This article is an interesting read and it surprisingly includes the Tripath TA2020 (now no longer manufactured). Tripath certainly made ripples in the audio world but the big players like Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor have since become the leaders in class D amplification. More surprisingly, TI and National will shortly become one company after a merger agreement was announced a couple of months ago.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/25-microchips-that-shook-the-world/0

If you get the error,

AppleSyncNotifier:The procedure entry point sqlite3_wal_checkpoint could not be located int he dynamic link library SQLite3.dll.

This solution could help.

Copy the file SQLite3.dll from the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support folder to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple\Mobile Device Support folder.

It is important that you simply copy this file and not move it as multiple programs use this dll. Hopefully this helps those who can’t get rid of the error and didn’t find the reference on the apple forum.

It is useful to know at least a couple of keyboard shortcuts in Solidworks to help navigate quickly through your designs and Solidworks also allows you to customise your keyboard shortcuts.

To customise your shortcuts right-click on the top menu and navigate to the Keyboard tab. There you will find a list of all possible shortcut commands with their current assignment.

I have included a PDF of the default shortcuts which can be found here …. Solidworks Default Keyboard Shortcuts (right-click and “Save As” to download).

Did you know that Firefox can automatically spell check? Well it can if you have the spell checking dictionaries for your desired language installed. At the link below you can also find specific variations on the standard English (US) dictionary which may reduce the frustration of not being able to eliminate spell check highlighting when you use correct UK or Australian English language.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/language-tools/

Once you restart you should be able to see the red lines under each miss-spelled word (and possibly a few correctly spelled ones too). A very useful tool to have when working with online content, blogs, and  forums.

Jonathan Harris presented (on TED) two java based visualisation websites which focus on the social content within blogs and news called We Feel Fine and Universe (respectively). What I found interesting was the great data visualisation techniques developed to support the presentation of such large data sets. The visuals are attractive, easy to use, and very informative. Follow the links below for more information on Jonathan Harris and his sites.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/jonathan_harris.html

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

http://universe.daylife.com/

On the wefeelfine site you have to select the interactive version.

I recently discovered that you can gain more control over your computer at the stroke of a key. All this is possible if you have a launcher application installed on your computer such at the following.

Windows - Launchy – An application launcher with plugin based function expandability

Mac - Quicksilver - The mother of all launchers with amazing speed and functionality beautifully implemented

I had a long running problem with missing tray icons in XP and found out recently that there is a solution to this symptom. The solution may lay in the information below.

This behavior can be caused by the Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP). This service discovers Universal Plug and Play devices on your network. To resolve this behavior, follow these steps and disable the SSDP feature:

• Click Start, Run and type Services.msc
• In the Services list, right-click SSDP Discovery Service, and then click Properties.
• On the General tab, in the Startup type drop-down list, click Disabled
• Click OK.

Note When SSDP Discovery service is disabled, new devices on the network cannot be found automatically.

Thankyou to the author at http://windowsxp.mvps.org/trayicons.htm

I have recently joined the fray and purchased an iPad. One reason for its purchase was to allow me to view a large collection of ebooks which I have gathered over the years as both reference material and fiction books. These books were stored in a number of formats including RTF, PDF, LIT, CHM, DJVU, and TXT files and naturally I sought to convert these formats to either ePub or PDF so that they could be viewed within iBooks.

After trying various programs for conversion I found that Calibre did a great job of converting most formats other than (PDF and DJVU) to ePub with a little tweaking of margin settings and the like (40 pt worked well). After conversion simply click on the cover art on the right hand side in Calibre, go to the path via the hyperlink, and drag the converted ePub onto the library heading in iTunes.

As apps designed for DJVU reading already existed and the converted size of many equivalent PDFs were so large I decided to keep these files in their original form and use eDJVUreader in 2x mode for the time being until an iPad optimised version arrived.

What I found interesting was that with native support in iBooks for PDF I was able to view most of my books in this format without any issues as long as they were categorised correctly but a few of them lacked most of the image content. The solution to this problem was to down convert them to a PDF/X-1a compliant file in Acrobat using,

Advanced -> Preflight -> Standards -> Save as PDF/X -> Save as PDF/X-1a -> Save as… (Coated FOGRA39 seemed to work for colour profile)

This neatly solved the lost artwork issue and showed that this is the preferred compliance standard for iBooks (apart from ePub of course).

Welcome to the Tekt Industries website and welcome to the new blog!

This will be a place to share code, designs, experience, and more with the community at large. As time goes by this site will grow to include a gallery of Tekt explorations and a download section for more interesting take home content.

The site now has SyntaxHighlighter integration to allow for code snipped embedding (such as the C code below) and also includes plugins for processing.js script embedding.

//
#include
int main(int argc,char **argv) {

static unsigned char data[8] = {0x1c,0x22,0x64,0x03,0x00,0x00,0xff,0x5c};

int i;
int result = 0;

for (i=0; i<7; i++){ result = result + (unsigned char)((~data[i])+1); printf("%02x -> %02x (%02x)\n",data[i],(unsigned char)((~data[i])+1),(unsigned char)(-data[i]));
}

result = result & 0x0ff;
printf("The checksum is: 0x%02x",result);
return 0;

}
//

I look forward to keeping you posted and sharing anything interesting I find with you. Enjoy!

If you have trouble viewing the above embedded youtube video in internet explorer it is recommended that you either,

1. Flush your browser cache AND,
2. Update the browser flash plugin,
3. OR get a browser with better web standards compatibility (http://html5readiness.com please check this link out with something other then IE9 to see what I mean).