Andrey Mikhalchuk’s Blog

Unfortunately most servos you can get for a reasonable price are not the same. Each servo has its own parameters and the cheapest ones for not allow adjustments. Fortunately in the “routerbot OS” your can easily fix that problem. Here is how you can do that in the “routerbot” project.

The routerbot we almost have built as descibed in the routerbot project is self-sufficient, but you can get more fun with it if you put an inexpensive wireless camera on top of it. This post describes how you can do that.

Ufff… the most critical part of your robot project is done. Now it is time to do basic tests and assemble whatever you have done. Here’s is hwo you do that…

Linksys WRT54GL original operating system was not designed to control external devices, so we need to rewrite it with something more suitable. This post explaines how to do this and provides the new firmware. You may also want to refer to the overall project outline.

WRT54GL router is not capable of controlling mechanical parts as is. So we need to add a communication port to it. This post describes how to do that. The complete outline of the routerbot project can be found in this post.

Linksys WRT54G router and similar are very famous because of great modifications potential hidden in the device. For some purposes you may want to add a serial port to the router. You may need that for development purposes or to turn the router into a robot for instance. This post describes the procedure of taking the router apart so you can get access to the serial port connector hidden inside.

For our robot we will need the following parts and tools:

Somehow my kids became huge fans of different kinds of robots, starting from teleoperated planet explorers and ending with transformers. So I promised them to build a robot, and in a few days I ended up with this result which I’m pretty proud to share. It appeared that for $150 or less you can build pretty cool robot that is way easier to program then most robots out there on the market + its range is way larger then most toys have. Here’s how you can build your own inexpensive yet powerful robot…

One of the websites I’m technically related to is for sale now. Pizza.com could be yours for a reasonable price. If you know how the domain market works you probably know that the reasonable price for such kind of domain names has 7 figures in it. So if you want the domain please contact the owner of the website directly. All serious offers will be considered and promptly answered.

The website has forum, polls, coupon engine, video, games, directory, worldwide restaurant search and more features. It attracts more and more visitors each month.

The domain is also a great investment opportunity. You have probably heard stories about business.com sold for $380 mln or sex.com sold for $14mln or one of the most recent vodka.com sold for $3 mln.

Imagine you need to create say 10 disks with predefined partitions loaded with some software. The ideal solution would be automatic disk partitioning and copying the software to it. While copying files is an easy-to-do everyday procedure partitioning is a bit more tricky (really, just a little bit). Here is a quick trick that will allow you to partition disks quickly.

Windows explorer in XP has very nice feature of displaying folder contents as a filmstrip. It is very handy to browse lots of images. Unfortunately the logic of turning it on and off this feature doesn’t perfectly match the reality. Here’s explanation how you can enable filmstrip view for your folder

Imagine you’re repartitioning a disk and when you quit fdisk writing the new partition table automount tries to mount new partitions. So instead of refreshed disk ready for newfs you get this warning:


WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy.
The kernel still uses the old table.
The new table will be used at the next boot.


So you can forget about newfs for awhile. What do you do? Just reboot? What if you need to repartition more then one disk? Here is the solution …

Uff that was tough one … If you decided to make your mail communications more secure you probably switched on SSL option in your mail client for POP3/IMAP/SMTP servers. There is a good chance you will get one of those errors that sound like

The server you are connected to is using a security certificare that could not be verified.
A certificate chain processed, but terminated in a root certificate which is not trusted by the trust provider.
Do you want to continue using this server?

I spent way too much time solving the problem because what was just annoying message in Outlook appeared to be serious problem in MacMail. It was not capable of working correctly with that problem. In addition to that I tried to solve the problem using Plesk 8.2 that was a mistake. It appeared that whatever you do with certificates in Plesk that doesn’t affect the mail. So here is the solution for the problem:

I recently tried to calculate md5 from *nix using md5sum and PHP md5() function. The result might surprise you - they don’t match in the situation you expect them to match. Here is explanation why and how to fix that.

As usually there might be a lot of reasons for that. In my case the reason became clear when I checked /var/log/messages:
imapd-ssl: /etc/courier-imap/shared/index: No such file or directory problem. The quick and dirty solution appeared to be really quick.

The purpose of this post is not to replace the original coupons module installation manual, but to provide answers that you might have while installing it. It is based on my own experience and might be different from yours. This post is a part of set related to installing and configuring your own store. Please read the master post here.

The purpose of this post is not to replace the original PayPal installation manual, but to provide answers that you might have while installing it. It is based on my own experience and might be different from yours. This post is a part of set related to installing and configuring your own store. Please read the master post here.

The purpose of this post is not to replace the original USPS installation manual, but to provide answers that you might have while installing it. It is based on my own experience and might be different from yours. This post is a part of set related to installing and configuring your own store. Please read the master post here.

1. You need to signup for USPS web tools. You can do it here: https://secure.shippingapis.com/registration/
2. In a few minutes you’ll get the email with your web tools login and password.
3. Send email to icustomercare@usps.com asking to switch your account to production server. You don’t have to test or wait. Indeed you should not do that as API used on USPS test servers doesn’t match the API used on production servers (sic!!). I.e. your osCommerce standard USPS shipping plugin won’t work with test servers! Actually that plugin is hardcoded to use production servers, but even if you patch it USPS test servers will return you error while production server will work fine.
4. After your account is switched to production you can go to admin menu of osCommerce->Modules->Shipping->United States Postal Sevice and configure it with your account data.
5. You can also test it on a fake order. If the plugin works correctly and you will get shipping rates from USPS sever on checkout page.

The purpose of this post is not to replace the original osCommerce installation manual, but to provide answers that you maight have while installing it. It is based on my own experience and might be different from yours. This post is a part of set related to installing and configuring your own store. Please read the master file here.

If you want to sell something in the internet you have multiple options, like

• Open Amazon.com store
• Open eBay.com store
• kagi.com
• If you’re selling software/non-material goods you can use multiple services like share-it

If you want everything quicker and ready to pay more and have less control on your store – go ahead and choose any of those. This article is about building your store that will physically reside on your server and use 3rd party payment processor to handle your payments.