Dean Vaughan

Veggie Cam!

Watch my indoor vegetable garden grow live! On the Internet! Oh my!

The picture updates every thirty minutes. I'll have some neato time lapse stuff up after I collect enough source material.

Update 4/20/09: Needed my EeeeEEEEeeeePC for something else, big timelapse to follow.

Posted in Me | No Comments »

DIY KLR Trunk

I've got a problem with my cheapo KLR trunk.

I was prepping my bike for the new season by tightening all of the bolts up, when I got to the bolts that hold the trunk on I noticed they were very loose. So loose, they fell out of the holes when I touched them. I tried to put them back and they would touch the head to the bottom, but only tighten a quater of a turn.

My first thought was, 'Oh no, the bolts are too short, I better buy some longer ones.' But then my second thought was, 'If the bolts were plenty long before, how did they magically get to be too short?'

I took the trunk completely off and this is what I found:

See those silvery bits in the holes? That is the back end of the bolts sheared off inside. The bolt is supposed to be about two inches longer. Not cool.

Posted in Bikes | No Comments »

Backyard Wildlife 03-09

It's almost spring in the Ozarks, lots of brown, but a touch of green here and there.

Meadow Lark

Dark-Eyed Junco

Cow Birds

Dark-Eyed Junco

Box Cat

Meadow Larks

Camo

Rusty Capped Sparrow

Bradford Pear

White Crowned Sparrow

Female Northern Cardinal

Female Northern Cardinal

Dark-Eyed Junco

Dark-Eyed Junco

 

Posted in Random | No Comments »

Keeping Busy…

Not my thigh, but it is my handy work.

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PHP Log Tail Revisitied

The brilliance of programming...

Last year I needed to tail a file in PHP. I whipped this out.

Today I needed to do it and came up with this:

$output = `tail -n 150 /var/log/messages`;
$tail_str = "<pre>$output</pre>";

Weee... don't know what the hell I was thinking last time.

Posted in Code | No Comments »

Free Online PDF to JPG Converter

I had the need to convert a PDF to a JPG today. I searched around on Google and everything was pay to play. This is pure exploitation since this sort of conversion is a one liner for most Linux systems.

I wrote my own.

Depending on your connection speed, this may take a while.

If you provide a single page PDF you will get a JPG back. If you provide a multi-page PDF you will get a zip file back, inside of the zip file will be a JPG of each page of the PDF.

Click Here to Download the Source

Posted in Code | 2 Comments »