechanism to decide which parts to keep. The main circuit board worked and using serial could be commanded to go to a position or even store positions, but it lost out due…

Read More »

New Project – Satellite Tracking Camera

No Picture

I recently acquired a second hand Pan Tilt mechanism from a CCTV camera system.

Read More »

2010 Geminids Meteor Shower

No Picture

The Geminids Meteor Shower for 2010 will peak on the 13th & 14th December this year. Expectations are high, with a peak ZHR (Zenithal Hourly Rate) of up to 120. The moon will set in the west around…

Read More »

Stag hat with a difference

No Picture

My brother recently got married and as per the rules of engagement, the lead up to the event included a Stag night. For my Stag night, I was given a hard hat complete with a flashing LED light…

Read More »

Converting PDF files to HTML on Ubuntu

No Picture

It’s very easy to convert PDFs to HTML on Ubuntu. The command is pdftohtml

Read More »

Downloading routes from a GlobalSat DG-100 with gpsbabel on Linux

No Picture

This is a GlobalSat DG-100 It’s an amazing piece of Kit, but the software that comes with it is absolutely rubbish. You can download all of the routes (and delete them from the unit) in one simple command…

Read More »

Stopping Javascript from resizing the window in Firefox

No Picture

One of my pet hates on the internet is shopping sites which resize the window when you’re looking at a zoomed in image. Not all of us still use a windowed browser, in fact, most people now use…

Read More »

Combining two images with ImageMagick

No Picture

To combine two images of the same size with ImageMagick, you simply do the following: The following will overlay overlay.png on top of output.png mogrify -draw "image SrcOver 0,0 0,0 ‘overlay.png’" output.pngmogrify -draw "image SrcOver 0,0 0,0 ‘overlay.png’"…

Read More »

Selective colour replacement with imagemagick

No Picture

Selective colour replacement is easy from the command line with imagemagick. You can download imagemagick from http://www.imagemagick.org/ The following will replace all red (#FF0000) pixels with blue (#0000FF) convert sourceimage.png -fill "#FF0000" -opaque "#0000FF" destimage.pngconvert sourceimage.png -fill "#FF0000"…

Read More »

Deleting folders recursively

No Picture

I needed recursively delete folders named .svn within a directory structure. The following will allow you dto do this from a command prompt: FOR /F "tokens=*" %G IN (‘DIR /B /AD /S .svn’) DO RMDIR /S /Q %GFOR…

Read More »