1. Make sure you’ve read what Wikipedia has to say about SOPA. They think this is important enough to take their site offline, so please understand what you’re about to circumvent.
2. Install the Adblock Plus add-on in your browser. As this scenario shows, it’s incredibly useful for blocking more than just ads.
3. Add my filter to your AdBlock list.

In my setup, that gets Wikipedia working again. Happy researching.

There’s a solution, and it doesn’t involve anything more complex than the Arduino IDE.

Arduinos are cool things that enable some amazingly productive microcontroller programming, but a) I prefer to work on a breadboard, b) it’s silly that they don’t use native AVR USB, and c) a full-fledged Arduino is a bulky and expensive chunk of hardware to integrate into a permanent project. In response to criticisms (a) and (b), I began my foray into microcontroller programming not with the Arduino hardware proper, but rather with a great little piece of hardware called a Teensy. But point (c) still stands — even the elegant Teensy is around 20 bucks a pop.

Fortunately, a Teensy can be used to program a bare ATmega. We’ll basically follow the steps in the “Minimal Circuit” portion of the ArduinoToBreadboard tutorial, but adapt as needed for our different hardware.

At the time of writing, I’m using the latest versions of Arduino and Teensyduino, 1.0 and 1.06, respectively. My Teensy is a Teensy++ 2.0. If you have a different Teensy, you should check to see whether the pinout differs.

From the ArduinoToBreadboard tutorial, follow the steps to add support for the “ATmega328 on a breadboard (8 MHz internal clock)” board. After setting that up, we can do the rest of it without having to exit the IDE.

Open the “ArduinoISP” example (File > Examples > ArduinoISP). This is what we’ll write to the Teensy to make it act as a programmer to put the Arduino bootloader on the AVR. First, look at that file’s header, which lists the pins associated with SS, MOSI, MISO, and SCLK — 10, 11, 12, and 13 on a true Arduino. On the Teensy they’re a bit different. We don’t need to change them in the ArduinoISP code, because it will reference the correct pin definitions when it’s built for the Teensy. But we do need to connect the right pins of the Teensy to our ATmega. Combining the Teensy’s pinout with the layout in the ArduinoToBreadboard tutorial yields the resulting circuit (click for full-size view):

After the circuit’s ready, let’s make one small change to the ArduinoISP code. Three LEDs are called for, and we’ll skip two of them, but we might as well at least make use of the Teensy’s onboard LED get one of the status indicators. Find the line #define LED_HB 9 and change it to #define LED_HB 6 to match the Teensy’s LED pin. Now make sure the right board (Tools > Board > Teensy++ 2.0) and USB mode (Tools > USB Type > Serial) are selected, and upload the sketch to the Teensy. If the LED “heartbeat” starts blinking, your Teensy is now a programmer, and it’s on to the next step.

Now, without touching the circuit at all, we can move on to putting the Arduino bootloader on the ATmega. Switch the IDE so it targets the ATmega instead of the Teensy: Tools > Board > ATmega328 on a breadboard (8MHz internal clock). Also make sure that the Teensy’s virtual serial port is selected: Tools > Serial Port > /dev/ttyACM0, in my case. We’re ready to burn the bootloader: Tools > Burn Bootloader. The IDE will tell you, honestly, that it may take a minute. When you see “Done burning bootloader,” your ATmega’s now got the brains of an Arduino. Almost there!

The last part of the process is to use the Teensy to upload a sketch to the ATmega. We’ll have to change the Teensy’s operating mode, and rewire its connection to the ATmega. Again, this is analogous to the ArduinoToBreadboard instructions, but with the pins corrected for the Teensy. Instead of an Arduino board sans chip, we’ll use the Teensy as a bridge between its virtual serial port on the PC, and its hardware UART connected to the ATmega. The Teensy’s creator, as part of a different venture, has provided code for using the Teensy in this manner. The Teensy’s UART gets connected to the ATmega’s RX and TX pins, and another pin on the Teensy is used to reset the ATmega. The resulting connection is like so (click for full-size view):

After adjusting your wiring, grab the Teensy_Benito code and open or paste it in a new sketch. Target the Teensy (Tools > Board > Teensy+ 2.0) and upload it. Now the Teensy’s performing the same role as the serial bridge in the real Arduino, and we’re ready for the final step: uploading an Arduino sketch to the ATmega.

Load up the “Hello World” example sketch. Once again set your target for the ATmega: Tools > Board > ATmega328 on a breadboard (8MHz internal clock); Tools > Serial Port > /dev/ttyACM0. Click upload. A few seconds later, your ATmega will be running its first sketch! (I concede that it’s a boring one.) Now go off and do something creative with it!

If you were Googling that error code, I just saved you some time. You’re welcome.

See the official 2.7 theme migration guide for more details.

If you use Analytics on your website(s) — particularly on very small sites such as this one, where your own visits can significantly skew any traffic measurements — you have probably wished you could reliably exclude your internal page views from your traffic reports. Google provides a filter system, but it falls a bit short if you aren’t visiting from a static IP address.

Aa great solution has just arrived in the form of Adblock Plus version 1.0.1, which finally provides the ability to restrict the domains to which its ad-blocking rules apply.

After installing the Adblock Plus extension, add a filter rule of the syntax

google-analytics.com$domain=zoombody.com

(replacing zoombody.com with your own domain). Now, when you visit your own site, you will remain completely hidden from Google Analytics.

You could undoubtedly apply this to other hit counters; Analytics just happens to be the service I use.

if not "%minimized%"=="" goto :minimized
set minimized=true
start /min cmd /C "%~dpnx0"
goto :EOF
:minimized
rem Anything after here will run in a minimized window

It works by having the script re-launch itself in a new minimized window. There are a few juicy batch scripting tricks in here that I recently picked up, like the %~dpnx0 syntax and the special :EOF label. And the overall flag/callback syntax is generally useful for creating self-contained batch scripts.

Other start switches besides /min can provide different parameters for the child window, such as adjusting the CPU priority of the resulting process.

[global]
   dos charset = CP850
   unix charset = iso8859-1
   display charset = LOCALE

I finally ran across an old mailing list posting that told me the secret: set my terminal to UTF-8 (to match the default character set of my Ubuntu server). Duh. I went into my PuTTY settings (yes, I was in Windows) and changed it from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. Muuuch better. Forget that smb.conf stuff.

Smoking burns a large hole in the economy. Including direct health care expenditures ($96 billion) and productivity losses ($97 billion), the economic burden of smoking on the United States hit $193 billion per year, the CDC said.

On the plus side, the US smoking rate has dropped below 20%.

[via Reuters]

We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

Now there’s an example of data mining we can all feel good about.

Via The New York Times. See also blog.google.org.

In closing, Mr. Gore shares the following amazing, humbling thought:

In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.