Design PCB with KiCad and edge it at home

KiCad is an open source cuircuit design and PCB layout program.  At busy.in.th you will see that using KiCad and a well know method for edging PCB (the laser printer method) lets you easily create a PCB prototype at home.

VMPlayer 5.0 Unity mode

I have been running Linux on VMWare products for years.  At work I have WMWare Workstation on my notebook.  At home, it is VMPlayer.

Just a few days ago, VMPlayer notified me that version 5.0, the newest one, is out.  Once I downloaded and installed, I saw new option in the menu called  'Unity'.  When clicked, the windows inside VMWare magically appeared on my Windows desktop.  Nice!

Before VMPlayer 5.0, I would start Xserver on my Windows and export display from Linux within VMPlayer to it.  This mean I have to start X that comes with cygwin, or lately, Xming.  It is working OK, but it is two steps process.  With VMPlayer Unity, it just easier.

It is not without problem though.  When you moving or resizing Unity windows, they will be a bit jumpy.  Sometimes it just won't follow your mouse at all.  Also, VMPlayer Unity does not suport all Window Manager.  While it works fine with Xfce, it refuses to work with Ubuntu Unity, which is a bit disappointing, if you ask me.

open 2 text files side-by-side using notepad++

Notepad++ has been mentioned here before, but one feature not talked about is the ability to open text file side-by-side.

This is great feature now that every bod has wide screen displays and notebooks.  I'm considering buying notebook with 1600x900 display, possibly Samsung Series 9 or Lenovo X1 Carbon, this feature would be very useful...or I can just use emacs for Windows, I guess.  However, I found that synchronize scrolling in Notepad++ is very nice.  Consider that using track pad on the notebooks is not that precise, having two related text to scroll at the same time can save lots of effort and possibly wrist strain. 

JOE text editor

JOE (Joe's Own Editor) takes me to the time when word processor mean Word Star, and writing program is Turbo Pascal 3.

JOE is a text editor that modeled after Word Start in term of short-cut and the way you move cursor around. It is a very small program and waste very little on your server.  If vi is too hard to user, emacs is too big, pico is too simple, give JOE a try

WinSCP, scp client for Windows

scp is the one of the easiest methods to securely transfer data on unix systems.  If the unix host let you ssh into it, then it has scp.

However, if you are on Windows trying to transfer files to your unix host, you will need to find scp clients.  One way is to install cygwin, it cygwin is pretty big.  If you just want scp, try WinSCP.  It is easy to use with the fancy GUI that lets you drag-and-drop files to/from window explorer directly.  WinSCP can be downloaded from its website, here.

Design application icon using Inkscape

Here's the tutorial on the easy way to make icon (Android App icon in this case).

We programmers suck at graphic design, which is why in Google Play you can find lots of icons drawn with MS Paint or something like that :)

While we will never be good at this thing, it doesn't mean we have to settle with sub-par icons. In this post I will show you how I made this icon in Inkscape using only a few basic drawing tools, all in about 15 minutes.  It's not that good compared to the professionally-made ones, but I think it looks better that a lots of icons on Google Play.

There are 7 steps to go from nothing to the image above. 

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Using Synctoy and dropbox for quick and dirty backup

SyncToy is a free tool from Microsoft that synchronize two folders.  However, I found that it is very convenient to have a quick backup of a folder when using it with dropbox.

Simply setup SyncToy so that your local folder to be backup is a "left folder", and the Dropbox folder is the "light folder".

While backup a folder like this doesn't help you if you want a file that has been overwritten, but it is a quick way to make sure you have one copy of your file somewhere in case of, say, notebook get stolen.

What I usually do is to synchronize my folder with dropbox using SyncToy before I start working with files in that folder.  If I mess up, I can pull those files back from dropbox.  Once I'm done and sure that the previous versions of those files are no longer needed, I simply sync them again.

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Pixeur Color Picker

Pixeur is my favorite color picker for its simplicity, and a nice feature.  To pick to color, you drag the target (that circle thing just above the About button) over the spot where you want to get the values of its color.  At the top, there is a small zoom window that magnify the array the target is on top, so even when you want to pick a color of a 1-pixel line, you can do it accurately.

Pixeur is available on Windows, for 98 to 7.

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tmetaDict, an English -> Thai dictionary

tmetaDict was my little project meant to be a hand-on programming project teaching myself the mobile phone programming, but it becomes quite successful (being a free app helps).   There has been more than 400K downloads so far for the BlackBerry version.  The Android version is just a month-old, with about a thousand users.

If you are Thai, or learning Thai language, tmetaDict will help.  It is different from other Eng->Thai dictionary apps in the way it is designed and coded.  It is very fast (for programmers out there, the database on disk is a flatten binary search tree that maintains its tree structure, so accessing the database is very fast without needing to load and store the database in the memory).  It also comes with a spell checking and spell correction which is very useful since typing on virtual keyboard is not very accurate.  The spell checking and correction is based on Levenstein distance algorithm.  Levenstein algorithm is quite slow, so tmetaDict uses a few heuristic functions to speed things up.  Together with fast database access, the result is almost real-time checking and translation.

If you are interested, check out http://www.tmetadict.com or you can download tmetaDict directly on Google Play

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Redcard Referee 2014 is a free, silly little program for android that let you be your own referee, eject people off the game, soccer style!


With RedCard 2014, you can SWIPE or SHAKE your phone to rotate between 4 screens:
- Yellow card
- Red card
- Talk-to-my-hand
- Nah-uh

Screen comes animations and sound effects, and you even change it to fit your style using text-to-speech.  It is available at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tmeta.redcard

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