Archive for the 'General' Category
It would be nice if online parts vendors gave you csv or excel files of your order or invoice. Mouser for example gives you the option of html files or pdf files. Future lets you download a plain text file, but it’s next to useless, there’s no part numbers or anything! I’ve created an excel spreadsheet that will convert a mouser html file into an excel format. It’s not a magic single button click macro or anything fancy, but as long as mouser doesn’t mess with their page layout too much, it should work.
To start, log into “My Mouser” and go to your order history (not invoice history). Click on an old order, and after it opens up, click on “print view”. Print view strips out the form elements that just make things more complicated. Now go to File, Save As and save the web page as a compiled page (MHT format). Sorry firefox, I do love thee as my browser of choice, but this only works in IE as far as I know.
Now open your mht file in excel, you should see that excel properly parsed the order table into neat little rows and columns. Now, open the excel file I’ve provided at the end of this post. Right click on the worksheet tab and choose “Move or copy…”. Copy the worksheet to the mouser workbook. After you have the two worksheets together, rename the mouser worksheet into “Web”. You’re almost done!
At the top of my worksheet there are two cell fields, starting row number and starting cell reference. The row number is where the parts table starts, it has been row 31 on all my orders so far. Starting cell reference is the worksheet reference for the first cell containing parts data, this has been B31 for all my orders so far. Be sure to include the sheet reference as well, so you want that to read “Web!B31″. If your order history is like mine, you may not need to change either of these. Once you get it right, you’ll see the rest of the spreadsheet fill in with your parts data. Now you can save this as an excel file, or export it as CSV, or whatever.
Download the excel spreadsheet
Popularity: 4% [?]
The previous “I Feel Dirty” theme was getting a bit old, so I decided to change things up! This is “Under the Sea”. I notice it is formatted for 1024×768 instead of 800×600. What do you think about that? I run a high res on all my personal monitors, but working in the IT business, I know low res is still popular with a lot of people, even if they have big monitors. If I stick with the wider format, I’ll resize some of my recent pictures so they match-up with the text.
Given that broadband adoption continues to rise world wide, I’ve increased the number of posts displayed from 3 to 5. My feeling on the small number is my posts tend to have lots of pictures, and I like to minimally compress them as possible to maintain good quality. People on slower connections or slower devices might have trouble downloading several megabytes of data to render a page. I have an old pentium 3 laptop that despite my broadband connection struggles to view some modern sites. Drop me some feedback if you find more is better, or if it’s too much.
A friend pointed out that I have several unanswered questions in the comments for some of my posts. This website is my blog, a place to record my thoughts, and in the process, share them with the public. I don’t view it as a discussion forum. I welcome comments, criticisms and feedback. You can certainly post a question, and as long as it is relevant and makes sense, I’ll approve it as a comment, however, please don’t expect an answer. Really good questions usually receive a response either here or via email. If you want a discussion or debate on something you see here, pop on over to Linear’s forums: http://forums.linear1.org.
Popularity: 2% [?]
The train has spent the last few hours speeding Eastward, I think we start heading North after Marshall Texas.
Here’s a screen-cap from Streets 2009, click on it for a huge version.
The sleeper car is a little different this time. The tiny closet has been replaced by a large hook and an open storage area. The single large step which you climbed to get into the bunk is now two steps, a little narrower. The halls feel narrower too, i think the room might be a tiny bit larger.
Our conductor is doing a better job keeping this rig rolling. The trip North is progressing more smoothly, we’re spending a lot less time at the stops.
My seat is on the west-facing side of the train again, so I’m seeing the same scenery again in reverse… I don’t really think I’m missing anything on the other side.
My EVDO connection has been working pretty good, I’ve been getting 15-20kb/sec uploading all these pics and videos.
Popularity: 30% [?]
Greetings Everyone…
The Faire is behind us now, and to sum up “how was it?” in one word: disappointing.
The fair reminded me of our local Independence Day festival in Manistee. It’s mostly arts, crafts and performers. The difference is, there were a few nerds in the corner, and fighitng robots.
The Faire had several major areas; the arena area housed some big ass tesla coils, some sort of lame robots with balls competition and the ComBot cage. The tesla coils were cool, but they were mostly just a light show to some midi controlled drums and a really loud PA system. The fighting robots were the coolest thing at the fair. It was very impressive to see the heavy weight and super heavy weight bots go up against each other. The smaller bots just sort of danced around until time ran out.
Next we have the Maker Stage, which was an outdoor tent covering raised platform and rear-projection screen. Different Makers and visionaries had scheduled talks. In general they were hard to hear, and the projection was useless. The tent was open on three sides and kind of small. The screen was washed out, and the PA wasn’t very loud – it had to compete with the human mousetrap and the electric guitar bicycle contraption.
Indoors we had the Maker Shed, selling many of the commerical projects covered on the Make blog. Lots of leds, arduinos and other assorted electronic gizmos. The shed had three tiny areas dedicated to demostrations and hands-on. If you purchased a kit from the shed, you could solder it together there which was nice, especially for the young folks just starting out.
In the rodeo barn there was the craft sellers. A little further down a company selling big CNC mills was cutting various things, and demoing a snap-together kit house they’d developed for temporary housing usage. Further down were some home-made CNC’s cutting away at various designs. Sparkfun had a decent sized booth at the end of the barn, showing off some of their eye-candies and doing soldering tutorials. On Saturday there were a few large LEGO cities setup, which were quite impressive. A few real hackers had their tables grouped together, show casing musical gizmos, nixie tubes and surface-mount soldering. A computer club named Austin Modders had some nice looking rigs on display, but they weren’t really doing anything. Duke University had several different teams displaying their work on parallel computing. I spoke with one of the engineers for about twenty minutes – he was very informative, it looks like a great program to be in.
Outside there were some art-bikes, a stage playing eccentric music, model rocketry, kite building and flying, and last but not least, a small trebuchet. I was lucky enough to stumble upon it right before a launch; it was most impressive.
I’m going through my pictures and videos right now, uploading as best I can with my evdo connection. Right now I think I’m on the sprint network and it seems pretty fast.
find some videos here: http://justdiy.blip.tv
and pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/gordonthree
More to come!
Popularity: 31% [?]
This pizza was lunch on Wednesday.
Dinner on the train was not so good. They were sold out of most things, I had to settle for some dry and flavorless salmon. Things were too hecktec for any pictures… Will try again today.
The train is about an hour and a half behind schedule – I hope they can make that up, since I don’t really want to be getting into San Antonio at 23:00 or later!
Popularity: 32% [?]