SparkFun has posted an excellent guide to the many different issues you could run into when you finally decide to get a circuit board professionally produced. We assume that most of you aren’t running a professional design firm and will appreciate these tips gleaned from years of experience. They provided a rule list, Eagle DRC, and CAM file to help you get it right the first time. The end goal is designing a board that won’t be prone to manufacturing errors. The tutorial starts by covering trace width and spacing. They recommend avoiding anything less than 10mil traces with 10mil spacing. For planes, they increase the isolation to 12mil to avoid the planes pouring onto a trace. They also talk about annular rings, tenting, labeling, and generating the appropriate gerber and drill files. SparkFun isn’t completely infallible though, and manages to produce a coaster from time to time.
[bunnie] managed to pick up a Nintendo DSi while in Japan. It seems he had the device running less than an hour before he tore it down for an impromptu hotel photoshoot. There’s nothing too surprising and he mentions that the CPU certainly feels more capable than the previous model, which may explain the shorter battery life. The ARM processor sits under an RF shield directly below the WiFi card. The best photo is the top side of the board with every single debug point labeled in plain English on the silkscreen. We’re sure that’ll help with the development of new homebrew hardware.
[bunnie] has posted some interesting teardowns in the past. Have a look at his Sony XEL-1 teardown to see the inner workings of an OLED TV.
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I can't always get to my main laptop when I feel like putting together a blog post. If you've read some of my other lists, you probably noticed that I'm a big fan of portable applications for just this reason. As long as I've got my trusty USB flash drive, I'm always equipped with the programs I need to get things done.
Here are ten of my favorites (plus two alternatives). With these programs in my pocket, I'm always able to write when inspiration strikes - regardless of what computer I'm using.
1. Windows Live Writer is the best offline tool for composing blog posts, hands down. While Microsoft doesn't offer a portable version, it's a simple DIY project (Brad first covered it in September 2007). You can download the portable launcher from Scott Kingery's blog: it's over a year old, but it works just fine with the latest beta of Live Writer. With a rich feature set and support for Wordpress, TypePad, LiveJournal, Blogger, and more, it's a necessity.
3. GreatNews is a decent, portable RSS reader that's actually portable (no Java runtime needed, like RSSOwl). The download is under 1mb, and it formats feeds into a tidy newspaper-like layout. If I'm using a machine where I'd rather not log in to my Google account, I'll fire up GreatNews to read my feeds instead.
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Find a home for narrow, hard-to-store kitchen items like cutting boards, lids, and cookie sheets with a vertical file. A reader over at the organization blog Unclutter wrote in with the following solution to storing the interchangeable plates on her counter-top grill:
I used a vertical, metal file sorter placed on top of a metal, mesh shelf so I can store my Foreman grill underneath the plates. The file sorter that is holding the grill plates is coated in plastic so it won't scratch the plates, which is vital!
Weightloss webapp Gyminee takes your fitness goals to the cloud. Search for new workouts, nutritional information, join groups of like-minded exercisers, participate in challenges, and find "GymBuddies" to serve as accountability partners and morale boosters. The layout of the site is clean and the functions easy to access. The home base of your Gyminee experience is "My Locker Room" where you can track a variety of fitness goals from defaults like body weight, body fat, resting heart rate, and size measurements, to custom user-defined entries like mile times, lap speed, or any other fitness goal you want to track. The locker room also has charts to map out your progress, a journal for detailing your fitness transformation, and a section for progress pictures so everyone can see how you went from Cubicle Jockey to Jacked and Tan. Thanks jonny6pak!
When you're hard up for an extra set of hands to help you reach knots in your shoulders and back, the BodyBack Buddy is there for you. Originally introduced to the benefits deep tissue trigger point massage by my wife, whose tiny hands are deceptively vice like, I found myself wishing I had a way to create the same effect when I was on my own during the work day. While it looks like the spawn of an unholy union between a Klingon battle blade and injection molding machine the BodyBack Buddy is a surprising effective tool for relieving muscle tension. What principle does it act on and why is it effective? From the BackBuddy web site:
Trigger points develop from either stress, repetitive or overuse of a muscle, trauma or accident, structural imbalance, improper stretching or no stretching before physical activity. When a muscle is overused or injured a contraction develops and knots occur. These knots develop when individual muscle fibers are over-stimulated and unable to release their contracted state. This contraction reduces blood flow resulting in a diminished supply of oxygen and a build up of metabolic waste. The contracted muscle (trigger point) reacts by sending out signals of pain.
While you could take a chunky magic marker and press it into the trigger points in your shoulders, the BodyBack Buddy acts as multiplier allowing you to exert very little effort to get a deep and steady pressure. Fifteen seconds or so with the Buddy focused on a trigger point and the muscles are noticeably looser and less achy. The BodyBack Buddy is a $35 muscle massaing tool.
Web application Memiary will help you remember exactly what you did last Tuesday. Memiary helps you record and recall five events from your day in a fusion of twitter style brevity and journaling. After the brief and painless signup process, you begin filling in five daily entries about the activities of your day. You can search by a specific day or display your entries for a set week, month, year or all the entries you have ever made. If you'd like to keep a more analog journal but retain the brevity check out The Five Year Journal. Memiary is a free web based journaling application. Thanks John!
The Gadget Lab blog makes an aggressive list of tech toys you should cull from your life because you just don't need them anymore, like:
Printers
Scanners
Built-In Optical Drives
Fax Machines
Landline Phones
I know I couldn't make it through the list without letting out a Milton'esque "But, but... that's my scanner!" Would it make sense for you to ditch your printer, scanner, and internal DVD burner? Sound off in the comments below. Photo by FXR.
Ever since video game consoles moved to optical discs, manufacturers and users have battled over backups. Manufacturers fear that if they allow users to burn disc backups, users will download and burn games they haven't paid for. Users argue that the discs they paid for are so easily scratched and ruined that it's absurd for the manufacturer to not allow it. Despite manufacturers' best efforts, every console is eventually hacked to play backups, often using a hardware modchip. Well, if you've got a Wii, a friendly Instructables user details how to play game backups on any Wii without using a modchip. All you've got to do is hack your Wii for homebrew apps and then follow the instructions in the post.
Windows only: You don't have administrative rights or iTunes at work, but you want to be sure you can beat box along to your favorite Kenny G album blasting from the Dell OEM speakers in your cubicle? Sharepod has you covered: it's a lightweight iTunes alternative you can launch directly from the iPod itself. We've shown you how to free yourself from iTunes with YamiPod, but Sharepod has a significantly more refined GUI which makes accessing your music all the more pleasant.
The media playback in Sharepod is smooth. On first play you may want to change the play settings from Random to Sequential lest you find yourself wondering exactly how an Alison Kraus gospel song ended up in the middle of your trance album. In addition to basic music playback and playlist management, Sharepod can back up and restore your entire iPod or simply copy individual tracks to and from the device. Note: Run Sharepod for the first time on a computer where you have administrative privileges to ensure it will run properly on computers where you have limited access. For more tips and tricks to get the most of your iPod, check out Adam's excellent 20 Best iPod Utilities feature. Sharepod is a free, Windows only, portable application for managing your iPod music collection. Thanks Philip!
While the next iteration of the ubiquitous Microsoft desktop operating system, Windows 7, isn't a dramatic overhaul of its predecessor Windows Vista, it does fix several sore spots and add a few welcome features. Rumor has it that Windows 7 will drop in the middle of next year, but last month Microsoft released a "preview" tester build of Windows 7. After living in the Windows 7 Preview for a week now, several features and niceties jumped out at me which promise to make Windows a better place to work come 2009. Let's take a look.
Note: The Windows 7 Preview is a pre-beta release, which means it's not even close to feature-complete. Chances are good that later releases will add or take away features listed below (though most likely later releases will grow these seeds and add a few more goodies).
Second note: Surely Windows 7 includes stability and performance improvements under the hood with highly technical explanations that would make operating system coders very happy. However, this list is purely from my experience as a regular user, living and working with Windows 7 for about five days.
Here are just a few of the things to look forward to in Windows 7.
10. Ding-dong, the Sidebar is dead.
One of the first things I hunted down and killed in Windows Vista was the Sidebar, which loaded by default and docked Vista's Gadgets to the right side of your desktop. In Windows 7, the sidebar is no more, and gadgets, should you want them, can roam free across the desktop. This time around, the gadgets feel less distracting to me—the CPU meter and calendar gadgets are my favorites, though this screenshot shows many more.
9. Calculator, WordPad, and Paint got overhauled.
It sucks that Windows 7 is stripping the built-in Photo Gallery and movie-making software that you'll find in Vista (even the Windows Calendar is nowhere to be found in the 7 Preview), but a few of their built-in stalwarts did get some attention. WordPad and Paint both got the Office 2007 ribbon installed, and Calculator now incorporates real world uses into it. At this point only masochists still use Paint and WordPad, but the extension of the ribbon to those inconsequential programs may be a harbinger for more upgrades and ribbon appearances in the future.
8. Windows 7 will run longer on your notebook's battery power.
While I'm running the Windows 7 Preview on a plugged-in desktop computer, notebook owners will be thrilled to know that Windows 7 promises to run more efficiently and thus longer on battery. Our brother site Gizmodo reports:
Vista's power management was definitely better than XP's, and Windows 7's is remarkably better still. Part of it is just that whole smarter background management, which for battery life does things like dial down the processor more often, use less juice to play a standard def DVD, automatically turn off your Ethernet adapter, common sense stuff like that. But it doesn't just do all this fancy energy-saving jujitsu behind your back (though it can). Windows 7 is capable of delivering a battery efficiency report that breaks down in detail what's chomping on your battery—power-slurping hardware, vampire-y processes, the works.
7. You can switch between Wi-Fi networks in one click from the system tray.
File this under "a small change can make a huge difference": Click on the Wi-Fi adapter in your system tray to pop up a menu of available wireless networks. From there you can refresh the list, and choose the one you want to connect to in one click. Another boon for roaming notebook users.
6. You can decide what you do and don't want to see in the system tray.
No more registry-editing to blanket-disable balloon notifications in your system tray! Windows 7 lets you set what icons and notifications you see in your tray with a detailed dialog box. Just right-click the system tray and choose "Customize..." in the menu.
Click the thumbnail to enlarge:
5. You get more control of User Account Control.
The single biggest complaint about Windows Vista was its User Account Control's incessant, nagging, pop-up dialogs that would ask you if you were ABSOLUTELY SURE you wanted to do the thing you just told the computer to do. In the name of security, Vista would even check if this STRANGE and SCARY program called Notepad was ok to run:
While legions of Vista users would sacrifice the well-intentioned security that User Account Control offered by turning it off completely just to get their sanity back, in Windows 7 you can fine-tune the level of nags, warnings, and confirmation prompts you get.
Click the thumbnail to see the UAC fine-tuner slider built into Windows 7.
4. Libraries group similar content; Homegroups to make sharing libraries easier.
Windows networking is a pain in the ass, but Windows 7 is out to fix that with two things: content Libraries and Homegroups. Libraries are a way to group similar types of files even if they live in different folders. For instance, your Video library could include your TV folder, Movies folder, DVD Rips folder, and your Home Movies folder. Then, you can create a Homegroup (basically a reworking of Windows' existing Workgroups), that makes sharing those libraries between PCs easier. Since I don't have two Windows 7 boxes available, I wasn't able to test how much easier sharing files was between the machines; however, the whole file-sharing layout and UI looks significantly more intuitive for regular Jolenes who just want to view the photos stored on the office computer in the living room.
3. You can instantly snap your windows to size, and clear the desktop in one motion.
As widescreen monitors become more common, easier side-by-side window management is key—and Windows 7 builds that in. While not as configurable as a third-party program like GridMove, Windows 7 offers the ability to snap a window to half your screen size simply by dragging it to the left or right of the screen. Here's what it looks like when you do so—let go of your mouse button and that Lifehacker browser window would snap that half-screen-sized glass overlay you see behind it.
Along similar lines, the new "Aero Shake" feature lets you clear the desktop of all background windows by grabbing the top bar of the active window and moving it back and forth quickly. Here's a screencast of the shake in action.
2. Windows 7 starts up faster.
Scheduling your morning coffee run for the time between the moment you hit the power button on your PC and actually start working sucks. Windows Vista is sloooooow when it comes to starting up and getting you to your desktop; but even the Preview tester release of Windows 7 shows 20% faster boot times than Vista.
1. You can do MUCH more from the Windows 7 taskbar.
Most people live with the Windows taskbar visible on their desktop at all times, so the more use you can get out of the real estate it hogs, the better. Windows 7's taskbar is greatly improved in two ways. First, you can pin programs to it indefinitely for easy quick launch, similar to RocketDock or the Mac OS X dock. Second, on a crowded desktop covered with windows, using the new "Aero Peek" feature, you can preview individual windows from grouped taskbar apps, and even close documents from the thumbnails themselves. This doesn't sound like a big deal in theory, but in practice when you've got two monitors and a dozen windows open from four apps, Peek comes in way handy. Here's a screencast of Peek in action. (Note: The Windows 7 Preview's version of Peek is yet incomplete; this is just the beginning of what you'll be able to do with it.)
There's also a permanent "Show Desktop" button on the far right of the taskbar which both clears the Desktop of all windows (instant Boss button!) and restores them right to where they were in another click.
As you can see, Windows 7 is a big pile of small improvements over Vista that amount to a lot in aggregate. As such, ordering this list was difficult, since there isn't an obvious, stand-out, "here's why you'd definitely upgrade to Windows 7" feature. It's simply better in many little ways.
So now, YOU tell us:
Any other Preview release testers out there unearth features we didn't mention here? Shout 'em out in the comments.
If you have an itchy clothing label that you'd like to be rid of but you don't want to risk damaging the seam with scissors, or you want to keep the tag on but decrease the itch factor there is an excellent solution over at parenting blog Parent Hacks:
Why did I never think of this before hacking off a bunch of my daughter's shirt tags? (I inevitably break the thread of the neck and a hole is born.) I got a little piece of iron-on no-sew hemming tape and tacked the tag down. No itching and no chance to ruin the shirt with my over-zealous tag removal.
A tiny bit of no-sew tape, an iron, and no more scratchy tags wiggling about your shirts. Photo by Lin Pernille.
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Find a home for narrow, hard-to-store kitchen items like cutting boards, lids, and cookie sheets with a vertical file. A reader over at the organization blog Unclutter wrote in with the following solution to storing the interchangeable plates on her counter-top grill:
When you're hard up for an extra set of hands to help you reach knots in your shoulders and back, the BodyBack Buddy is there for you. Originally introduced to the benefits deep tissue trigger point massage by my wife, whose tiny hands are deceptively vice like, I found myself wishing I had a way to create the same effect when I was on my own during the work day. While it looks like the spawn of an unholy union between a Klingon battle blade and injection molding machine the BodyBack Buddy is a surprising effective tool for relieving muscle tension. What principle does it act on and why is it effective? From the 
The Gadget Lab blog makes an aggressive list of tech toys you should cull from your life because you just don't need them anymore, like:
Ever since video game consoles moved to optical discs, manufacturers and users have battled over backups. Manufacturers fear that if they allow users to burn disc backups, users will download and burn games they haven't paid for. Users argue that the discs they paid for are so easily scratched and ruined that it's absurd for the manufacturer to not allow it. Despite manufacturers' best efforts, every console is eventually hacked to play backups, often using a hardware modchip. Well, if you've got a Wii, a friendly Instructables user details how to play game backups on any Wii without using a modchip. All you've got to do is 
If you have an itchy clothing label that you'd like to be rid of but you don't want to risk damaging the seam with scissors, or you want to keep the tag on but decrease the itch factor there is an excellent solution over at parenting blog Parent Hacks: