Everybody Staze...

Nobody leavz...

Ground your cable TV coax!

By

Ungrounded CATV coax connections can cause some rather bad speaker hum (at 60hz here in the US), and horizontal lines in your picture. Grounding your coax connection can help alleviate these problems, though it may not fully solve your issues. To demonstrate, here’s some backstory.

We have a older CRT TV in the garage that we use to play DDR/Stepmania, as well as have a TV going when working in the garage. I recently hooked an old computer up to the TV for a permanent Stepmania machine. Right after hooking this computer up, I started getting a really bad ground hum on the TV, which could be quickly fixed by installing a ground lift (Cheater Plug) on the computer power connection, but this is generally a bad idea (computers like being grounded). After doing some research, I found out that an ungrounded CATV connection can cause ground hum. Checking it out, I removed the CATV connection from the TV, and viola, the hum was gone. Okay… so, now to actually FIX the problem.

[Read more…]

Employee Scheduling Software

By

At a meeting this last week, a coworker expressed frustration over how labor intensive it is to schedule student employees. You have to ask them to give you a printout of their class schedule, and then manually wade through them all to figure out who can fill what shifts. Then create a “pretty” Excel document that shows the schedule for everyone.

So, during that meeting while everyone was talking about something else, I started looking around for a good solution to this issue. The first thing I came across was Employee Scheduler. Which after setting up and testing, seems pretty cool. Biggest things would be:
Pros:

  • LDAP access (though, doesn’t handle multiple LDAP uid’s correctly)
  • Allows students to set preferences (say, they CAN work at 8am, but it’s not preferred).
  • Self Hosted (php/mysql (AMP))
  • Designed for scheduling student employees

Cons:

  • Code hasn’t been touched since 2004
  • No Timeclock functionality

The second one I came across, that I didn’t bother installing, was Employee Scheduling System (ESS). I attempted to install this, but got errors on the .sql import that I didn’t really want to pursue due to, like the above: the code hasn’t been touched since 2005.

[Read more…]

ipSCA’s free edu cert

By

ipSCA offers free 2 year certificates for edu’s. But, back in 2009, their root CA expired, and since then, many browsers don’t trust their certificates. And while this isn’t a huge issue for the well informed IT crowd, it does pose a problem for the average user. Especially with browsers like Firefox that present certificate trust errors like the world is coming to an end.

[Read more…]