Albany, NY

Albany is the capital city of the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Albany County, and the central city of New York’s Capital District. Roughly 135 miles (217 km) north of the City of New York, Albany sits on the west bank of the Hudson River, about 10 miles (16 km) south of its confluence with the Mohawk River. The population of the city was 97,856 at the time of the 2010 census.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albany,_New_York

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My IDE of Choice – Geany

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My IDE of Choice – Geany

I have never been a fan of formal integrated development environments (IDE) as many tend to be quite slow, bloated, and have a lot of features I never use. Code completion, documentation and end brackets are the three features I mostly use, compiling is okay, but I’d rather just use a separate terminal window and browser for just that.

Linux web camera light

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It turns out that it is pretty easy to turn on and off your web camera light in Linux (and most other operating system systems). You might have to install uvcdynctrl but it’s available in most Linux distros.

uvcdynctrl -d video0 -s 'LED1 Mode' 0

While much of the press focuses on netferious uses of web camera lights there are legitimate reasons to use the indicator – for example to flash or light up when an email or message comes in or a download conpletes. Sometimes a video device might be /dev/video 1 etc but you can find that by running this command.

uvcdynctrl -l

Here’s a list of 200 smartphones that can run Linux distributions

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Here’s a list of 200 smartphones that can run Linux distributions

ALinux kernel is a core element of Android but despite this, Android is much different from a typical Linux distribution for its lack of a GNU interface. Android and Linux apps are not exchangeable because of different runtime systems and libraries. But with the efforts of some brilliant developers, you can actually run a legit Linux distribution on your smartphone which traditionally runs Android. The steps are as simple as installing a custom ROM and this is especially helpful if you have an aging smartphone that isn’t likely to get much – or even worse any – support.

Generating a 120/240 Volt split phase power supply from an inverter

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Generating a 120/240 Volt split phase power supply from an inverter

There are a couple of ways to set up a split phase 120/240 volt system using an inverter.  The drawing below shows the conventional way where two inverters are paired together in a back to back configuration to work in sync and produce 120/240 volts.  This works fine as long as you have inverters that can be ganged together like this to work in sync.  The main disadvantage of this arrangement is   1) You need two inverters and   2) You can only draw from inverter one to power leg A and inverter two to power Leg B.   If leg B has a lot of load and leg A has none there is no way to get the other inverter to help out, it just sits there.

There is an alternative way of doing this that is more versatile.  It uses a 240 volt inverter in combination with an Autotransformer.  This is what it looks lik