Tax

The flooding of Copenhagen have affected alot of people. And alot of these people throw out stuff that have become wet.

Its hard for a guy like me to sit still when loads of stuff is lying on the street with the pricetag FREE.

A friend of Tim reported late in the afternoon that there was loot in his yard from a HIFI shop in his building, so Tom, Tim and I immediately went there. We were not the first scavengers on the scene so our loot was limited to two alu-coffee cups and a vintage camera. I have always wanted to have my own video camera, so we brought it home and fired it up. But it did not seem to work. But after around an hour of fiddeling and trying out my new screwdriver set this was the result.

So if you have a wedding comming up give me a call and lets figure something out.

I just created a simple online hiscore service in Django hosted on Appengine.

http://simplehiscore.appspot.com/

1. Enter a key to use for encryption when your game submits hiscores. Write it down.
2. Recieve the hiscore-url where your hiscores are stored. Write it down.
3. Submit hiscores by posting to the hiscore-url, with the following postdata.
* “user”, which is a string
* “score”, which is a integer
* “hash”, which is a 64 character MD5 hash of the combined string: MD5(user+score+hash)
The trick is that only this website and your game knows the key, so outsiders cant submit hiscores.
Double hiscores are ignorred.
Old hiscores are discarded.
4. Test the hiscore list from the address of your hiscore-url plus /test/
5. Read hiscores from the hiscore-url in this simple format: “user1,200|user2,100″. Only the top 10 are shown.
6. Examine the javascript in the testpage to figure out how to use it.
7. implement it in your game.
8. Eat lunch.

It was a late sunday afternoon, and I was considering getting my hands on a Mac. I have almost never worked with them, but found it interesting to try out doing an app. Just like everybody else.

The problem is that owning a Mac is kind of expensive. Even for a used one.

So I looked through the used ads and finally found a broken Macbook Pro, dirt cheap. It was suffering from some sort of graphics error that kept it from booting normally. The owner said that it could boot in safe mode, but it was useless because you could not read anything. I could see from the add that the image was distorted at regular intervals, so my guess was that it had to do with the GPU memory being bad. I picked it up for 1000DKr and drove directly down to the local hackerspace, labitat, to examine the thing.

My hunch from the beginning was, that it could be fixed by reflow soldering the board. At least it was worth a shot. The fallback was to pickup a new logic board from eBay or similar.

Anyways: I took the beast apart and carefully placed it in the labitat reflow oven at 200 degrees C, for 60 seconds and let it cool slowly afterwords. In the process I melted a couple of plastic thingies I had overlooked in the disassembly process. So if you copy this procedure be very carefull. Also try to photograph every step.

I put it carefully back together and it booted without a problem in normal mode.

I figured a machine as cheap as that was worth a shot, and I succeeded. But I don’t know if the fix will last, and I don’t know the amounts of recklessness I have been guilty of in the process.

But on the other hand I have now got my hands on a dirt cheap Macbook Pro I can use to explore the world of app development.

If you copy this procedure it is on your own responsibility. Personally I would only try stuff like this as an absolutely last attempt to revive old hardware.

During my “research” I read that there might be lead in electronics, so don’t use the oven you feed your kids with!

It has to be mentioned that this is not my first attempt, and I have failed in the past. More than one to be exact.

So think carefully before you play on the reflow roulette.

I just made an online CV in hope of having good work flow my way.

http://jesper.taxboel.dk/cv/

put the following into a text file and execute it using twill.sh

agent “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; ru; rv:1.9.2b5) Gecko/20091204 Firefox/3.6b5″
setlocal username “username”
setlocal password “password”
go https://job.jobnet.dk/CV/Login/Login.aspx
formvalue 2 2 $username
formvalue 2 3 $password
submit
fv 2 1 1
submit
code 200

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