Nathan's Blog

Liberty University is building a new $50M library and the Liberty University Robotics Club had the opportunity to tour the new library and see it's robotic book retrieval system today.

I forgot to bring a camera and used my cell to take the pictures and video below, so they're not the best quality, but hopefully you get the idea of how cool it was!

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On January 1st I will have gone one year without watching a single television show or movie. In anticipation of this landmark, I thought I’d write why I did it and reflect on what a TV free year – something many people will never experience – was like.


Why I did it

Most people will admit that TV is overall a bad influence and a waste of time, but tha...

I've used Notepad++ for several years now and have yet to find it's equal. Sure, there are full blown PHP IDEs available, but those are more advanced than what I need and are slow. Notepad++ is very lightweight and starts up almost instantly, has great syntax highlighting, and works for many different languages. In short, it's great. Today however, it fai...

I recently purchased a My Weigh iBALANCE 601 precision scale for measurements and parts counting. This scale rocks so hard, I just had to write a short review.!

I...

There's a saying, "Big things come in small packages." So, what comes in big packages? Small things of little value, of course. Take this package I received, for example:



A fairly large package, right? I wonder what could be...

I usually can spot scam emails right off the bat, but I have to admit, this one almost got me.


Dear Webmail Account Owner,

This message is  from the University Webmail Messaging Center to all email account owners.

We are currently carrying out scheduled maintenance,upgrade of our web mail service and we are changing our mail host server,as a...

When I tried to import my localhost MySQL database sql file into phpMyAdmin today I was greeted with the following error:

Quote

The solution was pretty simple, and I'll post it in...

I recently found out about the new IDE Microchip has been working on, called MPLAB X. The new development environment for PIC microcontrollers has a plethora of new features and offers a much nicer user interface than its predecessor, MPLAB v.8. Rather than using a proprietary development environment, like the previous versions of MPLAB, Microchip opted to...

I’ve always been a little intimidated by SMDs. I mean, they are really, really, small, and I was under the impression you had to have a hot air rework station to use them. Recently, however, I came across a great article on SparkFun showing how to use a skillet to reflow...