Arduino Web Enabled Aquarium Controller

This is a project I started a few months ago, but never finished. I got distracted by the Raspberry Pi :). Even though it is unfinished maybe someone could get some value out of the current state of the project. The idea was to create a controller for an aquarium, to measure temperature, measure water … Continue reading Arduino Web Enabled Aquarium Controller

Ordering a Raspberry Pi

NOTE: This post is very old and details the process for ordering the original Raspberry Pi back in 2012. It is now much easier to order a RPI, available from many online stores, such as this one. I’ve had a few people ask me how I ordered my Raspberry Pi and how long it took … Continue reading Ordering a Raspberry Pi

Creating a dynamic image with PHP

To create a dynamic image is easy with PHP and the GD library. Its also a fun way to make your forum banner stand out by having it change each time someone loads it. For example, I used to have the following forum signature while I was playing EverQuest II: The image is created by … Continue reading Creating a dynamic image with PHP

Converting from Drupal 5.5 to WordPress 2.7.1

I finally decided to go ahead with the conversion from Drupal to WordPress. I don’ thave anything against Drupal, it just didn’t work for me. Luckily for me my site wasn’t that big so I could do things like categories, tags and slugs manually. All I wanted to copy across were the actual articles and … Continue reading Converting from Drupal 5.5 to WordPress 2.7.1

Mounting a hard disk image including partitions using Linux

A while ago I thought it would be a good idea to make a backup of my Linux server by just dumping the complete disk to a file. In retrospect, it would have been much easier had I just dumped the individual filesystems.

When I finally got around to using this backup, long after the 10GB disk had perished I realized that to use the loopback device to mount a filesystem it actually needs a filesystem to mount. What I had was a disk image, including partition table and individual partitions. To further complicate matters the data partition was also not the first partition inside this image.

Recovering reserved space in ext2 and ext3 filesystems

When using the ext2 or ext3 filesystem by default 5% of the available blocks is reserved for use by the root user. This allows the system to continue running if non-root users fill up the file system and also assists in preventing file fragmentation because the filesystem does not fill up completely.

Starting Microsoft Outlook 2007 on Acer Vista system gives MSVCR80.dll was not found error

On a recent Acer laptop (TravelMate 5620) running Vista I installed Microsoft Office 2007 and Outlook worked the first time, but after opening it a second time it gave me an error message, saying that “This application has failed to start because MSVCR80.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.” After numerous attempts to restart Office I either received this error message or it tried to re-install itself.

Nokia 3310 LCD Driver JAL PIC Library

[An old project I moved from my previous website, you can still find display modules using the PCD8544 controller, like this 5110 LCD Module] This JAL library includes functions for controlling the Nokia 3310 LCD (PCD8544 controller) and also a 5×7 font. Currently the table used only works on 16F, but should not take much … Continue reading Nokia 3310 LCD Driver JAL PIC Library

LM75 Temperature Sensor with 7 segment display output

[An old project I moved from my previous website] This is a test project built hastily on a solder less breadboard. It uses a LM75 to read the current temperature via I2C and displays the result on three 7 segment displays. It uses a PIC16F628 with an internal 4 Mhz clock. The program was created … Continue reading LM75 Temperature Sensor with 7 segment display output

Andre Miller's technology and projects blog