Electronics, programming, and tech tips — simple, practical, useful.
bustatech 
Hi all, we are currently editing the theme to give a new face for Bustatech. You can still browse on www.bustatech.com, but some images or text might be misaligned. Sorry for all inconvenience caused. You can also leave comment on any recommendation on the wordpress theme for Bustatech.
I am going to share on how I DIY a small LED lamp for my Marimo aquarium. It is basically a very small lamp, using 6 x white LED, USB powered, not a superbright lamp, but its bright enough for my Marimo tank.
The finished DIY LED Lamp on my Marimo tank:
Today, this special Google Doodle caught my eyes, its something like a comic/story with some animation.
These are videos made by Corning to demonstrate the possibility of glass touch screen display usage in the near future. Very interesting video.
An old chain email used to circulate claiming these were "tricks Microsoft can’t explain." They’re all real behaviours — and one popular claim is an outright hoax — but none of them are actually unexplained. Here’s what’s really going on with each.
True, and it’s not a mystery. CON, along with PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1–COM9 and LPT1–LPT9, are reserved device names that Windows inherited from MS-DOS. The system treats them as hardware devices (CON = console), so it won’t let you use them as ordinary file or folder names. It’s documented behaviour, not a bug.
In old versions of Notepad, typing this phrase (or any 4-3-3-5 letter pattern) and reopening the file showed garbled characters. This was a flaw in the way Notepad auto-detected text encoding (the IsTextUnicode function) — it mistook the plain ASCII bytes for Unicode. It was a known bug and no longer happens in modern Windows.
Typing =rand(200,99) and pressing Enter fills the document with text. Again, not magic — it’s a documented Word feature. =rand(p,s) inserts p paragraphs of s sentences of placeholder text, handy for testing page layouts.
A long-running chain email claims that a flight which hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 was numbered Q33N, and that if you type Q33N in Notepad or Word, increase the font size, and change the font to Wingdings, you see a plane, two documents, a skull, and a Star of David.
This is a hoax. None of the four aircraft involved in the September 11 attacks had the flight number Q33N — they were American Airlines Flights 11 and 77, and United Airlines Flights 175 and 93. The Wingdings symbols are simply that font’s normal glyphs for those letters; you can type almost any characters and get a row of pictures. It’s a coincidence dressed up as a hidden message, and it has been widely debunked. We’ve kept it here only to set the record straight.
Click on the link above to visit Google homepage and type in “let it snow”.
Press enter key or click the search button. And you should see the search result page start snowing. It is something similar to the “do a barrel roll” that the google search result page will actually do a barrel roll, if you search for those words (do a barrel roll).
http://edu.casio.com/products/ntd/fx570es/
I bought a new Scientific Calculator, Casio fx-570ES. You can click on the link above for more information about the calculator. Previously I am using Casio fx-570MS until recently I left my calculator at my hometown. The function for both of them are similar, and I am being told that the newer fx-570ES support more calculation function/feature which are not available in the older model. The one on the left is fx-570MS, (belongs to my housemate) and the one on the right is my new fx-570ES.
Normal functionality of the new calculator doesn’t give much problem to me, location of the keys similar to the new one. One thing that really bugs me on the new calculator is they remove the number prefix (like milli, nano, pico, Mega, Kilo, …) on the new calculator, and they change the combination of the SHIFT + Number to other functions. I will say I rely a lot on this function on my previous Scientific Calculator for the calculation of timing in my coding work.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ThemeCreationGuide
I have created a BustATECH Google Chrome Theme, mostly based on the colour arrangement of www.bustatech.com. For the complete Theme Creation Guide, click on the link above. The screenshot of BustATECH Google Chrome Theme.
I took around half day to learn on how to create a Google Chrome Theme, editing images, and finally its done. I will say it is quite simple.Simply follows the instruction from the Theme Creation Guide and you will have your customized theme. For those who likes this theme or want to try out this theme, please get the theme from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hnohflgafpephcmdnnghnhappjbdfbko. Open the link using Google Chrome, and click the Add to Chrome button. It takes few seconds to download and your Google Chrome theme will automatically switched to Bustatech theme.
Let’s say you have an image file, that you are interested in, and the filename is not really giving much information about the source of the image, how you can get more information about the image? What I normally do is to describe the image using the best words I can think of by looking at the image, and search for those words in Google. This is not a very good method, and sometimes didn’t guarantee good result.
From now on, you don’t have to worry about the problem above, or use my method of searching about the image. Google has launched the Search by Image (http://images.google.com/). Watch the video to get the idea of this new Search by Image.