PPSStudios

  • DMX for actual Electrical Engineers

    So it’s been coming up recently that our church media department has been buying “OpenDMX USB Dongles” for upwards of $80. I was mortified, especially after seeing this USB device, opening up the sheet metal project box and finding it to be a simple 2-stage USB to RS-485 protocol bridge with no programmable intelligence whatsoever.

  • A Fun Adventure in PGP

    So I got curious about PGP keys and signing and encrypting using them. I managed to figure out how to use the semi-popular gpg4win (the standard windows port of GnuPG) with its built in Kleopatra GUI, Outlook add-ins and all the other fun stuff.

  • That’s a lot of code I’ve “example’d”

    Not to say it isn’t useful. I certainly hope it is. Oh and it’s that time of year where I switch out blogger templates. Maybe this time I’ll make it more straightforward and automated. Maybe. Which reminds me: this is the first year that my MUSH will be auto-deploying its Christmas theme. Pretty excited for…

  • USB Fast Chargers

    I’ve been a bit confused lately at what constitutes fast charging versus normal charging, and why newer Android devices complain repeatedly if you use the wrong cable, or the wrong charger, or the wrong cable AND charger. How does it know? Then I found an article on LifeHacker that partially explains it, but this comment…

  • LetsEncrypt List of Useful Commands

    Here are a few letsencrypt commands that I’ve found useful in the past few months of trying it out.

  • Typecasting struct to char* for Idiots Like Me

    Want to cast from a struct to a character string? Seen all those posts out there suggesting that reinterpret_cast will work, but is unsafe? Yeah, I tried it. Yeah, it’s unsafe.

  • Embarcadero TThread Works Just Fine

    I’ve been annoyed for a large amount of time (years in fact) over some of our software we use and sell. In essence, what we have is a TCP GUI that communicates on a 250ms timer with a microcontroller that’s serving up a two-way communications protocol over ModBus FC23 – we send commands either to…

  • PHP Access Control List

    A quick little Access Control List (ACL) snippet I made for PHP/HTML. Enjoy! <?php $acl = array( // Populate with IP/Subnet Mask pairs. // Any zero bit in the subnet mask acts as a wildcard in the IP address check. array(“192.168.10.24″,”255.255.255.255”), ); $acl_allow = false; for ($i = 0; $i < count($acl); $i++) { $ip2chk…

  • Linux – Find what is Preventing You from Unmounting a Drive

    Disclaimer: I’ve had this problem for probably four months, ever since I started running Plex Media Server on my headless linux machine at home, whilst storing all my actual media on a nice external portable drive. Usually I just yank it, but then I watch the drive letters run themselves up obscenely high before I…

  • Pentax Camera Accessories – The Expensive Joy of Brand Loyalty

    Last April, after months of researching and stressing over whether or not I should (or could), I finally bit the bullet and spent $1300 on a nice 24Mpx Pentax K-3 DSLR. This is a super camera that I really have been enjoying and getting some high quality photos with. Most of all I like the…

Got any book recommendations?

Get In Touch